Why should entrepreneurial leaders build a strong company brand?
A strong company brand increases the value of your business to all stakeholders - clients/customers, owners, investors and your people.
A strong brand means a future buyer of your business may pay more. Your business is the sum of your tangible assets (e.g. stock, cash, buildings, land, equipment, long-term contracts) and your intangible assets (e.g. intellectual property, client lists, employee loyalty, reputation) also known as Goodwill. Your company brand is the embodiment of your Goodwill (see box below). When a brand is managed actively, consistently, across all touchpoints, it creates value because it increases Goodwill, which may increase the price paid when a company is sold.
A strong brand improves customer/client loyalty. It builds emotional benefits, in addition to functional benefits, as reasons why your company brand gets chosen in the market. And emotional benefits are more powerful than functional benefits. Without a strong brand it's a race to the bottom, where price is the main differentiator.
A strong brand is a positive influencer on company culture and strategy. It can help attract and retain the best talent.
How to build a strong brand
Marketing is the function that defines, creates and manages the company brand.
But the brand experience is delivered by everyone in an organisation, especially for SMEs and B2Bs. So it's important your Marketing team engages the right internal stakeholders to ensure all touchpoints with your company brand are positive.
Buying journeys are complex; they’re not simple transactions. Your audience might: Read a post. Get an email. Talk to someone. Come to an event. Do a search. Read a web page. Hear a 30” pitch. See a van. Watch a video. Contact us. Get a proposal. Read another post. Talk to someone again. See some merch. Etc ...
It takes, typically, four opportunities to see a brand message for people to take notice. And ten to take action. That’s the complex customer journey before they start a business relationship.
After they become clients/customers, they don’t need to experience all those brand contact points, right?
Well, no, everyone is busy, and the world is competitive, so everything that reminds them why we’re here is good. And the more consistently we can deliver the brand experience, the more we build loyalty.
Engaging our audiences in the right way comes from insights into their motivations, fears, desires, pains - today and future. So good brand management seeks first to understand what motivates people.
A well managed brand can mean a future buyer of your business may pay more than the current value of tangible assets
Business Valuation
=
Tangible Assets e.g.
> Stock
> Cash
> Buildings
> Land
> Equipment
> Contracts >1year
+
Intangible Assets e.g.
> Intellectual Property
> Client lists aka Book
> Employee loyalty
> Reputation
The Brand is often overlooked by Business Owners of Small & Medium-Sized Companies as an Asset that can be actively managed to add value to the future sale price of a business.
Large Corporations are very aware of the value of building a strong brand.
Any business - small or large - can leverage the power of brand building to maximise the future sale price of a business.
Why build a strong brand?
A brand is a licence to operate and a summation of an organisation’s reputation. A brand is a sign that signifies the totality of the emotional and functional meaning of everything that the audience has experienced.
However, for many companies, their brand remains an underused or poorly understood tool for business strategy.
A good brand - one that the audience engages with in the right way - creates an unlevel playing field, where the good brand is chosen instead of the alternatives for many reasons, price being secondary. A good brand has the potential to lead to better profits, assuming that the operations that deliver the brand promise are efficiently managed.
And a good brand is consistent in how it feels at all the touchpoints. Most of a brand's audience is not ready to buy at any one particular time; the goal of marketing is that, when they are ready to buy, your brand is what they think of first.
Managing a brand so it feels consistent is crucial. Without consistency, it leads to cognitive dissonance, or, put another way, a lack of trust. To make a brand feel consistent requires proactive management of all aspects of a brand: visual language, tone of voice, verbal identity, colours, fonts, logos, quality of materials, etc …
Is good brand management relevant to SMEs? To B2Bs? Isn’t it just for big organisations?
Every company has a brand. Not all are proactively managed.
Every action, every communication, every interaction, every touch-point either adds or detracts from a brand's value. Nothing is neutral.
A good brand is good for all stakeholders - for people, for the planet, for profit.
We strive to build good brands for all the brands in our portfolio.
GoodWork.Company
Definitions
Goodwill aka your Brand is built over time through consistent, distinctive, persuasive, engaging activities. A brand's identity is the sign that signifies all that Goodwill.
Brand owners = all stakeholders: business owners, investors, the company team, clients/customers, the community in which the organisation operates. Interestingly, the difference between the value of the tangible assets and the price a company actually sells for is Goodwill which is embodied by the company brand. Proactive and consistent brand management is therefore crucial in helping to maximise value for business owners and/or investors looking to sell in the future.
ESG = Environmental, Social and Governance. So crucial in this 1000-year decade because modern capitalism has made society breach the planet's limits, and humanity must adapt, and organisations must play their part.
1000-year decade = the decade between 2020-2030, so called because the amount of change expected in society and the world of work, in most part due to technology (especially AI) and the climate emergency, will be the same as that experienced in the previous 1000 years.