Your Brand Exists to Create Advantage, Not Advertising

Most business owners are proud of their brand and love to show it off, however, many have too narrow an understanding of what their brand is for and its real value. 

Businesses often miss the mark by treating branding as simply the visible material created to support advertising. Your brand doesn’t just exist to be able to create cool marketing materials or content. Instead, your brand exists to express your business unique value to those who need what you offer. To do this, your brand must not only show up, it must show up to the right people–clearly, consistently and convincingly. 

At Enthuse Creative, an adage we live by is “your brand is not just about giving your customer something to buy, it’s about giving them something to believe in.” This becomes your advantage, or, the reason your brand should be chosen and recommended. Then, your brand doesn’t exist for the purpose of advertising, rather advertising exists to express your brand’s unique value.

Your brand, in its fullest sense, helps you clarify your identity and connect with your audience, suggesting and declaring how what you offer is different and more valuable than other offerings. Your brand serves as more than decoration – it is a declaration–creating meaning and advantage that is perceived, understood, and believed in the hearts and minds of your customers. This is what you can leverage to create the most compelling advertising. 

Your brand exists to be felt more than it is to be seen. The reality is that brands and their messages are in constant competition with one another. Statistics vary, but the average digitally-connected person is exposed to hundreds of brand messages per day. This neverending digital onslaught will surely continue as long as we rely on our devices for information and communication.

Advertising can place a company in front of the right audience, but visibility alone does not create preference. The audience still needs to understand the “4 Whys”:

• Why this company is relevant
• Why its offerings are different
• Why its claims should be trusted
• Why choosing it is worth the cost, effort, or perceived risk

The advantage comes from having strong answers to those questions before the campaign begins.

Exposure vs. Experience 

Many business owners think this way: I need to design a logo so I can put it on business cards, social media and other materials and get it out there so people can see it and get familiar with it. People typically need several touchpoints before they recognize and trust your business. But visibility alone isn’t enough — what matters more is whether the experience of your business is meaningfully better than the alternatives. In today’s market, it’s not enough to just tell people, you have to show them. A well thought out brand, developed through strategy and not just creative, is well-positioned to develop advertising from. In short, you need to elevate your brand experience and create a distinct, tangible, meaningful advantage for your customer. This will keep them coming back, more than just seeing your logo all the time. This helps you go from just being a recognizable brand to being recognized as the right brand to solve the client’s problem.  

This requires having a strategic and creative approach to how your brand is built. It’s not just all strategy and concepts, you’re trying to make something that real people have a real connection to. It needs to be aesthetically appealing, strike visual and verbal notes that signal the right things to your audience. Similarly, brand building is not just a creative process, it needs to be founded on real customer insight and sentiments, and built on a strategy that identifies who benefits from what you offer and how best to reach them with your message. Both sides of the brand building process must work together to make your brand effective. 

Your goal is to help your client clearly identify and choose your brand, through a combination of factors that your client sees, hears, thinks, and feels. The most effective brands may use advertising, but it is just a tool.

Alignment

Alignment is a key brand building concept that must be carried out through the various aspects of an organization. A company cannot build a strong advantage when its positioning says one thing, its visual identity suggests another, and its client experience delivers something else entirely. Brand advantage emerges when the major parts of the business reinforce one another:

• Strategic Messaging
• Visual Identity
• Culture & Leadership
• Customer Service and Experience

Alignment  ensures that all these elements point toward the same promise. Your brand gains a powerful advantage when what a company says, shows, and delivers tells the same story.

Clarity

Clarity should be the goal of all great brands. Many businesses do not suffer from a lack of quality, but rather, a lack of clarity. Their brands create confusion, which is a barrier to customer engagement because they make a few common mistakes: 

• Too many services
• Description of business is too broad
• Too similar to their competitors
• Too much jargon and insider language.

Brand clarity helps people quickly understand the “4 Whys” and also provide key details and context that helps them understand why this matters to them. hat clarity creates an operational advantage as well as a marketing advantage. It can improve sales conversations, proposals, hiring, partnerships, referrals, and internal decision-making.

Consistency

Consistency is fairly straightforward, but it is a must in a marketplace where client preferences change quickly and new options are being introduced all the time. Consistency is about ensuring brand expression and experience is delivered in a way that can be trusted time and time again. Every touchpoint and transaction is either elevating or eroding trust, strengthening your advantage or weakening it.

Consider this analogy: It’s not acceptable for a restaurant to serve good food to every one out of three customers. It’s also not enough for your brand to deliver a great experience once every three engagements. An advantage emerges when the same level of craft, polish, strategic thinking and execution are delivered every time. Then it becomes something people expect and a reputation that becomes an advantage when you find yourself in a competitive situation with another firm that doesn’t quite hit that standard.

What does Advantage Allow You to Do?

Prospective clients may be evaluating your expertise, reliability, judgment, responsiveness, cultural fit, and the likelihood that the company can deliver without introducing unnecessary risk. Strong branding, which includes elements like polished design, strategic writing, thoughtful user experience, thought leadership and insightful perspective, and unique voice, all work together to make those qualities visible and accessible before the engagement begins. This makes buyers convinced about your credibility and feel more confident about moving forward with your company. 

Many prospective clients are sifting through a handful of possible providers at any given time. The advantage you have built through your brand can help move you and keep you at the top of the list. Done right, this approach doesn’t just make you feel better about the brand you’ve built, it can result in a real impact on your bottom line. Four of the most important results a brand-focused approach can produce: 

• Build more goodwill and trust more quickly
• Reduce risk and friction 
• Attract more loyal, higher-spending, better-fit clients
• Do not compete on price and instead highlight other tangible benefits

Every successful client engagement, useful article, referral, presentation, interaction, and visible proof point can strengthen what the market believes about a company. Over time, that can create long-term advantages. This approach is better than one that relies on advertising and should be a focus of growing service-based companies.

Conclusion

Advertising tends to be campaign-based. Brand equity is cumulative. It is something that is not bound to a particular channel and can be built on an ongoing basis as a high-profile priority or steadily in the background. We believe this can ultimately be more valuable than any advertising campaign. This is an important distinction! Branding is the long-term play, not the short burst of energy an ad campaign provides.  The impact of strong branding is a slow rising tide that can lift many areas of a business.

Advertising helps a business communicate and capture attention (for a time). Branding helps the business become clearer, more credible, more valuable, and more difficult to replace. We encourage leaders to stop asking only, “How should we advertise this?” and begin asking “What advantage are we building—and does our brand make that advantage clear?”  If you want your business to go from recognized to requested and from seen to sought out, focus on building your brand and leaning into the advantages that creates.

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At Enthuse Creative, we help growing businesses create brands that create an advantage for them. Contact us today for a free brand consultation.