Your brand is your business.

Your relationship with your customers begins and ends with your brand. Your brand is the personal relationship your customers have with your company, product, service or cause, based on trust that’s built through consistently fantastic, completely predictable experiences with you on every level, at all of your touch points. Indeed, brand is one of the three pillars of your company’s overall strategy, the other two being finance and operations. Brand is that important. In fact, your company may not survive if any of these pillars – brand, finance or operations – is weak for an extended length of time.

The strongest brand always wins.
Take two identical, competing products, and the one with the best-executed brand will always win. Take two other competing products, and even the less feature-rich product can win if its brand is stronger; that is, customers have a better experience using it and interacting with your company than with the other company.

Share the love.
The strongest brand is the one that people love. If you can get people to fall in love with your brand, you’ll enjoy the most fulfilling relationship you can have with your customer, and vice versa. You can count on a committed relationship for as long as you deliver a consistent brand. Building your brand is really building a personal connection with your customers.

Your brand is two things at its core.

  1. What you provide – your product or service, what it does, how it provides satisfaction or pleasure, and most importantly, how it solves a problem or pain point. Plus, how it is different (and truly better in some way) than similar products.
  2. Who you are – your company’s personality. Yes, companies, just like people, have personalities! Many companies simply choose to behave as if they have no personality. They’re the boring wallflowers in the corner that nobody is excited to engage with. Conversely, some companies, such as Apple, Southwest Airlines, Starbucks, Mini (the car), Geico, to name a few, have audacious, outrageous and endearing personalities – the kind people fall in love with. Have the most likable personality and you’ll have the strongest brand. And remember, the strongest brand always wins.