Your Culture and Consumers

Personal branding for professionals and small business owners

Personal branding has become essential for both professionals and small business owners today. It’s not just about providing the right service or selling the right products anymore. Because there’s so much competition out there, you really need to stand out, and one of the best ways to do this is through personal branding.

Developing your brand isn't something that can be done overnight. It takes thinking and planning and conceptualizing and most of all discovering what your personal brand is.  If there’s one thing that’s very important in the making of your brand, it’s your brand culture.

Interaction counts

Even if you’re just a small business brand, the culture within your company is important to your branding. Your company's culture is how you and the people you work with adapt and work together towards a common goal. It’s how you work together, interact with each other, communicate with customers, connect with them, and how you go about doing the daily tasks of your small business brand.

Your personal or small business brand isn’t just a brand anymore. It’s a culture, a lifestyle. The overall feel of your brand affects how consumers view you, and the consumers are affected by the culture of your brand. Even the people you work with are affected, and how they view your brand also affects the way they talk about it with other people.

Times have changed, and you can’t just be the best in your industry anymore. Maybe your coffee shop has the best coffee in town, but if your customers hate the ambiance in your place, then no one’s going to visit anymore. Maybe you’re the best doctor in your area, but if people hate your secretary's poor customer service, then no one’s going to be lining up at your door anymore.

Getting or losing customers is all about the culture in your small business brand and how it aligns with the interests of your consumers. You want your culture to be something that affects both the people you work with and the people who obtain your services or buy from you. It should be based on your values, and the best service that you want to provide to your clients and customers.

How exactly do you create a strong culture in your small business brand?

     1. Understanding yourself

As a personal brand, it’s important that you understand yourself first. What do you stand for? What are your values? How do you envision your brand?

Understanding yourself is the first step to creating a strong brand culture. By knowing what you stand for, as well as the things you can and cannot compromise with, you can really determine how you want to run your small business, and ensure that what you envision it to be can turn into reality.

     2. Understand the people you work with

Another important factor in creating a strong brand culture is understanding what motivates the people you work with. People don’t want to just do their jobs and exhale a sigh of relief when it’s time to go home. People want to love their jobs, love the people they work with, love their boss. Honestly, who would want to work in a place when you always feel as if you’re dragging your feet every morning when it’s time to go?

Communication is very important. Make an effort to know what the people around you think, and take their views into consideration. If you really want a successful brand, then it’s important that the people you work with love the brand as much as you do. So don’t ignore the people under you. Make sure that their voices are heard.

     3. Understand your customers

Who is your target audience? What do they want? What makes them tick? It’s all about getting into their minds and understanding what they truly want from your brand. Yes, you need to provide excellent products and services. But you should also give them excellent customer service as well as an excellent experience of your brand. Give them an experience that’s unique to your small business brand, something that no other brand can give them. This is how a culture is created.

Today, it’s not just about providing a product or service that the customer needs. It’s also about ensuring that you give your employees as well as your customers the best experience of your brand as possible so that they can talk about your brand in a positive light and share their experience with others.

Author:
Maria Elena Duron, is managing editor of the Personal Branding Blog, CEO (chief engagement officer) of buzz2bucks.com – a word of mouth marketing firm.   She helps create conversation, connection, credibility, community and commerce around your brand.   Maria Duron is co-founder  and moderator of #brandchat - a weekly Twitter chat focused on every aspect of branding that is recognized by Mashable as one the 15 Essential Twitter Chats for Social Media Marketers.

Discovering Your Personal Brand Culture

As business owners, we spend a lot of time on marketing our brand. We lay out different marketing strategies, tapping different channels to find consumers.  But some of us might be too focused on marketing alone, attracting and converting consumers to loyal customers.

Brand culture is a balance of your business goals, vision, mission, values, and beliefs mixed together. You walk and talk your brand, that’s your culture. This mix is important to a business because it’s the one thing that will define and separate you from your competitors, a culture that the owner, manager and its employees live with. A strong brand culture will easily attract consumers who believe in your values and how you do business. It is seen as an important driver that can make a business successful. It is flexible and adjusts well to consumer trends. If you have a great product or service, don’t let that go to waste because you have no clear vision of what your business is about.

As a personal brand, creating a culture around your brand means being clear and committed in your core values and non-negotiables (those things that are essential to who you are, what your business is, and what you will not compromise on).  You should start from within. Start with the things that you have control of, like the way you run your business, the way you handle your employees. Start internally.

