Build your brand in nine steps: Business Murray Bridge members hear from guru

Murraylands business owners and managers have taken a few pointers from Crisp and Co’s Richard Miller.

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Richard Miller speaks at Business Murray Bridge’s May breakfast. Photo: Peri Strathearn.

To succeed in business, your customers need to know who you are long before they ever think about making a purchase.

You need to build a relationship with them – to establish your brand.

So said marketing guru Richard Miller at a breakfast with Business Murray Bridge members at the Bridgeport Hotel last week.

Branding was not about logos and tag lines, he emphasised, but about a business’ purpose and the ways it could benefit its customers.

“Brand is about how you make people feel,” he said.

“People buy with their hearts, not their heads.”

How do you develop a brand?

He suggested a nine-step process:

1. Insight: Why do you exist? What’s your origin story?

2. Mission: What do you want to do for your customers?

3. Vision: What’s the future you’re striving for, and how will you get there?

4. Pillars: What are the values on which you won’t compromise: convenience, low price, quality, independence, something else?

5. Promise: What do people depend on your company, and yours alone, to deliver?

6. Targets: Who are the people you want to reach? Think about location, buying power, demographics, incomes and behaviour, and be specific. Where are they on the journey from not knowing your company, to knowing it, to respecting it, to loving it?

7. Personality: If your business were a person, what characteristics would it have? Your target market should be able to relate to that person.

8. Pitch: Can you shrink all the above points into a 30-second spiel about the problem you solve, the unique way you solve it and the product or service you offer? Can you do it in a way that invites people to ask more about you?

9. Tag line: Can you boil it down to just a few words?

Once you had the fundamentals right, Mr Miller advised, then you were ready to think about the categories of people you needed to reach, how to reach them and what to say to them.

If you worked out how much money you could make from each category of customer, you would have an idea of how much to spend marketing to them – then you would have the outline of a marketing plan.

“That investment, in dollars and time, will save you a fortune down the track,” Mr Miller said.

• More information about the nine-step brand builder: crispand.co/#9steps.

• More information about Business Murray Bridge: Visit www.businessmb.com.au or search for Business Murray Bridge on Facebook.