Over the course of the past years I have been in contact in one or the other way with many small businesses. The most impactful and hands-on experience was when I was responsible for the restructuring of a company in the Swiss educational sector. The core team was only around 5-8 people, but we had almost 50 lecturers and over 250 students at peak times. I was basically thrown into the position with little to no prior experience of leading a company, particularly not during a high stress situation. Within only one year we were able to double revenue, increase customer satisfaction to an industry wide benchmark, do a rebranding with a new website and marketing collaterals, automations, and much more. In the first half year I worked easily 6 days a week and in average around 12-13 hours a day. I was used to heavy work hours from my time in strategy consulting, but not on 6 days in a row. While this time was super stressful, it was also very rewarding to see the transformation first hand – the slides from my analysis weren’t kept under the table, but I could test first hand what works and what not. The learnings from that time, as well as my learnings from the past years at Wellevate form the basis of my top learnings for small business when it comes to brand identity development.
No external and internal analysis prior to developing the brand
This is where my consulting mindset comes in – whatever decision you take when it comes to your brand identity, you must do the basics beforehand. Your brand should be the answer to your overall company and commercial strategy, which again is determined by the external environment (the market you are in and the competition you face) and your internal strengths and weaknesses. In the example that I shared before, I did a proper analysis of the customer’s preferences, a trend and competitive analysis, as well as investigated the internal strengths and weaknesses. I realized through this work that in order to be successful we need a brand that attracts our main audience (young adults, predominantly females), we need a strong web presence including automated processes to ease the customer experience (e.g., buying process) and reduce our internal work load. I also came to understand what the weak spots of our competition are, namely the study material that was not comprehensive and professional, as well as the lecturers that were found to be not knowledgeable enough. Last but not least our analysis showed the potential that we had if we were successful in creating a brand that could be remembered and get former students to continue their educational journey with us. So our strategy was to differentiate ourselves with quality (which was the contrary to what we had at that time) and innovation, to also be able to legitimate higher prices. Our rebranding kept the name, but worked with strong and bright rgb colors that were intended to catch the attention of the younger audience that we were attracting. For our bestseller course we chose a pink / purple color to cater for the rather female
audience that we were expecting. We did a photoshoot with our staff to use professionally done pictures instead of iPhone camera photos to illustrate the quality that we aim to pursue. We built an API to our internal ERP system and were able to offer an end-to-end customer flow from having interest to subscribing to the course and receiving the invoices automatically. We redid all of our course material with our new branding to offer our students an end-to-end brand experience, from the initial website visit to the day-to-day courses – they would always see the brand, logo and colors. That again would help us to be seen as high quality service provider and increase the brand awareness and stickiness. It should become very hard to forget the school you attended.
While the rebrand caused some irritations with our elder staff and lecturers, the young people started to sign up in amounts we haven’t seen in years. The rebranding had exactly the effect that we intended. However, that was only possible with a proper analysis beforehand – and no, I don’t mean asking the CEO what he thinks, but have someone or an external consultant investigate your target audience, trends and competition to build the basis for your strategy, which is the basis for your brand.
Different agencies for different stages of the brand identity development
In real estate everybody knows it – you need to have that one company or person that takes responsibility for the project as a whole. Someone that coordinates with all the different construction companies and makes sure they keep the overall plan in mind, use the agreed approach and guidelines. It is exactly the same for a brand identity development – someone needs to do it. While in big companies you have whole marketing teams that can cater for such projects, smaller business often to the mistake and start to work with various external freelancers and agencies on different parts of the branding. Who coordinates them in the end? Not the CEO, not the marketing responsible as this position is either not existing at all or the person is occupied with day-to-day operational work. What you end with is either a very lengthy process (the rebrand being outdated once it goes live) or a chaotic output. These agencies and freelancers typically deprioritize the coordination with other stakeholders as they know it is typically unpaid and very burdensome. What small businesses need is an external partner that can cater the whole project end-to-end and relief the management from the time-consuming coordination and project management work.
There are of course many more mistakes that small businesses might be doing during a branding project, but I thought these two are kind of the no-go’s that one could start with. If you manage to avoid these two, you have a solid basis for success.
