Your brand is not about you

When people imagine my job as a brand expert, they usually picture a marketing whiz sitting in a closed-off boardroom brainstorming and crafting a perfect brand.

That couldn’t be further from the truth.

The reality is, branding doesn’t come from your company. Branding comes from your customers.

Your brand lives in your customers’ needs and desires, as well as their perceptions of you and their connection to you. Branding is not an inside-out activity; it’s an outside-in activity.

Real branding comes down to getting inside your customers’ heads and then working inward from there. What do your customers think? How do they behave? What do they need? Where do they go to get it? Where do they shop? How much are they going to spend? What’s important to them? How does it make them feel? And how does it advance the goals that they have for their lives?

This is where branding starts.

Don’t Know What Your Customers Think? Ask Them! 

Most companies don’t have a six-figure budget for market research. So how do you learn about your customers?

Lo and behold, you learn who your customers are by actually finding and having a conversation with them. There are many different ways to talk to your customers. Conversations can take place through informal market research, or through formal research methods. Each approach offers a number of opportunities to dive into your customers’ inner lives. 

The different methods available for informal market research prove that budget is not a barrier. On the super-low-budget end of the spectrum, you can just hang around in a Starbucks and ask people to try your product or service - then solicit their opinions. Be sure to ask open-ended questions, such as “What do you like about this brand?” -or- “How do you see this fitting into your life?” -or- “What would you change about this?” Actually talking to customers face-to-face is one of the most valuable things you can do to understand your brand.

One easy way for marketing managers and executives to interact with customers is by fielding customer service calls or inbound sales calls. Even at the CEO level, if you take customer service calls for a few hours every month it might just be the most valuable time you ever spend. The callers won’t have any idea you’re the CEO, so they won’t sugarcoat how they feel about your brand. And you can ask them almost anything you want, and they’ll answer honestly.

Another inexpensive method is hosting a pizza and beer party (or flatbread and wine party, depending upon your target demographic). Invite friends and friends of friends to visit your office or your home and try your product. Tell them you’ll provide take-out food and beverages in exchange for their time. The key here is to make sure you’re getting honest feedback. Friends and family will usually try to tell you they love it, even if they don’t. So offer them the booze in exchange for brutal, unvarnished honesty.

The above ideas are free or extremely inexpensive. Entrepreneurs in early stage start-ups, and companies without market research budgets, should take full advantage of all of these ideas and devise other methods that put them front and center with customers. 

On the opposite end of the cost spectrum is formal market research. These could include everything from focus groups, to quantitative studies, in-depth interviews, surveys, or even observing your customers “in the wild” through ethnography. Professional focus groups can yield a tremendous amount of data, but they’re costly.

Regardless of how much you spend, companies of all sizes should be asking their customers about their needs. Oh, and here’s a pro tip: smart companies don’t just ask this of their own customers; they ask their competitors’ customers too.Customers must always be a central part of the equation when you’re doing brand strategy. 

Unfortunately, there are many marketing agencies out there that believe in the myth of the marketing executive in a closed-off and customer-free boardroom. To do branding in a vacuum without putting the customers’ point of view front and center is a massive mistake. In building a strong brand that connects deeply with customers, you must conduct discovery so you can gain an understanding of customers’ needs as well as the trends, forces, and brands that compete for their attention.

The goal is to do more than safeguard against what other brands are doing. You need to gain insight into your company’s unique role in the marketplace, and your unique relevance to your Ideal Customer.

Learn how to focus your branding and marketing efforts on your Ideal Customer by messaging me below!