3 Simple Ways To Establish Your Brand

It seems easy enough, but once you sit down to establish your brand, it can seem almost impossible to pin down your identity.

Whether you’re working with a large or small team, everyone will have different ideas about brand voice and identity. Here are three simple ways to nail down the brand that you are:

1. You’re Not for Everyone

 The number one mistake for any brand is assuming that they can meet the needs of any and everyone. Yes, you should offer a service or product that will appeal to a large amount of consumers—you should fill a need, but you don’t have to fill everyone’s need.

Have you ever been to a restaurant with a ridiculously large menu? You’re overwhelmed by the options, but there’s something for everyone. You don’t know if you should pick the burger or the tacos or the lo mein because you’re not quite sure what will be the best. The truth is that all of the options are probably okay and will meet your minimum need of satisfaction, but nothing will be memorable.

So, the question that you have to ask yourself is do you want to be the restaurant with the menu of a little bit of everything or do you want to be the In-N-Out or Shake Shack of the burger world?

Before starting any brand or company, you need to know who’s your competition. People spend time doing market research and trying to figure out ways to gain an advantage over a rival, but what if you tried to become friends with your competitors instead?

Meeting other people in your industry who do what you do only better or do it differently is a great way to solidify what you want to do and where you want to go. No brand or company is an island, and while you want to be profitable and expand your business, you should operate under the premise that there is enough work out there for everyone.

For instance, let’s say that you have a landscaping business and specialize in aerating and de-thatching. You receive a call from a potential customer about tree removal. While you don’t provide tree removal as a service, you know a great company that does. Hopefully, this referral begins to create a good rapport with that business and other businesses in town.

It also establishes you as a company that the customer can trust as you want to point them in the right direction even when it doesn’t directly benefit you.

Part of knowing what you want to do is knowing what you don’t want to do. Once you’ve narrowed down your niche, stick with it.

It’s easy to start branching out some when the phone starts ringing and people want to know if you could just do this one thing, but the best thing that you can do for your brand is know when to say no.

You’ve done the work to hone in on your specialty, so don’t muddy the waters now.