A Brand is Not a Logo or Slogan – How to Build Your Own Brand with Style

Remember that it is not just a logo or a tag line that makes a brand. There are any number of companies that have very attractive logos and even catchier tag lines. But they are not necessarily strong brands.

The logo and the slogan merely represent your brand. There are a host of factors that contribute to the building of a brand. Your product/service, customer service, pricing, history, your own reputation as a person, your company’s reputation, legal wrangling, hiring policy, environmental concerns, ethical quotient, transparency with shareholders, sharing profits with stakeholders, and of course the logo and the slogan – all these determine your brand.

Each one of these factors holds a lot of power over your brand. A glossy sign and a catchy tag line cannot fool people in to buying from a store that treats genders unequally. Wal-Mart is experiencing a dip in its customer base as the number of employees’ gender inequality cases are piling up against the retail giant. Seventy five percent of Americans felt that Wal Mart to be the number one destination for discount shopping two years ago. Now the number has dipped to sixty percent. Obviously any self respecting woman would have questions in mind while shopping at a Wal Mart store, “Do these people treat women employees unfairly?” “How do they treat women customers?” That’s not a comfortable situation. Of course, there are other factors like steep competition from trendy stores like Target. But a sullied reputation undermines other advantages like low prices and a one-stop-shopping experience.

So, building a brand carefully takes into consideration all the above mentioned factors, and does not just concentrate on designing a logo and adding a slogan. There are discerning customers that would prefer a company that pays handsome dividends to its shareholders or treats its employees without any discrimination. Americans value values.

First Things First

The first and foremost thing that comes in to building a brand is – answering some vital branding questions:

How good is your product or service?

Get the Basics Right. The product or service that you stand for is the foundation of your brand. No amount of brand promotion is going to help a product or a service of inferior quality. Any kind of brand promotion will be an exercise in futility for low quality products or services. Your product or service must be good. In fact, it is suggested that you develop an unbeatable quality product or service. It will make your brand building easier. If you cannot make your product or service stand above the rest of the crowd at least make it visible among them. Let it have one distinguishable feature.

Next ask yourself:

o “Why am I here”?

o “How can I serve well”?

o “Who can I serve”?

Then the next set of questions should be:

o “What or how I can produce or serve differently”?

o “What unique way can my product or services be useful to people”?

Well, the answer you get is going to be your brand.