Think of a piece of rope – it might be a long piece of rope. At one end you have your product or service, and at the other end you have your brand
image/statement and description.
If they pull in different directions, you’ll either go nowhere or the rope will snap.
And, even though brand is at one end and your product or service is at the other, it’s all one piece of rope. So, set alight to your brand at one end, and the fire will quickly travel to the product and service. Soak the product and service end of the rope in water, and the damp will slowly pass to the brand.
These two – brand and product/service – are both indivisible and yet distinct at the same time. Never neglect one, thinking that the other will take care of things.
The best product in the world will fail if its brand is unattractive; the coolest brand is useless if the product or service is poor.
68. Establish clear ownership of code, content and process
Your business will generate new ideas, code for websites and proprietary
technology, and a variety of business processes known legally as ‘trade secrets’.
At the same time, businesses increasingly use information and publishing (via blogs etc.) to communicate and share ideas with clients and suppliers.
So it is important that all that content belongs to your business – including the right to use any content contributed by other third parties who may not get paid for the right either. (For example, posts on forums you host and responses to your blogs or articles.)
It is important that you clearly establish rights to your intellectual property, and that although all such rights may allow a use appropriate for the task – so a freelancer can use your technical code to help them do their job – this does not infer that you have given them ongoing rights to use it.
69. Own your clients
Who has the key relationship with your clients – your brand or your team members?
If the clients are loyal to your brand, then team members can come and go and clients will remain. If your client’s loyalty to particular members of your staff is very much stronger than your business brand, then your clients will follow those staff should they leave.
This is the problem that high level services such as banking and legal services suffer from.
Obviously, in some respects, clients who value your team members is a good problem to have – it should mean your staff are performing out of their skins.
But it could also mean that your brand is weaker than it ought to be. In either case, it requires some extra work on the brand side of things.
So, this might be where you engage a brand marketing agency, and look to establish a strong and distinctive brand which supports your team members and their relationships with their clients, but also makes it clear why the clients would wish to stay with the firm for the long term.
70. Refocus your brand – regularly
Strong brands are often the result of doing something exceptionally well. It is likely that after a few years of entrepreneurial ducking and diving, and attempts to squeeze profit and margin out of your business model, you may have covered a lot of ground and your brand might mean a lot of different things to different people.
Don’t panic. It doesn’t mean that your business has a problem – all the really strong brands have gone through this. It is often just the time to get really clear, again, about what you are and what you are not. In fact, it’s probably better to put energy into it at this stage, when you’ve found and developed your
business’s strengths, than foreshortening your horizons early on.
That way, as you now begin to increase your marketing spend on non-direct- revenue-generating marketing – i.e. brand marketing – you don’t waste your money. And, as your brand becomes stronger in its niche, so it becomes harder for copycat companies to copy you (or simply too expensive for them to enter your market).
71. Measure resolutions as well as complaints
Maintaining brand value amongst your customers is obviously key, and an important part of this is how you deal with complaints.
Working out how well you’re doing this can be counterintuitive – there’s actually a pretty big error that it’s easy to slip into over time, and that’s to
automatically equate low numbers of complaints with a satisfied customer base and a well protected brand. Nope. Not necessarily.
The quantity of complaints will vary from business to business, but if you measure the resolution of complaints rather than the number of complaints, you’ll have a far better measure for how your brand is likely to be doing.
It is better to have 20 complaints and 18 resolved, than to have four complaints and none resolved.
The first situation, 20 complaints, 18 resolved, suggests not only the obvious (that you are very good at resolving customer’s problems), but the less obvious and equally important conclusion – although you’ve got some issues to address, you are good at encouraging your customers to tell you what they think, and they have faith in your ability to solve any problems they have. This means that they have a more intimate and respectful relationship with your company. That you have solved 18 also suggests that the remaining two will likely be solved shortly.
The second situation – four complaints, none resolved – suggests not only that
you are not solving any customer complaints, but that, although their number appears to be small, you haven’t a hope of starting to. It is therefore likely that, by now, far more than four customers have problems with you – it’s just that they’re so disenchanted they can’t be bothered to get in touch. They’ll let other people know about it, though, don’t you worry! Website forums, fellow
customers, family members and friends – and their friends in turn – will soon know every reason why they shouldn’t have anything to do with your company.
Clearly, four complaints and four resolutions is the ideal! But, as you can now see, the important part of that is the number of resolutions.