Part IV of our IV Part series on “Creating Your Own Niche”

Your Brand is everything! Your Brand is owned by your customers and lives in their minds!

Your brand is not your advertising. It is not your logo, your company name, or even your product. Your brand is a living entity, owned by your customers and anyone else who has an impression of your company. Your brand lives in the minds of your customers – and whether you keep your promise, whatever they may perceive that promise to be. It is what defines you in the marketplace. It must be the top priority of everyone working in, and for, the company – from the CEO to the employees in the warehouse, to the receptionist. It is their responsibility, and in their own best interests, to build, protect and represent your brand to the very best of their ability.

Life dishes out some eureka moments to all of us, but we must take the necessary action to enable that eureka moment to rise out of the gloom. We must “decide to go” – to make the commitment that creates a new level of success. We must make the commitment to go in terms of the deliberate pursuit of greatness and then go all out to achieve it. Corporations spend millions developing and splashing their brands all over the place. Developing your brand is not expensive but it does take some deep thought, coupled with commitment and structured development work.

So how do we go about building and protecting this brand of ours? Follow these guidelines:

• It’s not just about storytelling. It’s not the job of the marketing, advertising, or public relations people to create the brand. They have a hand in it, certainly, but their job is to tell the story of the brand. It’s the job of everyone in the company to create the brand with the quality of how they do their daily work – EVERY DAY! Brands are not created, or maintained, by commercials – they are created, and maintained, by every individual in the business.
• Inconsistency kills. Companies who have developed their own niche understand the ongoing nature of building, protecting, and communicating the brand all the time, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. You can advertise all you want, and you can have the best people working for you, but your brand is only as strong as the employee with the weakest commitment to excellence. If that person fails to fulfil your promises to your customers, you run the risk of losing vital support from those customers.
• Focus is key. To maintain brand strength requires focus and constant reinforcement with everyone in your organisation. Brand isn’t that mission statement you wrote, nor is it your 10-point list of priorities. Your brand should be a simple understanding of who you are, what you promise in the marketplace, and your ability and willingness to keep that promise.
• Communication reinforces your branding effort. Reinforcing the strength of your customer relationships as the core of your branding effort is a process, not an event. It starts with getting buy-in internally from managers and employees alike – through constant communication and feedback from the whole workforce. Only when you have their blessing can you take the strengths and message of your brand to the people outside the company – your customers.
• Your brand is personal. A job well done means more than simply doing great work: It means doing great work in a way that builds successful relationships with customers, employees, and partners. People are at the heart of your brand and branding efforts. Your promise to the marketplace – the foundation of your brand – is personal.

If your brand lives in your customer’s minds, the obvious question you must ask yourself is what type of mind is most beneficial to your brand.

• Walk away. Companies who own their own niche are very good at knowing where they fit and where they do not. They will quickly walk away from a situation that does not fit them. They focus on gaining knowledge, not for the purpose of making a sale, but for the purpose of seeing if it’s a good fit. The worst thing you can do for your business in the longer term is to get outside of what you’re good at and try to do a job that someone else should be doing.

Walking away from an inappropriate fit is just another example of why it is important to know yourself, to know your business and what it’s there for, and to know what you’re there to do. Pursuing a bad business fit takes time and resources away from where you should be focused – building customer relationships that do fit.

• Three Customer Rules. Every niche-owning company lives by three essential rules when it comes to customers:
  1. Know more about the customer than anyone else.
  2. Get closer to the customer than anyone else.
  3. Emotionally connect with the customer better than anyone else.

In a customer-driven market, there are no substitutes for these rules. Combining these three actions will give you the single greatest advantage over your competition, enabling you to truly rise above commoditisation and defy comparison. The single most powerful selling tool is to know more about your customer than anyone else when going into the relationship. The problem with this reality is that, in some eyes, it takes too much time. Who has time to do the legwork, or the research required to get to know prospective and existing customers better?

You must make the time. Knowledge of a prospective customer can help you recognise what business you don’t want to pursue. It can be very damaging for a business to try to make itself fit into a situation with a customer where the relationship is not mutually beneficial. Why be a square peg trying to fit into a round hole? You can’t qualify your prospects without the right knowledge.

The purpose of any business is to get and keep customers. Select your customers well, live up to your promises and you will have created a niche from which nobody can unseat you. What is the point of going through all the work to woe a mate, only for the marriage to end in divorce and mudslinging within a year or two. Select your customers carefully, keep the relationship growing and you will not be able to avoid meeting the object of your business – to make money!

 

Success in business is all about getting the business fundamentals right … and the actions you take!

 

QUOTATION:

I do not know for sure, but I strongly suspect that the person who performs service that is greater in quantity and better in quality than that for which he is paid, is eventually paid for more than he performs.

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