Here are some tips on how you can discover your brand from its core to make it into a culture:

An energetic and engaging leader – the right attitudes make a culture. If you show that you are energetic and passionate about what you do, this will rub off on those who work with you. Become an example to your team. Make your products and services a part of who you are. As a leader, inspire your team by engaging them into the realities of your business. Help them see what you want your brand to be known for. This will make them understand what your business is about and how you want others to see your brand. Once they get a clear idea, their attitudes will adjust to what your business needs. They will be happy to talk about your products and offer amazing customer service when they reach out to customers.

Put your values into action – now that you have set values for your business, you have to consistently live by them. Your team members or employees will have a hard time living by company values if they only hear and read about it. For maximum impact, you have to put your values into action. Let them see how you work and they will follow. Create a lively environment where you can live by your brand values. Empower those who work with you so that they can embody your brand culture.

Clear roles and accountability – businesses who have established a strong culture recognize how important their team members or employees are. They are part of why a business is growing. As a leader, you have to recognize their talents. This will serve as another way to inspire them. Give them clear roles and let them know what is expected from them and what they are accountable for. By empowering them like this, they will understand how important their work is and start living the brand’s values. When you are hiring, you can also look for people who already share your interests and have an understanding of what you are doing for you business. This will make it easy to establish a culture.

Acknowledge success and failure – every business faces challenges and whether you get through that or not, you are left with a lesson. Remember to celebrate your business’s success even if it’s a small thing. Give credit to those who helped you reach that goal as a way of letting them know that their efforts are valued. If you take care of your people, they too will take care of you no matter what happens to your brand, even when you suffer a bump along the road.

Brand culture is important because it is what separates you from the others. If you have a well established culture, it is harder for you to completely lose balance in the business world. It’s never too late to start defining who you are as a brand. You can start discovering and establishing your culture from within.

4 Ways to Integrate Brand and Culture

Integrating brands and culture is about knowing market trends and how to create and recreate our products and services to make sure that they will stick with consumers.   

Brand and culture was a focus of a recent #brandchat discussion.  Think about how our products and services can help consumers; turn the want into a need. It’s not easy but there are ways now to easily get feedback from consumers to help improve business. Creativity and innovation to integrate brand and culture will help your business compete in the tough market. The market is always evolving and consumers jump from one new thing to another, but if we can establish our brand with culture, make it consistent, then consumers will have something they will never forget.

Here are four ways on how integrate brand and culture:

Become an icon – this is not easy but if you dream big, you will set business goals to reach that dream. A product becomes iconic when people start talking about it and spreading it to others. You have to find ways you can create and invest in establishing a culture around your brand. Make sure that everyone in your company lives up to your mission and vision because they represent your brand. If they do a great job in providing customer service, customers will have a memorable experience and will surely come back for more. Same with your products and services, if they feel that you truly live up to your ads, they will have a brand that they can trust and will come back again. In integrating brand and culture, make your employees happy and they will be happy to serve everyone too.

Work on your niche – If you find your brand’s niche, work on that. If you work on your brand consistently, people will start talking about it until it becomes a cultural figure. If you can tap into the emotions of your customers, they will not forget it. Take Apple products; they are now the leading makers of cool gadgets. That’s right, cool gadgets. And their products are not just physically designed to be cool, they are built to process and make computing really convenient. They have iPods, iPhones and iPads. A lot of critics say that these are just toys, but Apple is proving them wrong because a lot of professionals are taking iPads to Boardrooms, the office, and everywhere else, especially iPhones.

Create something that is culturally influential – one way to make your brand culturally influential is to know what your consumers want. If you can create something that has everything they want in it, and then a few extras, the want becomes a need. Your advertising should be aligned with the quality of your products. Once consumers can trust your brand, they will be loyal and spread the word to others. Take RIM’s Blackberry vs. the iPhone. Blackberry started the smartphone craze and everyone doing business has to have  one. Blackberry lets you do emails on the go, Internet when you need it, everything to make a businessperson’s work easier. Now Apple tapped into that with the iPhone, a touchscreen smartphone. It’s not just for business either because there are so many apps you can use, depending on your needs. A lot of people are making the switch because they can do more with an iPhone.

Create a strong branding campaign – this point might mean more money for marketing, but there are tools now that will help you get your brand out. Create a marketing strategy on the Internet, make use of social media sites to attract and interact with your target customers. Through these sites, you can post images, videos, and stories that are related to your brand, something you can use to make an impression. Ford has a blog site that accepts stories from their customers about how a Ford product helped them or inspired them. These stories get published in the site, no marketing whatsoever. But the site gets around and so does the brand.

What do you think? Perhaps you’re a BRANDido (people who chat on #brandchat weekly) even if you’ve never chatted with us on the chat – chime in here!