Why You Don't Need to Brand Your Business

Branding is the Holy Grail of big business, and for good reason. Building a strong brand can lead to long-term sales, pricing flexibility and loyal customers. But trying to mimic the branding strategies of big companies, as some experts advise, requires vastly more financial resources and marketing sophistication than any genuinely small business can command. Besides, there are lots of more cost- and time-effective things you can do to drive sales. Tackle branding only after you've done these to near-perfection:

• Make sure your product fits the market. Small businesses have the luxury of knowing their customers more intimately than big companies. Use that inside knowledge to see that what you're offering exactly suits their needs, Susan Payton advises in Small Business Trends. Then maybe you can worry about your brand.
• Promote your logo, but don't spend a fortune designing it. Nobody picks MSN for search over Google because of the logo, Nick Rice of Small Business Branding convincingly argues. It's better to have an average logo with great exposure than a great logo that nobody knows about. So put yours on ads, signs, business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, newsletters and other collateral.
• Focus on improving customer interactions, not on hiking your ad budget. "You do not build a strong brand only through advertising and media; it is the collected, overall experience that makes a strong brand," notes Jonas Bergvall of Allaboutbranding.com. Knowing your customers, offering well-suited solutions, having the right employees, instituting good service policies -- all these are central to improving customer experiences and should be refined as well as you can get them before you start spending a lot on ads.
• Keep in mind your own imitable uniqueness. McDonald's may have Ronald, but only your company has you. "Projecting your personality is a powerful competitive advantage, branding message and business tool that you should be using every day. Don't hide it behind a corporate facade, express it in everything you do," Yaro Starak says on Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.
• Stick with it. Consistency is the underlying essence of developing an image. If you want people to know who you are, you can't change with the wind. So avoid changing logos, changing media channels or making big changes to your ad budget, suggests Walter Dailey of the Fox Small Business Center. Don't give up too easily on your markets, and they won't give up so easily on you.

Mark Henricks is an Austin, Texas, freelance journalist whose reporting on business, technology and other topics has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, and other leading publications. Learn more about him at The Article Authority. Follow him on Twitter @bizmyths.

Image courtesy of Flickr user loop_oh, CC2.0