Entrepreneurial Resources: Creating a Brand

Many people think a “brand” is a trademark or name. In fact, a brand goes considerably beyond a name or mark. A brand, in actuality, is everything the name or trademark represents.

More than an apple.

Consider the Apple(r) brand. The mark is a multi-colored apple with a bite taken out of it. But it represents much, much more. The Apple brand, among other things, represents non-Microsoft computers, ease-of-use, innovation, computing for the “rest of us”, and is associated with many other sub-brands such as Macintosh(r), iPod(r), iPhone(r) and others. The point is that when someone uses the term “Apple” as a brand, it conjures up much more than a multi-coloured partially eaten apple – it defines an entire groups of products and their key attributes.

Making your brand every day.

Whether they like it or not, every company is creating their brand on a daily basis. They create a consumer experience, which in turn defines the attributes of the company’s name. If you provide an excellent product and your customers are delighted with their purchase of it, your company name and the product name – your brand names - are associated with “excellence” and “delight”. If your product has quality problems and is often returned with complaints, then your brand names are associated with “problems” and “dissatisfaction”.

Plan your brand.

Obviously nobody wants a brand name to be associated with poor quality or consumer dissatisfaction. But avoiding this often requires that you plan your brand in advance by using entrepreneurial resources. The beginning of that plan is a “value proposition” that declares and defines what you want your service to be in the minds and experience of your customers. There are many ways to create such value propositions but the simplest is to make a list of statements – looking through the consumer’s eyes – about how you want your company, product, or service to be viewed. For example, such a list might look like the following:

These statements may seem overly general and theoretical but they provide the guidelines and boundaries for how the company will behave and what experience the company wants its clients to have. Once defined, the company need only ensure that everything it does with products, facilities, services, sales, pricing, advertising, and manufacturing line up with the value proposition. If it can do this successfully, then the company will have created a brand based on “superior value”, “quality products”, “convenience”, etc.

What is your brand?

Whether you are a 1-person business or larger, try to make a “value proposition” for your activities and utilize entrepreneurial resources. Be critical as you do so and when you’ve finished, think about what other value proposition elements you want associated with your brand and what you have to do to create them. If you are still stumped on ideas for your brand or company name, you may turn to professional networking sites, professional associations, social business networking clubs and get feedback or just examples of what others have already done and go from there.