5 Ways to Use Your Marketing Plan to Define Your Business – Brand

Last week I talked about the first of 5 ways you can use your marketing plan to define your business – Know Your Market. If you know who they are you can start thinking about how to reach them and ultimately how to spend your time and money in your product design, business location, operations, tools, etc. This week let’s talk about brand.

Tip #2 Define Your Brand

You may have heard this before but brand is not only about your logo. Your brand is all about the essence of the company. It is the personality you want to portray through every touch point you have with your clients. One book I read that really nailed this home for me was “The E-Myth Mastery” by Michael E. Gerber. Gerber goes into great detail about what the customers’ experience may be as he enters Sarah’s pie shop. He had Sarah define how the store might look to a client as they entered, who they saw, what they felt and smelled, the colors, the textures, the neighborhood, the uniforms, what her employees would say, what the bags, signs, and boxes looked like, and so on.

He had her go into great detail about every possible item a customer would see, touch, feel, smell, or hear when her business was in front of them. By the time I finished all the exercises in the book I understood so much more about how my clients viewed my company and how I was missing the mark on many points. It was such a valuable tool that I started with this exercise when I built my second business and I use it to review my first business’s brand to ensure it still applies, I teach it to others that work in my businesses so they also display this brand and I use it to define the amount of money I need to purchase equipment, marketing collateral, and online tools that will match this brand.

Of course, one of the key benefits of knowing your own brand so well is being able to describe your business to anyone with enthusiasm and understanding. But that is a whole other post.

Stay tuned next Thursday for Tip #3 Create Your Product