Reality Upgrade

Branding? What?

Branding has become a catchphrase in the marketing world. I tend to be biased against anything that is a catchphrase for anything, but in this case I will make an exception, because the concept of branding is incredibly useful. 

Branding can be a great marketing tool, and I will talk about it from that perspective in this article and the ones that follow, but “branding” like this can mean a lot of things. Branding can be the brand name of a huge company, like Coca-Cola or Nike. It can be the local reputation of a small company. It can be the “personal brand” of a consultant or freelancer. 

But it can also be your own personal brand, the image of you as a person. 

In the same way, marketing can be selling a product or a service, but it can just as easily be selling yourself. You sell yourself in everything from a job interview to meeting someone in a bar. Developing your own personal brand is critical in social situations of all kinds. In future articles I will talk more about using branding in casual social situations, rather than business. But for now we will discuss the general concepts of branding in business. 

The first step to branding success is that it’s all about them.

Find out what your client wants, and provide it.

That sounds a lot simpler than it actually is. The real difficulty is in the first part: Find out what your client wants.

This is probably the most difficult part of branding success. The problem is that most of the time, even clients themselves do not know what they want.

For example, I worked for an engineering firm who performed design services for new buildings. The obvious answer to the question “what do our clients want” was simple - they wanted good engineers, for a good price. If we asked them what they wanted, they would even say so.

This was a problem for us, because no matter how good and cheap we were, there is always someone better and cheaper.

Luckily, we realized that what our clients actually wanted was something else entirely. What they really wanted, whether they realized it consciously or not, was comfort. Designing and building a new building is a very complicated, expensive, and confusing process. Our clients were rightly nervous. They were afraid that the engineering firm they hired would mess something up, cause them problems, and cost them more money in the long run.

So, we stopped selling our design services, and started selling comfort. We became the company that an owner would not have to worry about later. Yes, we were more expensive, but isn’t it worth it to know you won’t have headaches later?

And it worked.

So the first step is find out what your client wants, and then give it to them.

Step 2 - Hearts, then minds