How do you stand out in your market place and grow your business?

Our Cog:ent meeting on 10 April 2014, explored this topic. The themes discussed are captured below.

High growth businesses focus on their customers and have brands with a reputation of consistently delivering better value than their competitors. Facts that are proven time and again by the clever minds of academics everywhere. The case for investing in your brand is a strong one, but brand is more than just a logo or a new lick of paint. Brand is everything you stand for and say. It is everything that you do and are as a business. It is your customer’s experience of your culture.

How do you create a great brand?

Well according to Steve Edge, our special guest for the day, it’s about balls! That is, finding the one ball that makes you really stand out and then building upon it to the nth degree. Call it purpose, call it value proposition, call it whatever you want, but this is about the special relationships that exist between the real passion of the business, the gap in the marketplace and the emotional needs and wants of the customer.

What is your one ball?

• For Lidl it is about giving people the simple pleasure of finding a bargain
• For Apple it is about bringing consumers beautiful products that are a delight to use
• For Cog:ent it is about simple business truths, borne of real world experiences, delivering long-term benefits

However, answering the question is harder than you might think. It requires the right blend of pull (listening to what customers, staff, suppliers, competitors say about you) and push (clearly, concisely and consistently communicating your core brand message). It is very much a dance. For most, the scariest part of this is the fear that what customers might say and is very different you might hope! But isn’t that the point of branding? What hope do you have of doing this if you are too afraid to ask? In exploring this point further, we all concluded that we are not as customer focused as we might like to think!

So, once you’ve discovered your one ball, what do you do next?

Well, you do everything you can to keep that ball in the air. By constantly assessing and monitoring how well you are doing in the eyes of the customer across all aspects of your business. Simple!

Well, perhaps not!

Because like most things in your business, your brand is delivered by your people, who live and breathe in the culture of your business. When you are an ambitious business owner focused on growing your business it is hard to pay attention to the people and cultural aspects of your business. Yet the high growth ones make that time and continually demonstrate that if you can align your culture and brand, your competitors will find it hard to match you in the long-run!

So how are you, through your people, going to create the brand that you want?

We suggest that you start by:

• reading the slides from the workshop and our previous blog on the theme
• completing the high growth mindset diagnostic
• contacting us if you want an objective and combined assessment of your culture and brand

Our next Cog:ent meeting themed ‘building an agile and resilient business’ and takes place on 10 July 2014. If you are interested in finding out more about the theme, Cog:ent or how Telos Partners can help you to grow your business, please email acampbell@telospartners.com.

Telos Partners, has teamed together with Chantrey Vellacott DFK, Pitmans Solicitors and HSBC Bank to develop and run a series of practical, thought leadership workshops on how ambitious business owners build a successful and sustainable business against the background of a difficult economic climate.