Why Branding Is More Important Now Than Ever

I thought it would be appropriate for the first post on my self-branded blog to be about branding.  I like to try to be clever like that.

Branding is not a new concept.  In fact, it’s probably one of the oldest concepts in marketing.  The internet, however, has created a branding revolution. It used to be that if you told me to think of a brand, I’d think of Coca-Cola or Marlboro (two of the most highly valued brands in the world), and a handful of others.  Now, when I think of brands I think not only of the big boys, but I think of everything as a brand.  Where branding used to only be for major corporations, now it’s become just as important for the individual.  That’s right, your name is a brand, hence this site.

In order to underscore the renewed importance of branding across the spectrum, I’m going to split branding into two artificial categories: business and personal.  I call these categories artificial, because as you’ll see, the internet is causing the two areas to spill over into each other in a big way.

Business Branding

If you’re a business owner, you need to know what is going to make customers pick you.  What good or service can you provide that your competitor can’t?  If you’re lucky enough to have a completely unique product, congratulations, you don’t have any competition…  yet.  If you’re like most business owners, and you’re competing with other business for customers, then you know you need to have an edge.

It used to be that you could compete on price, speed and quality.  I have bad news, though.  Price and speed?  You can’t compete on those anymore.  Even if you can make something cheaper and faster than someone else, in two months, China will do it even cheaper, and even faster, and ship it to Wal-Mart to add a convenient distribution method.  Two months after that, China will be outsourcing to Vietnam, to cut its own costs and production time.  Competing on price and speed is a race to the bottom that small and medium-sized business owners should avoid altogether.

What’s left then?  Quality.  Quality of your product and quality of your service.  Quality is what keeps customers coming back.  Quality is what generates word of mouth.  Customers will pay more for quality. Here’s the catch, though, customers associate quality with a brand.  No one walks into a shop picked at random and assumes quality.  If, however, people recognize your brand, they assume there’s quality tied to it.

Most people who buy an iPod over any other MP3 player are buying it for the brand.  They buy that brand because they assume it’s of a higher quality.  Is it?  That’s debatable.  I’ve tried multiple portable music players.  I’ve liked some of them just as much, if not more than Apple’s iPod, and yet, I own an iPod.  I don’t know for a fact that the product is better, and yet I still bought it for the brand.  The great thing about building a brand is that if you can convince people that your product is better, it doesn’t actually have to be better (but it does need to be at least comparable).

Having a recognizable brand and a quality product also creates brand loyalty.  That’s the customer who keeps coming back.  Customers who keep coming back are the best kind, because instead of doing all the work of attracting new customers every time, you attract them once, and then they keep coming back on their own.  But if you want repeat customers, and brand loyalty, you need to make sure you build the reputation of your brand, and then that you protect that reputation.

Personal Branding

Personal branding is either a relatively new concept, or an old one that simply exploded with the help of the social web.  Either way, it’s become a reality, and it’s one everyone needs to begin to embrace as soon as possible.

The concept behind personal branding is no different than that behind business branding.  Job markets are increasingly competitive, not just with the higher number of people completing higher education domestically, but also with the huge influx of talent coming from overseas.  In a hyper-competitive market, you need a way to stand out, and the way to do this is to build your personal brand.  You can equate your personal brand to your reputation, and in today’s world, reputation is currency.

Dan Schawbel is the self-proclaimed Personal Branding expert for Generation Y, and also a great example of what personal branding can do.  As a personal branding expert, you can imagine that Dan has done quite a bit to build his personal brand, and as such, has created a ubiquitous presence on the web.  A couple of weeks ago, Dan followed me on Twitter (if he weren’t following tens of thousands of people, I would be honoured).  I’m still relatively new on Twitter, and have a small network, so I actually check the profiles of anyone that follows me before I decide whether or not I follow back.  Annoying twitter-talk aside, my point is that if I hadn’t recognized Dan’s name from some other source that I’d read about him, I’m not sure I would have followed him back.  But, because I did recognize his name – his personal brand – I followed him, started receiving his tweets, took a look at his blog, and now I’m writing about him on mine.  All that because I recognized the guy’s name from something I’d read a while ago.  Maybe he is an expert on personal branding after all!

