Building a brand can be an expensive business. Even if you are talking about just your visual brand – logo, website, identity materials – this can be costly. A freelancer would offer entry level pricing, but using a bigger design agency would almost certainly run into the thousands.
But brand is far more than a logo anyway. From a marketing perspective it encompasses messaging about your business, how you communicate to people about it, and can even move into areas of business strategy at the higher end. It is also about hard earned reputation. Reputation can only really be earned by consistent delivery over a long period, delivering on the brand message and promise in the way that organisations such as McDonalds, Pizza Express or Apple have done. Organisations could also embark on costly promotional activity like Gucci or Ferrari have done, but this is obviously not an option for SMEs.
All the elements that encompass a brand are important, for SMEs as well as larger organisations. When beSlick launched, we paid close attention to our brand, what it stood for and how we would communicate that to our target audience. But a hugely overlooked element of brand is process. This is rarely if ever mentioned in brand strategy sessions, yet it informs almost everything relating to a brand.
What constitutes brand?
When people talk about ‘brand’ it can mean a number of different things. But increasingly, it’s all about customer experience and the consistent delivery of that. Apple is rightly lauded as a company with a clearly defined brand strategy of innovation – for years its strapline was ‘think different’.
But the reality is that its products are good, but not necessarily better than the many others in the market. The Apple brand is a combination of product, visual identity but above all customer experience. Whether in an Apple Store, online or over the phone, how people interact with Apple is their perception of the brand and that applies to almost any business.
If they get a bad customer experience then that will impair the brand for that individual. Worse still, they are likely to share that experience with their personal networks. Brand perception is shaped by engagement and interaction with customers and prospects, and successful companies rely on strong process management to ensure these are smooth and seamless experiences.
Process and customer experience
Process is at the core of almost every different function in an organisation. Customer experience is a particularly important function, given its importance to brand, and this all starts with customer onboarding.
Creating a great customer experience from the outset is essential to retaining that client longer term. Getting the onboarding process right at the outset provides the flexibility and freedom to delight that customer and give them a memorable experience. But get it wrong and you will immediately be on the backfoot with that customer, whether that’s a consumer in a shop or a business using a firm’s accountancy services.
If there are smart processes that show step-by-step what should happen when a customer first interacts with a company, then there is little chance this can go wrong. Frontline customer service staff know exactly what they are doing, and while the process can (and almost certainly will) change and evolve over time, having this documented is a smart move for any business.
Recent beSlick research with SME employees revealed that 43% of employees say their company has lost customers because of failed processes, so it is something that should be addressed as a priority.
Establish process…deliver experience…improve brand
There can also be processes that detail what should happen with almost every type of customer interaction: a problem or issue a customer is complaining about; wanting to return a product; wanting to change providers.
Doing so means that at every stage of the interaction, customers are getting a consistently good experience and in turn are developing a positive perception of that brand. This is a far more powerful way of addressing brand perceptions than delivering a fancy logo and one that organisations – especially SMEs – would be wise to adopt.
Let us demonstrate how beSlick can help in building a brand and improving your customer experience.
