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Deconstruct Branding And You’ll Find A Promise

The Dictionary of Business and Management defines a brand as “a name, sign or symbol used to identify items or services of the seller(s) and to differentiate them from goods of competitors”. Signs and symbols are an important part of what a brand is, but to us this is a very incomplete definition.

Walter Landor, a great German entrepreneur and ad man, one of the founders of the branding discipline, once said: “Simply put, a brand is a promise. By identifying and authenticating a product or service, it delivers a pledge of satisfaction and quality.”

In his book, Building Strong Brands, David Aaker suggests that a brand is a “mental box”. He defines brand equity as “a set of assets (or liabilities) linked to a brand’s name and symbol that adds to (or subtracts from) the value provided by a product or service.”

Building from this idea of a “mental box”, a more poetic definition might be: “A brand is the most valuable real-estate in the world — a corner of the consumer’s mind.”

These are all great definitions, but for the technology marketplace, I prefer: “A brand is a collection of perceptions in the mind of the consumer.”

So why is your brand important if you are a small technology company? After all, you are not Vodacom or Toyota or Microsoft and you do not have hundreds of millions of rands in a marketing budget and several years to reach the mass market. In the vehicle and consumer products sectors, the brand is the most important attribute to the customer, but this probably isn’t the case in your business.

The short answer is brands are important to everybody since the most basic objective of any enterprise, big or small, is relative profitability (in percentage, not absolute terms). So what can my brand do for me? Some very important, tangible outcomes of a strong brand are:

Shorter sales cycles since there is trust, credibility and, typically, less due diligence; Higher profits since customers will not be as price sensitive; and More customers, and hence revenues since they will call you more often.

Your brand is often what distinguishes you from the competition and your products away from the dreaded “commodity” category. Products can be differentiated in many ways, including customer service; rapid delivery; appealing design; superior performance or technology; technical innovation; convenience; safety and reliability.

How are your products different? And how are you communicating these distinctions?

Keep in mind that, as an entrepreneur, building a brand is not just about developing an image and message and getting it into the market.

When you deliver on a promise, the right level of quality, the right level of service, and products that work, you will build a source of credibility in the market. Once you have that, you have a brand and your promotional activity will succeed in building value in your business.

Serandos is MD of Pure Communications, a Johannesburg-based public relations and digital marketing agency.