Your Company Brand as a Key Asset

In our last edition of the Marketing Masterclass, we highlighted how as a CEO or business owner, one of your strongest assets is your Personal Brand. Today we want to look at your company brand which is also one of your key assets. If you want to succeed in business for the long term, then you need to build a strong brand.

First, let’s start by defining what a brand is. Your brand can be described as the promise you make to your customer. It is what differentiates you from the competition.

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So how can your business stand out from its competitors? What do you offer your customers that is unique, and how do you communicate that difference?

You have to start by defining your unique value proposition. When you are clear on it, you then communicate it with clarity and consistency.

Since your brand has to stand for something distinctive, how do you achieve this? The answer can be found in creating a differentiated value proposition. The easiest way to think about differentiation is giving people a reason to choose you over others. 

We will look at how a brand can be differentiated using the four ‘Ps’ of the Marketing Mix.

The first ‘P’ is Product; we said earlier that a product is anything that fulfils a customer’s need. It could be tangible or intangible. Increasingly though, many products and services in the marketplace are so similar, it is difficult to tell how one is different or better than the others. When we look at some service businesses like hair salons, schools, hotels, restaurants, or products like  tissue paper you will see very little or no differentiation.

Yet, if your goal is to gain market share you have to stand out. So, the question becomes how you will distinguish your offering from others in the market.

There are several ways. It may take the form of adding features others don’t have. It could also be through increased performance, reliability and durability, superior product quality, and the variety available for your product.  

It could also be the convenience of use; Let’s look at Paystack, a Fintech Startup revolutionizing payments for small businesses. It’s mission is to help businesses in Africa get paid by anyone, anywhere in the world. Their value proposition is an easy, painless payment system.

Before Paystack it was very difficult and cumbersome for small businesses to accept payments online.  Paystack made it easy to integrate various payment systems so that customers could pay however they want.

It redefined how people pay by creating the fastest, simplest way to accept payments in Nigeria. From signup to payments was under 15 minutes. Today it processes more than half of all online transactions.

It was no surprise that they were acquired by Stripe in what was termed the biggest startup acquisition to date to come out of Nigeria.

Research shows that effective differentiation increases brand loyalty and sales, leading to growth. In our next edition we will look at differentiation strategies based on the rest of the four ‘Ps’ of the Marketing Mix.