FAQs from businesses like yours.

Some people conflate strategy and strategic planning. Although they do serve complementary functions, they are very different. Strategy is a distillation process which produces focus and also inspiration. Brand Strategy helps define the beliefs, values, and principles by which all employees agree to operate. Choosing how to express the beliefs and values helps shape the specific meaning a business hopes its customers will associate with the brand. Strategy acts as an internal compass, or “north star” if you will, for what your brand stands for and how it should be experienced. Good strategy creates alignment across organizational teams and facilitates the harmony of their efforts.
A strategic plan, on the other hand, provides a roadmap for action plan execution. It outlines specific ambitions or goals, precisely which steps to take to achieve specific goals, how to prepare for these efforts, their sequence, timeline, etc.
Many businesses operate solely under the guidance of a strategic plan. However, the world’s strongest brands rely on strategy to maintain a clear path forward without missing a beat when circumstances change in their particular market and/or the entire world due to significant cultural shifts, technology advancements (AI anyone?), or competitor moves.

A question as old as time and one that so many small businesses consistently struggle with. Through no fault of your own, your product is less known, less available, and therefore purchased less, perpetuating your disadvantage relative to larger competitors. Yes, you need to get exceptionally creative with your marketing in order to be seen and heard. And yes, there are also some very simple and quite methodical solutions to help you grow. These solutions begin with a deep understanding of your brand, your customer and your competition. Regardless of your budget, it is only once you are able to precisely pinpoint what makes you relevant and distinct that you can begin making headway into building a strong brand.

ROI is indeed top of mind for business owners regardless of the size of your business. Business owners to marketing directors need to justify every dollar spent and they aim to track what's working with clear metrics. Where people go wrong is not understanding that brand building campaigns and performance marketing campaigns are different and require a different time measure or data set to determine ROI. Performance marketing is evaluated on a much shorter time frame (weeks to just a few months) where as brand awareness campaigns should really not be evaluated on times frames any shorter than one year.

I will largely leave this question to the social media marketing experts of the world. However, a misstep that I run into very frequently, especially among small businesses, is not clearly highlighting a distinctive brand asset in a social media post. As a small business (at a disadvantage relative to your larger competitors) it is vital that you do everything in your power to be remembered. No one buys a product or service that they cannot recall during the moments they are shopping. Your distinctive brand assets are powerful brand recall tools and you must ensure that you use these tools as frequently as it makes sense.

Growing a brand is a game of incremental baby steps. Rarely does a brand explode in popularity over night and it’s quite likely that you’d want a more sustainable approach to business growth anyway. Competing in any market is never a one off tactic. You can win in time by (among a long list): providing a product or service that is relatively differentiated from your large competitors; consistently show up with a distinct voice and presentation; focusing on your distribution mix and product placement; building a strong internal culture; and building strength in cross functional capabilities.

Market research and target customer identification are fundamental concerns for businesses trying to define their ideal customers. However, from my experience far too many businesses are following an outdated directive to “niche, niche, niche.” While identifying a niche market can be a positive, most businesses believe their market is far more segmented than it really is. Recent research has shown markets are far less segmented and consumers are far less brand loyal than previously believed. When a brand speaks only to a very specific and small segment of a market its presence is hidden from a very large population of potential buyers. For a small business that is already at a disadvantage relative to larger competitors, this is a bad deal. For a brand to grow, you must think beyond the customers that you know exist. Do this by offering a very specific form of value to anyone and everyone that could possibly want or need what you offer.

From my experience, businesses (small and large) struggle to maintain brand consistency across websites, social media, packaging, and physical locations because they have not identified the one thing that makes them relevant to their buyers and distinct from their competition. Failing to identify this anchor point leave a business and marketing team chasing many different story lines to see what works. Often this leads to a curated mix of today’s culturally trending topics that are not in any way directly tied to their brand long term. Find what makes you relevant and distinct, and remain dedicated to that point of view. Season your story with the spicy trends of the day, but recognize a trend as the salt that it is. Your distinct brand must remain the star of show.
On the other hand, brands that have created very tight brand guidelines documents can struggle with not being flexible enough to incorporate relevant trends in their marketing and communication efforts. To avoid brand rigidity, I like to help brands develop a “brand universe” mentality. This is a frame of mind that helps anyone inside of a business understand the universal laws of their brand. This helps on the fly decision making in a rapidly changing world.

Although customer loyalty is real, many studies in the past decade (most prominently by the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute) have shown brand loyalty (and similarly, retailer loyalty) is drastically less common than previous believed. All brands in a market share a large percentage of their customer base. The largest brands share slightly less of their customer base because they are large, more well known, and more readily available at time of purchase. Smaller brands share a slightly higher percentage of their customer base because they are small, less well known, and less readily available at time of purchase. Likewise, over a reasonable time frame, repeat purchasing from the small percentage of a brand’s loyal customer base has a significantly smaller impact on brand growth than does the infrequent and light purchasing from the vast majority of a brands customer base. So what does this all mean and what should you do? In short, do what you can to help both frequent and new buyers feel delighted by their purchase of your product or service but focus your growth efforts on attracting many new buyers that will likely buy infrequently. All brands will lose customers for reasons that are completely outside their control. If you focus only on repeat purchases from loyal customers, you will go out of business. The only question is when.