A brand isn’t something that you make up. It’s something that you recognize, emphasize, and communicate. You don’t decide it, you identify it. It flows naturally from your company’s unique personality and method of doing things.
What happens if you try to “choose” your brand? You start breaking your marketing.
Understand that your marketing might work insofar as it brings in leads. But that marketing is also making promises. A business can’t possibly keep those promises if their marketing talks about who the company is supposed to be, rather than who the company actually is. Thus, customers are going to walk away disappointed, even if you do everything else right.
For example, you feel like everyone has “cutting edge technology,” so you decide that you need to brand your business as an organization which similarly gets right on the cutting edge. In reality, you’re a little bit behind the times. Your business is good at giving customers warm, friendly face time, and you haven’t even figured out how to give customers the ability to schedule service or pay bills online yet.
The problem is, all that marketing has attracted the wrong crowd. You’ve attracted young 20-somethings with their fingers glued to their phones when you needed to bring in 50-somethings who were ready to appreciate your warmth and personal attention. The 50-something never arrive. The 20-somethings do, and they’re disappointed.
Any disappointed customer is a threat to your reputation. If you’ve made them angry enough by failing to align your branding messages with your company reality then negative reviews are sure to follow.
In a worst case scenario they decide your company lied to them. That sort of mindset creates a slew of angry blog posts and sometimes even news stories which can tank a business reputation in a matter of hours.
Businesses who take this route are usually well meaning and lying is the last thing on their mind. They’re just trying to choose the message that is going to work. However, that reasoning is not going to mollify a consumer who feels misled.
If you are already selling a product or a service that people need then it is okay to be the company you are. There will always be a portion of the population who will want to do business with a company just like yours, whether your strength is cutting edge technology, warm, friendly service, ruthless efficiency, speedy delivery, astounding expertise, or whatever.
You just have to approach your business with eyes wide open so you can figure out what those strengths are, and then authentically communicate those strengths in the right places. Reputation management is hard enough without trying to reach out to people who will never love your business anyway.
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