There’s an employee at your company that might not be pulling his own weight. Everyone has someone like him working for them. He’s either out back smoking a cigarette during an important conference call or pulling practical jokes on co-workers when he should be finishing up a presentation for Monday. You might think I’m talking about Phil from accounting, but I’m actually referring to your brand. Your brand is a critical part of the team and letting him slack off might be more costly then you think.

What is your company known for? How do your employees feel about the work they do? Does your competition have strong loyalty? These are just a few questions that can be answered after doing some branding exercises.

Constructive Feedback

A good brand exercise to start with could be a brainstorming meeting with top employees where you all put yourselves in your customers’ shoes and start to ask and answer these questions. Then apply that to real customers, write 5 brand related questions and send them out as a survey to a small group of customers. This feedback is priceless and will steer the improvements you should make to you brand. Essentially answering the questions: What changes to we need to make within our company to improve the likelihood of customers buying our product or using our service.

Building a company’s brand is about emphasizing its value it has already been building and broadcasting that out to the masses. People like to feel attached to the things that surround them. Companies need to communicate their strengths, purpose and value.

Talking to the walls

You might be looking at branding all wrong. Dropping $40k on a new website just to have a new website is clearly not a strategy worth discussing. The same goes for any other touch point of your brand: logo, business cards, mission statement, etc. These are all things a branding/design agency can create for you, but should they? Well that’s the critical question and as a company owner you should be involved in that decision. And I believe that decision can only be made by first taking a thorough look at your company and deciding what your audience needs to better understand your product or services.

Using what you have

That brings us to the purpose and role of a brand, the communicator. Your brand needs to be a broadcasting Swiss army knife. It must speak for you when you’re not around to drop you elevator pitch, it should act as a symbol of trust to comfort your customers if they’re ever in doubt, and it must also evolve when your company evolves. These things don’t just happen over night, in fact a strong brand takes years to develop. But that doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch. You need to build on what your company already means to people, this is the first step in discovering effective brand tactics.

Where to start

No one understands your company as well as you do. You need to be the steward of how it’s perceived to the world and your responsible for interrupting that to your customers. A good branding or design team can create beautiful pieces of work but the root of the message needs to come from you.

Start the branding conversation and put your brand back to work.