LittleEngine

Branding, as we've talked about before, is the gut reaction a customer (NOT YOU) has about your small business.

Once you start building your small business brand, you'll find a community of individuals supporting and interacting with it everyday. This community begins inside the company: employees, investors, and executives. It continues outside to partners, suppliers, and customers.

This is a system built on promises, one makes a promise to each other and they all harmoniously inte...

more

Branding, as we've talked about before, is the gut reaction a customer (NOT YOU) has about your small business.

Once you start building your small business brand, you'll find a community of individuals supporting and interacting with it everyday. This community begins inside the company: employees, investors, and executives. It continues outside to partners, suppliers, and customers.

This is a system built on promises, one makes a promise to each other and they all harmoniously interact. Once your small business drops a promise, your brand forms a negative connotation that needs to be fixed (common problems include slow payment, bad product, horrendous tech support, etc.)

You'll notice brands that keep hard-to-establish promises, have customers that are loyal — customers who love their brand! For example, Apple steped-up and said we will design and build personal electronic devises that will be beautiful and easy to use. For the most part, they've kept that promise and have established customers that are willing to pay a premium for them to continue that promise.

Apple knows that not everybody will appreciate that promise, but they don't mind, they've come to conclusion that they can't touch everybody. They keep chugging along and picking fights all the time (cell phones, mp3 players, television); sometimes they lose (AppleTV), and sometimes they hit a home-run (iPhone). What they are doing though is making a promise each-and-every time and being radically different than the social norm to keep that promise.

As a small business owner, make all aspects of your business radically different, but keep your positioning statement and promises to your community close to your heart. You'll see the local love swell!

less