“Brand equity assets such as name awareness, perceived quality, associations, and loyalty all have the potential to provide a brand with a price premium. The resulting extra revenue can be used (for example) to enhance profits, or to reinvest in building more equity.” Managing Brand Equity by David A. Aaker
One of the challenges I have noticed over the last several years of working with all types of organizations is the challenge of communicating and leveraging our value. Most organizations are doing really good work and producing pretty good results. Most of the organizations also have great hearts and great desires to do good work and provide excellent customer experiences and value with very high quality. Sounds amazing, right? What we are missing is the process to let the world know how amazing we are.
Early in my career, I had a chance to work for an amazing company in Atlanta. John Wieland Homes and Neighborhoods. John Wieland was a man ahead of his time. When some of the great business books were just being written, John Wieland was already way down the road of great culture, great customer service, great warranty, great product and great customer experiences. In creating these amazing results our branding and advertising created a high demand for one of our homes in one of our neighborhoods. It also created the opportunity to improve profits by asking more for our homes than our competitors because we felt we were better. John Wieland did a great job with our brand and leveraging that brand to draw more traffic and more sales at higher prices.
There is a huge opportunity in the market place today to leverage why we are better. We need to create websites, social media, email blasts and advertising messages that show why we are different. That show what we do is different. To show how we do it is different. And that all of these things create an bigger interest in wanting to find out more. Maybe even purchase from us. It should never be just about price. There is more to our product or service. There is more to our experience. There is more for you as our customer than just price. We need our future customers to understand why we are so amazing and why they should pick us!
If you are not on this journey of leveraging yourselves yet, today is a great day to start. Grab a quick meeting with the team and unpack what makes us better. What makes us different. Why they should pick us. Maybe send out some surveys of past happy customers and find out why they loved us. Then take that information and start telling the world. Don’t forget to remind them to hurry or they might miss out!