[Advanced] Building Your Brand (1)

Insightful advice to create a company on which customers can depend

One afternoon, brand consultant Laurence Vincent asked a potential client a few simple questions, including: How indispensable is your brand to your customers? What does your brand do better than any competitor, and why does it matter? If your brand disappeared tomorrow, why would anyone care? "On this particular occasion, his answer stunned me," writes Vincent in his book Brand Real: How Smart Companies Live Their Brand Promise and Inspire Fierce Customer Loyalty. "He said, ‘I’m not looking for a management consultant. I’m talking to you because I need a nice new brand to make up for the problems you just asked me about.’ And there it was: the trouble with modern branding..."

The trouble, according to Vincent, is that companies with deep core problems believe that all their problems can be solved with a new name or logo. In the case of this potential client (who never became a client), the company’s differentiating strategies consisted of aggressive pricing and cost-cutting, instead of adding value. In short, the company was a mess. No worries, thought the CEO, I’ll just hire a brand consultant to "design a better logo, tidy up the Web site, and clean up the advertising," Vincent writes. "That’s not branding. That’s stagecraft."


Notes and Vocabulary
insightful adj.
having or showing a very clear understanding of something : having or showing insight;
able to understand or showing that you understand what a situation or person is really like

indispensable adj.
extremely important and necessary
someone or something that is indispensable is so important or useful that it is impossible to manage without them [= essential]

fierce adj.
having or showing a lot of strong emotion : very strong or intense

stun v.
to surprise or upset someone so much that they do not react immediately

differentiate v.
to recognize or express the difference between things or people [= distinguish]

tidy or tidy up v.
to make (something) clean and organized


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