Why Brand Recognition Matters for Social Enterprise

Here's a quick snapshot of how brand awareness impacts the different audiences for Social Enterprises, NGOs and Non-Profits.


If you ever wondered why your organisation should be devoting time to building mass recognition, this should clue you in.





* HNWI = High Net-Worth Individuals (Philanthropists, Investors)

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Why Social Enterprises Need Strong Brands

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Here's the jist of it...

A brand is what your audience feels , thinks , and remembers about your enterprise.

Brand used to be ‘ offline ’ and ‘ online ’ Now it is seamless , and primarily driven by how you are perceived via the web.

And now that organisations can create their own profiles , brands can effectively function as ‘ people ’ i.e. In the interactive web 2.0 world, your brand has a personality.

So… Brand used to just be about image, but now its about image AND personality!

Before the web, niche brands could only engage niche audiences. They relied on costly traditional PR and push marketing, which meant that their audiences were tiny and their budgets high. Now niche brands can engage mass audiences at low cost.

Social organisations sit in a niche that typically does not sell product. They are competing for attention. And when you're competing for attention, your competition is everything. You have to stand out to be noticed.

A strong brand is a core factor in being noticed, and therefore heard, which is why it critical for social organisations to get their branding right.

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Dummies Guide to Startups: Bridging the gap between Brand and Strategy

The reason I'm sharing so much on brand is because today brand is key. You could be the most unique start-up and the first to do something, but if your brand experience isn't right, you leave massive scope for someone else to come along, do the same thing as you and walk away with your market because their branding is more compelling and memorable. Unfortunately social impact organisations regularly miss this point as you can see from this other post of mine on how social organisations get their branding wrong. 

Anyway here's a really interesting presentation on bridging the gap between your brand and your strategy.

The Brand Gap from coolstuff

In summary here's what it says about what a brand is

• It's not a logo, entity or product
• It's your audience's gut feeling about your organisation, product or service
• In other words it's not what you say it is, but what they say it is

The presentation then highlights the 5 disciplines of brand building:

1. Differentiate: Focus
2. Collaborate: 1+1=11
3. Innovate: Zig when others Zag
4. Validate: Use focus groups plus cheap, dirty, quick tests. If your audience can't verbalise your concept then you've failed to communicate it.
5. Cultivate: Develop and influence the character and not just look and feel of the brand

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Dummies Guide to Startups: 5 Steps of Brand Building

There are 5 key steps to understanding and building your brand

1. Situational Report: A situational analysis is designed to take a snapshot of where things stand at the time you're developing your brand. An easy way to outline and create this is through what's called a "4C Analysis" - Company, Customer, Competitor and Channel.
2. Positioning Statement: A Positioning Statement is a one to two sentence statement that conveys what you do for whom, and why. It is useful as it requires you to identify, and then briefly articulate your distinct value to your customer in relation to your competitors.
3. Growth Vector Analysis: This describes product alternatives in relation to market options and is one of several means to classify strategic alternatives. Basically a growth vector matrix contains three market options and three product alternatives so that there are nine different combinations or vectors in all.
4. Growth Driver Analysis: Checks whether assumed growth in your market is a reality or just an illusion. It should also help identify if and how you can influence growth in your market.
5. Action Plan: This is your short and long term plan for developing your brand, based on outputs from the various analyses you've completed.

The vector and driver analyses are a bit more complicated than the others, so my advice is give them a thought but focus on getting the situational analysis, positioning statements and action plans right. Searching on Google will provide you with lots more detail on all these, but I'll put up some more bullets on each as we go along.

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Dummies Guide to Startups: 5 Key Components of Branding

There are basically 5 key areas you need to know about and count for when creating your brand

1. Brand building and re-evaluation: The title is self-explanatory and the process essentially consists of a Situational Report, Positioning Statement, Growth Analysis and an Action Plan
2. Brand tracking: This is about going through a process to understand out what key customers think of your brand
3. Designing Value: What you need to know to ensure that your brand increases the value of your enterprise
4. Messaging: What do you want to say, with what, and to whom
5. E-Marketing: Marketing to your customers/subscribers/members online

We'll take these different aspects apart in more detail as we progress, starting with brand building next week. Meantime if you urgently need more information on this just drop me a line.

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Dummies Guide to Startups: Brand, Design and Usability

Here's a really good Google presentation on "How To Design For Branding" that I thought was worth sharing as we talk more about creating a brand online.

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Dummies Guide to Startups - Online Branding

An Introduction

I've recently had some really kind offers of help with designing logos, so this is probably a good time to start sharing the basics around brand building...

The success of any branding or marketing strategy is primarily down to exploiting the medium to your advantage. The net has transformed the nature of communication. With a multitude of options just a click away, branding needs to be designed to capture those 'sticky eyeballs' and focus them on your product or service.

As with offline marketing strategies around positioning, brand building and target marketing also apply to the virtual market place. Anyone extending products and services to the virtual world must adopt a branding strategy that will synchronise with any existing or future terrestrial banding. This is not only to ensure higher brand equity, but also to achieve the necessary differentiation of products and services.

The key however, is to think differently and not simply replicate terrestrial branding models. The online audience is different and interactive, and has greater choice coupled with a lower threshold of patience. Online branding is therefore about an experience rather than the traditional one-way bombardment of messages.

Offline, branding is about crafting careful visual and textual images that potential buyers passively consume. Branding on the Web is entirely different, because it needs to be active and not simply about associating a colour, phrase or character with a service. Everything you do online becomes part of the brand building experience, with people forming an image of brand based on their experience and the messages they perceive.

The point to note is that a brand will acquire an identity through association and interaction, whether it is proactively planned or not; so it makes sense to develop branding strategies that allow you take control of this process.

The next few posts in this series will walk through the basics you need to know to build your brand. I'll try and update these at least once a week. Probably every Thursday, so hey now you have a reason to come back! If you have any questions, leave a comment and I'll do my best to answer it.

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