So How Do You Start Building Your Brand?

The hardest part in any process like this one is getting started, and so I’ll tell you how to get it off the ground and then you can run with it in any direction you like.  After all, it’s your brand.

1. Start by creating an online presence
If you don’t already have an online presence, create one.  It can be as elaborate as an interactive website, or a blog, or as simple as a bio page.  Whatever you choose to do, create a space for yourself on the web, because that’s where the attention is turning to.

2. Own your domain
You’ll notice that this site is www.adamdistefano.com.  I could have named it any number of things more creative, but that would defeat the purpose.  When someone looks for me, I want to make sure they find me, and not someone else.  In that respect, owning your domain is as much defense as it is offense.  There is nothing more damaging to a brand than having someone else using it and ruining its reputation.

3. Monitor Google results for your brand
Googling your brand might seem like an exercise in vanity, but it’ll give you an idea of what people are seeing when they look for you.

Uisng myself as an example, a search for my name on Google shows that on average five of the top 10 results are actually me (searching on google.com and google.ca with quotes and without).

More important than just the quantity of results, however, is the quality of the results.  Most of the results that aren’t me on Google are fine because they are obviously other people with the same name, but they’re not damaging to my personal brand.  However, some could be.  I used to write regularly for askmen.com and those articles are now indexed on Google.  I have no issue with that.  Since then, various international websites have scraped the content from askmen.com and repurposed it for their own use.  Normally, I would have no issue with that, either.  Additional exposure is a good thing.  In this instance, they even kept my name attached to the articles (something that is not always done when websites scrape content for their own use).  The issue arises when you look at the context of the article.  For whatever reason, many of these sites chose not to copy the articles, but instead to summarize them.  Unfortunately, the summaries were poorly done, using bad grammar and simply badly written.  To make matters worse, nothing in the summary indicates that this is a summary of an altogether different piece, and instead, it simply looks like something I wrote.  As a freelance writer, you can imagine that this is not good for my brand.

The lesson here is to make sure you keep an eye out for your brand to make sure it’s not being misrepresented.  Apart from just Googling your brand repeatedly, you can also set-up Google Alerts, which are a handy way to be notified anytime something you’re trying to watch is mentioned on the web.

4. Make sure you appear in major eyeball areas
Aside from having a site, and ensuring that you’re well represented on Google, make sure that you appear in other major eyeball areas.  If you’re a restaurant, make sure you’re listed on Yelp.  If you’re a local business, make sure you’re listed in the major business directories (such as YellowPages.ca).  If you’re a Doctor, make sure you’re in medical directories.  Go to where people are looking for you, and make sure your brand is there. After all, what’s the point of building a brand, if no one ever sees it?

5. Social Networks
Social media and social media marketing have turned into a gargantuan topic.  Tons of books have been written on the topic (Trust Agents is my personal favourite).  Love them or hate them, they are making a splash.  The topic’s too big to cover in a bullet point in a blog post.  Instead, I recommend that you sign up to a few social networks and fill out the basic profile. Even if you choose not to participate, stake a piece of real estate.  More often than not, the top six results on a personal name search on Google are from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  That’s something to keep in mind if you still refuse to sign up for those services.

If you follow the above five steps, you’ll have created a footprint for your brand online.  From there you can grow it any number of ways, but the best way to do it, is to provide quality products and quality service.  If you do that, the foundation you’ve laid will grow nicely.

Additional resources:

• Seth Godin: Seth is a guru on just about all topics marketing and business, but he has some particularly good stuff to say about the importance of a business’ reputation and brand.
• Dan Schawbel:  Even if you’re not a Gen-Yer, you might still be able to learn something from Dan.  You might feel turned off at first by the self-promotional nature of a lot his stuff, but after you get used to it, you’ll start to see a lot of value.
• Susan Lewis: Susan took personal branding to a new level when she decided to use social media and her personal brand to hire a boss.  That’s right, when she finished her MBA, she didn’t apply to jobs.  She had THEM apply to HER.

What do you think about branding?  Is it overrated?  Should we stop paying attention to brands?  If you just conduct good business, will your brand build itself?