Understanding and building Brand+ within your business is a great way to build value.  At the same time, it helps cement your culture.

1:   Why Brand+ is so important, today & enables you to gain a huge competitive advantage

Brand is important is making published communications.

The identity and the communications can be controlled by a few people within an organization.

Brand+ is about the non-published and human inter-faces.  Here, management have no control as the quality of the activity is dependent on your culture (as that dictates your people’s behaviours) and a set of simple, compelling messages that your people buy-into

Focusing on Brand alone was fine when the touch points between a company and its customers were mainly through traditional media and when people were more focused on the product and less concerned about the business (and its story) behind it.

However, today there are many more touch points and many products are much more service orientated.  Today, people are more concerned about the culture and values of the businesses they are giving their custom to.  And, they have much more choice and they are, today, highly sceptical about what they are told by brands.

In addition, today, we have the “Y environment” – that facet of society which is much more conscious of the softer elements of mankind: how we care and respect people and the environment; the emphasis we place on human values rather than just money; the different emphasis that is now used in building trust.

For all these reasons, conventional brand-building is struggling whilst Brand+ activity thrives.

2:  How it differs from a brand strategy

There are a few key differentiators between brand and Brand+.

Your leadership can control your brand.  However, management diktat cannot control how your people inter-face: their behaviours are dependent on the strength of your culture and the extent to which they believe in it.

Brand remains important for big corporates.  However, because they don’t have a truly strong culture, Brand+ is difficult for them to achieve.  This issue, together with people’s desire for a great, authentic inter-face, is what creates the opportunity of Brand+ for many SMEs today.

Building a conventional brand is expensive and determined by budget and the quality of the marketing people/consultants employed in creating it.  Building your brand through Brand+ is cheap and is all about how your people go about their everyday work.

People are sceptical about brand statements today. They see your Brand+ activities as giving a true insight into your business.

3:   The importance of building core messages

Today, there are many touch points between your business and your customers and prospects. In developing a bond between you, consistency across these touch points is vital and, at each point, you want to be conveying your Common Purpose – your purpose, vision and core values.

This is achieved by way of simple, core messages and a set of behaviours that can be repeated consistently across the business and represent your culture.

The core messages should be authentic, coming from the heart and soul of your business, and represent your culture and the way that you do business with people. 

Simple core messages will also help, at the same time, to endorse your culture with your people when they deliver them.

4:   The big benefits for SMEs

Click here to see the key benefits of Brand+

To discuss how you can best achieve these benefits please contact us on: [email protected].

5:  The Brand+ risks that need to be managed

Brand+ is all about creating simple, compelling messages and behaviour that comes from the heart and soul of the business.  Authenticity rules.

The key is therefore having a culture in which your people are bought into and building core messages which represent it and engage and enthuse your customers.

The other key is achieving consistency of message and behaviour across the touch points with the customer and prospects.

These elements require a strong culture and well designed processes to ensure a high degree of consistency.

6:  How to achieve Brand+ …. it is all about process

Communication between a business and its customers is formed through lots of little pieces of activity and your messages.  The simpler these messages and the more consistently they are conveyed the stronger your communication will be.  This drip-drip process will have a huge cumulative impact.

It will be more effective if at the heart of the communication lies simple core messages, repeated many, many times and consistently across all of your business activity.

There are four key ingredients to good process:

planning & design: making the process easy to implement and measure and highly motivational for the people involved

messaging: enabling the process to easily carry your core messages

measure: measuring the success each part of the process so that you know what is working and what needs to be refined

constant improvement: building “lean” into the process.