The Essence of your Brand is at the Heart of your Future Success

Does your sales, marketing and recruitment content focus on the following?

• What you do
• How you do it
• How much it costs

If it does you’re missing the point and probably attracting the wrong staff and customers.

Although ultimately your customers are buying your products or services, in order to make that buying decision they usually want to know more.  The ‘more’ is an unconscious feeling or perceived  sense that they like you, trust you and want to do business with you.  The ‘more’ is what I call your brand essence and is predominantly about your WHY and your WHO – in other words your purpose and your people.

The same goes for your staff from board-level across the company.  If they don’t know, understand and agree with your purpose, ethos and values and feel a part of your success how can you expect them to put 100% into working for you, be flexible and go the extra mile?

My belief is that the Why (the purpose) in combination with the Who (the identity, values and characteristics that drive the purpose forwards and determine the style of operation) need to be at the centre of everything a company does – starting with recruitment.   In a company that adopts this approach, all members of staff feel a sense of belonging and ownership of the purpose and genuinely want it to succeed.

I was recently interviewing the CEO of a 3rd sector organisation that has enjoyed increased turnover of 20% year on year under his leadership from less than £500,000 to over £7 million per annum.  I took the opportunity to present to him to my hypothesis that the Essence of the Brand is at the heart of any business’s ongoing success.

His  response was that my hypothesis is absolutely right…

“We need to communicate very early on why we do what we do, and then how we do it.   It is absolutely critical that we get the right people on board who share our culture”

In order to achieve this, the organisation’s purpose and values are embedded into their recruitment process and they operate a 3-day interview process to try and ensure that new recruits are a good fit.  The results speak for themselves.

So the Essence of the Brand is about peoples perceptions and feelings, yet if you don’t take the time to articulate and communicate them in marketing and recruitment material, you attract the wrong staff who don’t fit and won’t go the extra mile for you, and you attract the wrong customers who don’t align with your values and will be much less likely to be loyal.

Take the time to discover, articulate and communicate the Essence of your Brand, then make the resulting mission and values the foundation of everything else you do. When combined with effective business strategy and processes you give yourself and your people the best chance of genuine ongoing success.