(Author’s Note: This is the first in a series of five articles dealing with the essential elements of marketing in a family-owned business. Some readers might prefer an altered sequence in presenting the Five Pillars, but it is hoped that all readers would agree on the Pillars themselves.)

A family-owned business can promote its brand’s tangible attributes, such as low prices, ingredients or assorted flavors, or its intangible attributes, such as image and benefits. The interplay is complex, but statistical techniques can help you key in on the appeal of each attribute, as well as reveal misconceptions about those attributes that actually lead your customers away from a “buy” decision.

Brand attributes can be categorized both as features and benefits. Those valued as distinctive—but that buyers consider irrelevant—represent the common mistakes of branding. Every brand has attributes, or features. They are essential to making clients consider making a positive commitment to you.

But even more important than features are benefits. It is the benefits that answer the question, “Why do business with you?” Until that question is fully answered in the mind of the customer, a commitment remains uncertain at best. The sum total of both well-communicated features and benefits creates your brand’s message. And a strong brand message will make a major contribution to your business success.

Features and Attributes

Let’s examine the world of brand attributes, features and benefits.

Features serve as the basis for getting into the branding game. Those worth investing in and promoting can differentiate a product from competitors and drive purchasing decisions. A brand is built on the reality of your product, service or software application. It starts with features. There are four types.

1. Features that clients value, but which are provided by all competitors at essentially the same level.
2. Features that are important to clients and highly differentiated from those of your competitors.
3. “Neutral” features that are not critical to the client’s decision.
4. There is the group of features that can fool you: ones that are distinctive, but don’t mean anything to customers and don’t help establish their loyalty to your brand.

Branding

To some, branding is the most esoteric of marketing strategies. For many, it is the hardest of the five pillars of marketing to grasp. Branding is more about the benefits—fulfilling the intangible emotional promises of quality, service, performance, utility and value to the client than about a logo, slogan or color scheme.

A family-owned business must clearly articulate their commitment to the customer—the promise that all of their business practices, services and messages (indeed, everything the firm says and does) will meet customer expectations for benefits as communicated by the brand.

Brand development focuses on finding the essence of your family-owned business, what you stand for, and creating a foundation for building on it. Brand messages can be planned or unplanned. Your brand is developed through the application of the following process:

• Determine the prospective customer’s current wants, needs, perceptions and emotional triggers.
• Determine how clients and prospects learn about your services and those of your competitors.
• Establish performance and sales targets.
• Communicate consistently and effectively to build your brand.

Here is how it might work.

Let’s say a software firm wants to add new customers. First, they would need to understand why and how clients buy, as well as the customers’ perceptions of the brand. Research can uncover the reasons. It can be as simple as asking your existing customers why they decided to do business with you.

Advertising, public relations, direct mail and collateral material should be developed to reinforce the powerful brand message uncovered by the research.

The company website can be redesigned to capture the brand message. SEO can be employed to make it easier for prospects to find you on the internet. Use social media to get your story out and energize the market you seek.

Internal communications programs should be put in place to educate all employees, contract workers and suppliers about what the customers perceive the brand message to be and what the strongest portions of the customer’s experience was.

As a result, you can expect that your organization will move toward a customer-centered approach to your marketplace, one based on those attributes that will most likely encourage broad and strong relationships. As a family-owned business, you can emphasize those attributes throughout your company.

This process also can uncover messages that you are sending to your clients and prospects that are inaccurate or do not reflect how you want to be perceived in the marketplace. In such an event, you will need to work to establish the message that you want communicated and make sure that your organization reflects the truth of that message.

Remember, every business is critiqued by the marketplace. You either have the image you desire and work to achieve, or you have the one that your competitors attribute to you. The correct branding will establish the image you wish for your family-owned business. It can provide a compelling answer when customers ask, “Why do business with you?”

“The customer is king” must be more than a cliché in your organization. You just cannot forget this important adage at your brand’s expense. Everyone who touches your customer—and that includes telephone operators, technicians and accounting department staff—needs to understand that excellent customer service is critical in satisfying and keeping your client loyal and in building your brand in the marketplace.

All of your employees should be concerned with building and protecting your brand. Consistency is the key to successfully building and managing your brand. Having a long-term outlook and projecting a consistent image of your brand to your customers will maximize the results of brand-building.

Remember, building your brand is a continual process with long-term operating implications. You must “be” your brand. You must deliver on your brand’s promise.

In 1988, Graham Phillips, chairman of Ogilvy and Mather Worldwide, said, “I doubt that many would welcome a commodity marketplace in which one competed solely on price, promotion and trade deals, all of which can be easily duplicated by competition. This would lead to ever decreasing profits, decay, and eventual bankruptcy. About the only aspect of the marketing mix that cannot be duplicated is a strong brand.”

His wisdom remains true today. The quote clearly demonstrates the importance of investing in your brand to establish and maintain it. Many people may think that building and maintaining a brand is solely the responsibility of one or two people in your organization, or the work of your advertising agency, but it is actually a cross-functional effort. All employees, including the family, should contribute in a successful brand-building initiative because they best understand the virtues of your brand. Your task is to establish your brand and then get them to communicate the brand constantly and consistently.