A strong brand is good for business. It gives it an advantage over its competitors by distinguishing it from them in a way that matters to customers and influences their choices, making the difference between commercial success and failure in a competitive market. Despite its importance, however, this simple tool, available to every business, is often misunderstood, underestimated, and underused, particularly by smaller businesses.
In this guide on branding for SMEs, I encapsulate and offer my wealth of experience as a leading brand development consultant. I distil a clear and useful definition of ‘brand’ as a tool that influences choice by reflecting the relationship between buyers and sellers and the value they exchange.
A business uses brand to help it become the natural choice of its customers; its customers use brand to help them make the right choice of product or service. On this basis, I provide a comprehensive set of concepts, terms and tools and techniques with which businesses can build their own brand infrastructure.
Accessible, rooted in the experience of advising SMEs, and easy to apply, each section of the guide features an illustrative fictional scenario, real-world examples from my brand work with clients, checklists and other tools to enable you to apply my approach.
