Developing Brand Identity

by Mark True

The recent growth of branded ingredients in the natural products market might lead some marketers to believe a product branding effort is the best use for their shrinking marketing budget. An alternative, longer term solution is investing in organizational, or corporate, brand building that involves everyone in the organization and builds cultures and systems to support the business well beyond the life cycle of any one product.

While some product brands have been successful, they are rare. FloraGLO Lutein comes to mind because I was part of the team that built that brand, but other successful brands include Tonalin CLA, Lyc-O-Mato lycopene complex and OptiMSM. Commodity products are the rule in the natural products industry. Even truly innovative offerings are often copied and the category is commoditized with few relevant distinctions to the audience. In the INSIDER Interactive Buyers Guide, for example, there are 144 companies listed as sellers of folic acid, 21 different companies listed as suppliers of glass bottles, and 26 companies supplying capsule fill services. When selling identical or nearly identical products, companies have to differentiate themselves by the way they do businessby their brand.

It Takes a Village

The challenge with corporate brand building is that it takes everyone in the organization to build and maintain a corporate brand. Widespread involvement is also its strengthit builds an infrastructure that supports the corporate brand for the long term and easily defines what you are to customers, prospects, vendors, media and others doing business with your organization.

Some organizations and the firms they hire to help with the process tend to focus on developing new logos, new brochures and new advertisements and call the result branding. They forget about the infrastructure that supports the brand and leave the job incomplete. One of the simplest definitions comes from brand management consultant and author Karl Speak, who defined a brand as a perception or emotion, maintained by a buyer or a prospective buyer, describing the experience related to doing business with an organization or consuming its products or services, in his book Be Your Own Brand: A Breakthrough Formula for Standing Out from the Crowd (Berret-Koehler, 2002).

More simply put, brand is reputation. In fact, some researchers comparing brand, advertising and stock value growth use reputation as the measurement for brand value. Studies conducted by these researchersJames Gregory and Jack Wiechmannshow sustained advertising helps build both reputation and stock value, while erratic or reduced advertising result in diminished reputation and stock value (Leveraging the Corporate Brand, NTC Business Books, 1997).

While organizational brands in the natural products market dont require high volume traffic of consumer brands, the reputation is still critical. Instead of Happy Meals and Playlands, contact with your audience is via inbound telephone lines, trade show exhibits, packaging, advertising or accounting and collateral materials. Together, they build a certain perception among buyers, competitors, media and others who come in contact with your business or products. Brands are created over the telephone lines, after opening a shipment or reviewing an invoice. If the person taking the order was belligerent, the package was leaking when it arrived or the invoice was incorrect, it doesnt matter how attractive the advertising. The corporate brand takes the hit.

The Auto Mechanic

My auto mechanic provides a great example of this concept. Randy is the owner of an independent auto repair business and has served me well every time Ive needed to have my car repaired over the past five years. He calls me to explain what is wrong with the car, reviews the options, asks for approval to proceed and, when the job is complete, calls to tell me the car is ready. Sometimes, he even delivers the car to my house so my wife and children dont have to walk to his shop to pick it up. Its small-town friendly.

If I chose to take the car to the dealership near where I work, I would talk to the service writer when I drove it in. Id talk to a shuttle driver who would take me to my office. I may or may not get a call from someone when the work is done. Id have to find a ride back to the dealership after work, then talk to a cashier. Thats high-volume efficiency.

Both Randy and the dealership can fix my car (most of the time) and do it with the same brand of parts, so they offer the same basic service. Randy and the dealership have created two different kinds of experiences. Two different brands.

A brand is colored by the attributes given it by everybody who comes in contact with it on a regular basis. Maytag means dependability. Saturn is a friendly place to buy a car. Ben & Jerrys is the good corporate citizen. Theyve walked the walk and the public knows it. Gregory and Weichmann explain the complete corporate experience this way: By linking the corporate name closely (and showing evidence for the linkage) with such favorable attributes as quality, value, dependability, innovation, community mindedness, good management, environmental consciousness and so on, corporate branding builds a special relationship with target audiences. It can change behavior toward the company.

You can replace corporate with organization to avoid any confusion caused by legal definitions. Understand every organization has a brand, from Microsoft to the guy down the street who fixes computers in his basement. The brand may not be widely known. It may not be positive. But its there.

Start With the Audience

Determining which attributes are favorable with your audience can be the first step to understanding your brand. How do you do it? Ask them. What they say may not be what you expected them to say.

If you serve the natural products industry and you think your innovation draws customers, but the customers just want the product at their dock on time and in good condition, there is a serious disconnect with your brand. Customers who find a dependable supplier will leave you and your innovation behind. And your brand will take the hit.

The same is true for any other characteristic: value, accuracy, quality, trustworthiness, etc. If it is not important to the audience, then it is not important. Once you determine what is important to your audience, demonstrate that value in everything your organization does ... at every contact point with the audience.

For instance, if dependability is critical, are your shipments on time or are they routinely late? Is your technical service team available to answer questions? Can they translate technical data into finished product applications? Is the information on your Web site up to date? Do you provide support to your dealers? Do you pay your vendors quickly?

If accuracy is a key measure of your brand, are your invoices correct or are they usually incomplete or confusing? Are your packing slips accurate or do you tend to ship incorrect quantities? Is the phone number in your advertising correct? Is your product backed by legitimate science?

These can be tough questions for some organizations particularly those that feel the marketing department is responsible for the brand. While the marketing department and outside resources such as marketing communications agencies can help define the brand and ways to enhance it, ultimately, everyone involved in the company is responsible for the brand. The receptionist is as important as the plant manager, who is as important as the shipping coordinator, who is as important as the president. Remember, the brand is determined by the customer, vendor, media person or anybody else who comes in contact with your products or services, but the organization controls the contact.

Customers Appreciate Brands

Corporate brandslike product brandsrepresent a short cut ... a signpost of whats ahead, saving the customer a lot of time and effort getting to know what the company represents. But unlike a product brand, they tell you how a company does business, what are all the products like, what new products are like and what the experience will be like. More importantly, a good corporate brand will grease the skids for future new product introductions. Customers will know what to expect long before they experience the new product brand.

Perhaps Dad was a Ford man or a Chevy man whose choice of automotive transportation never varied, even when new models came out. He knew what to expect when he put down his hard-earned money for a new car or truck. As a parent, I know what to expect when I walk into Chuck E. Cheeses. As a reader of Natural Products Industry INSIDER, you know what to expect when you open up your copy.

If youve listened to your customers and created a relevant corporate brand, they will know what to expect every time they pick up the phone to place another order. And everyone in your company will know what it takes to maintain that reputation.