Small Business Branding Portsmouth

Many people, when thinking about branding, confine themselves to comments and thoughts on their company logo and design.  Others actual say to me – well, branding is really just for big companies – not for us at all.

As I explain – this is not true – and whilst the ‘display’ of brand values, the breadth of your brand reach and how much your spend on brand identity may be very different if you are a small business – you can still learn and take ideas from the biggest and the ‘best’ brand advocates.

The most important thing is not to limit your thoughts when it comes to deciding how you will develop and exploit the power of your brand.

You can think about it in terms of the 5 P’s of brand.  Let’s take a closer look at what I am talking about…

Proposition

For any business, getting the proposition right is important but for a small business it’s absolutely critical.  A larger company with more substantial budgets may have time to spend developing a clear proposition and testing out options in the market place. 

A smaller business doesn’t.

Instead it needs to develop a clear and compelling message about itself and use this consistently in all business communications.  And this proposition must help you stand out from the crowd – maybe for the niche markets that you serve or the nature of the product or service that you deliver. 

You need to work hard on this – without a strong proposition – a statement or explanation of what you do for your clients – you will find it very hard to develop ‘brand’ messages that make you stand out.

Presence and Presentation

I’m talking about some of the more familiar manifestations of the brand.  This is all about how you convey, visually what your brand (for a small firm your business) is all about.  Everything from your location and signage to company letterhead, brochure ware, website and even the type of paper you use for business correspondence can all help reinforce, or destroy the image of your brand.

Let’s take a closer look at a few of the points above to illustrate what I mean. 

Location and signage - now clearly if you are a traditional firm of accountants working with business people and wealthy individuals you are most likely to locate in a well serviced, centrally located office building and you will make sure the signs directing people to your offices are professionally produced and use the correct corporate font and colours, to be consistent with your logo and design of other ...