The Entrepreneurial Spirit of the Brand
Many entrepreneurial people have an idea that focusing on brand is a waste of time and money for a growing company trying to create repeat business in a crowded marketplace. A typical representative of these would argue that you should build customers first. Brand negatives also find that many entrepreneurs end up with “analysis paralysis”: pondering for months on end what their brands will mean to consumers before they open for business, only to enter the marketplace and find they need a new strategy.
Flexibility instead of a fixed brand?
They also like to say that entrepreneurship requires flexibility, because your original brand strategy could be completely wrong. Listen closely to your customers, because they will help you figure out your brand. We have all seen a lot of businesses that start out being one thing and end up being something else.
And honestly, as a start-up in B2B, how much value is the brand any way and how do you communicate a brand?
Many entrepreneurs’ sees branding as the emotional connection companies forge with customers. Harley-Davidson is a popular example of a great brand. Like in this popular quote from a Harley-Davidson executive:
“What we sell is the ability for a 43-year-old accountant to dress in black leather, ride through small towns and have people be afraid of him.”Surely, creating for instance a big-name technology brand is different, isn’t it?
Microsoft cared more about hiring skilled software developers than creating heavy name awareness in its early years. True, I remember having a dispute about branding with Bill Gates himself, then an unknown person to most of us, when I first met him in Stockholm in the early years when helping to make advertising and establishing the Microsoft brand in the Scandinavian market.
Of course it’s correct: it was not the external branding that made Microsoft become a market leader. And this supports the very much beloved idea that: “In technology, brand evolves over time. People are buying what a technology product will do, not the marketing. Brand can’t really deliver value to the customer in the first year of business.” This is the thinking of a lot of entrepreneurs.
Actually they are all wrong!
The great mistake is the misunderstanding of branding as some¬thing that simply equals marketing.
Branding is for most people only the external branding, when in¬stead the most interesting power of branding is internal and im¬portant to the start-up entrepreneur literally from day one.
For the Microsoft developers, as well as the developers of Nokia or Ericsson, or for any company with any amount of R&D, the philoso¬phy of development and innovation are nothing but pure internal branding.
For any entrepreneur, building the brand is key to business suc¬cess – something that can be easily overlooked by more immediate concerns of financing and product development.
An experienced entrepreneur knows that the brand is much more than just a logo. It’s a strategic statement or set of statements that encompass who your company is, what it does, how it plans to succeed, and why it’s unique or different. Branding covers your differentiation, positioning, mission, identity, style, value proposi¬tion, your motto and your brand story.
Scott Bedbury, former Starbuck’s marketing head and Nike adver¬tising director, states in his book, “A New Brand World: Eight prin¬ciples for brand leadership in the twenty-first century”:
– I can think of no better organizing principle for a company than the brand itself. A well-managed brand mobilizes all of a compa¬ny’s stakeholders (employees, customers, investors, etc.) to create value.
The local hero challenge
Another reason for branding, even if you are a known local hero, is when a big, well-known competitor moves onto your turf. How will you differentiate your small hardware company? This is the ques¬tion that killed Main Streets all over the World. Figure out the one thing that sets you apart from this new intruder, and center your marketing around it. And it most probably won’t be the price. Quite often you will find out that your products or services are very similar in features, benefits and price to the competitor’s. The more interchangeable your offerings are with the next guy, the more you need a “hook” to get people into your store. Is your hook great customer service? Free Wi-Fi access? A complementary acces¬sory with purchase? Find it, and communicate it – you are branding yourself externally.
You have to be different, maybe not dramatically different, but dif¬ferent! Becoming a challenger yourself?
You also find out how much you need a brand when you’re expand¬ing into new towns where people don’t know your company. Again your local customers know you already, but people in other towns don’t have a clue what you’re selling. This is a good time to edu¬cate them about your purpose and mission, etc. – your brand! Brand helps employees all over the map resolve customer ques¬tions and problems. A brand strategy can provide service consis¬tency and further build your brand.
Branding is one of the hottest concepts in business management today, for a reason, and it’s not just for the deep-pocketed, highly glossed Coca-Colas and Nikes.
An increasing number of independent-business owners are embracing branding as the guiding philosophy for building their companies. And they quickly become very successful; creating large business value in a short time. In the beginning of all human achievements is the entrepreneurial spirit; the will to do something different, to stand for something you believe in and to want to communicate that to others. And that is the spirit of the brand.
In larger corporations, the distance or the gap between that initial entrepreneurial spirit and daily operative business is usually vast. This is the reason why large companies need new tools to bridge that gap – branding is such a tool – it makes large companies become more entrepreneurial again.
There is almost always an individual behind each of these branding successes. In some cases we know the entrepreneur of the brand by name for example: Ingvar Kamprad at IKEA (his initials are even in the brand name). In a lot of cases it takes some research to find who the branding entrepreneur of a larger organisation is.
Branding in my mind has since then always been about re-creating the entrepreneurial spirit in a company and enabling it to transfer that to all its stakeholders: employees, buyers and user of goods or services, investors, suppliers and other publics. Branding for me has a really strong link to leadership.
THE KEY IDEAS ABOUT BRANDING AND ENTREPRENEURSHIP:
1. Entrepreneurs are the role models for brand building; to succeed with your entrepreneurial venture and keep it on the right track, use your personal Brand - your unique promise of value, because in the world of entrepreneurship the corporate Brand is the personal brand of its founder. These brands are inextricably linked. You need only look at successful entrepreneurs like Ben and Jerry, Richard Branson and Bill Gates, to see that entrepreneurial ventures take on the values and passions of their leaders. In my book “Managing Brand Me” you have a complete method on how to build your personal brand, and then use it as basis for your business.
2. The ownership of the Brand is the real ownership of the company – it doesn’t matter who financially owns the company – the one(s) owning the brand – own the company! I know of a Swedish entrepreneur in waste management (Ragnar Sellberg) that once owned a company and sold its trademark (Sellbergs) and business to a strategic investor (PLM), but he silently kept the brand (personality, principles, core ideas) and as soon as he could he started a new company with a new name (RagnSells) and the same brand as he had before – meanwhile his old brand had taken on the brand of the acquiring strategic investor (PLM) and it had become all diffused and was eventually later sold off again to another company.
3. The entrepreneurial key branding questions: Why am I different? Why is my business idea different? Why can my company make a difference? How can I better than others attract and satisfy customers and other stakeholders?
4. Entrepreneurs are usually driven by an issue, the best brands are usually driven by an issue. How about finding out what is your issue? What is it that makes you proud of yourself? What gives you the “permission” to enter this market?
5. Branding is continuing process: a brand is a hypothesis that has to be approved or adjusted by the wisdom of customers and the employees of a company. But you can never ask your customers or employees first about the brand. You have to decide what you like to offer them and then see how it’s perceived. The more differentiating the more time you have to give your business concept before you should change it or give up on it.
6. Empowerment is a distributed form of entrepreneurship inside an organisation and it requires branding – clear perception among employees of the purpose and principles of the company. Branding is the twin of Empowerment | 
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