By: Elyssa Cherney
The Bloomingdale’s signature “brown bag” is tightly clasped. Ray-Ban sunglasses coolly rest upon the heads of these eager shoppers who are fearlessly guided by a pair of Nike sneakers.
Yes, a stroll around my local mall reveals all things typical of an upper-middle class shopping center. From head to toe, these patrons flaunt their designer labels.
But in this brand-eat-brand world, we needn’t travel outside our own homes to witness this phenomenon.
By simply gazing in a mirror, we can see the brand we invest in the most: ourselves.
As I sat in on an internal marketing meeting at Davidoff Communications, I realized that the idea of branding penetrates much further than surface level impressions, and delves into deeply rooted ontological questions—ones that lie at the cornerstone of our identity.
How we brand ourselves—the image we project to the world based on the clothing we wear, the phrases we say, and attitudes we adopt—creates a defining label of who we are as humans.
It comes down to several critical questions that we all must ask ourselves—Who do I want to be? How do I want others to perceive me? What are the types of things that I want associated with my name?
While this introspective process happens acutely on a personal level, it occurs even more furiously on a larger-scale, within the business sector.
The impact of branding is reflected by the exorbitant amount of money that corporations are willing to invest in marketing.
According to TheList.com, the internet’s largest relational database of marketing and advertising decision makers in North America, major companies like General Motors and AT&T spend over two billion dollars on advertisements to build their respective images.
Traditionally, businesses are advised to consider several factors when deciding which resources should be allocated to marketing. Some businesses set a flat dollar rate, others calculate a sales-revenue ratio, and many follow the plans of their competitors.
Still, some maintain that there should be no monetary cap on marketing.
“For startups and small businesses, branding can often take a backseat to other considerations, such as funding and product development,” reads a 2009 column from businessweek.com that appeared in The New York Times. “This is a mistake, as a company's brand can be key to its success. Dollar for dollar, it is as important and vital as any other early steps.”
But the marketing landscape is forever changing. First came the Internet and now it’s the dawn of the social media era.
More than half of businesses with marketing budgets under $1000 are adopting social media practices rooted in Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter (in that order), reported a 2010 GrowBiz Media study called entitled “SMB Marketing Practices: Small to Midsized Business Survey Results, 2010.” The same report, which surveyed 751 small businesses of less than 1,000 employees from across the country, also found that nearly 40 percent of respondents are spending more than one fifth of their marketing budgets on websites.
In these tumultuous times, constantly being redrawn by technology, the effort to define the face of your business becomes increasingly difficult.
But there is one overarching constant: revisiting those tough questions. The challenge is to apply this process of self-questioning to our businesses.
The daily struggles and often-agonizing truths we must confront about ourselves act as a model for branding a company, a service, or a product.
We must maintain the same self-awareness and objectivity that serve as personal checks to evaluate the image our business presents to the rest of humanity.
Stagnancy is failure. If we simply accept our faults and do not try to change them, we will not build our moral and social character. Likewise, building a brand requires constant recalibration.
Change is not a sign of weakness; it is a mark of strength. We must have the courage to recognize when a problem exists and the creativity to find the best possible solution.
It will take time, but by remaining cognizant of these fundamentals, your business can furnish its own unique brand—one that is differentiated from the sea of your competitors and highlights the specific talents that only you offer.
Only then will your vision for your business match what the rest of the world sees, its reflection staring squarely back at you from that mirror.
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