Chapter 17
Scaling Your Brand Identity
IN THIS CHAPTER
Scoping out your scaling options
Auditing your brand to see how it’s performing
Developing a plan to increase brand reach and awareness
Scaling up production while maintaining quality standards
Beefing up your staff so you can focus on higher-level tasks
You built a successful brand. Congratulations! Now what?
You can rest on your laurels and let your brand continue to generate revenue, or you can scale it up to make it even more successful. If you just let it be, sales and revenue could increase on their own, but it’s just as likely — if not more likely — that sales and revenue will plateau, taper off, and eventually decline to a point at which the brand could be declared dead. Like most things in life, a brand that isn’t growing is dying.
Consider Amazon. Jeff Bezos started it as an online bookstore and built it into the number-one online retailer in the world. (Walmart is bigger, but it’s a hybrid online/bricks-and-mortar retailer.) Did Bezos rest on his laurels? Did he settle for being a hugely successful online retailer? Heck, no! He continued to expand — into groceries, streaming audio and video, movies and television series, book publishing, cloud computing services, and more. He’s even dabbling in outer-space tourism.
When he was starting out, Bezos was no different from any other entrepreneur; he had a vision, some management skills, and access to capital. What he did, you can do too — maybe not on such a grand scale, but you can scale your brand up and out to increase its reach and its impact. In this chapter, I offer some guidance on how to do just that.
Surveying Different Approaches to Scaling a Brand
Scaling a brand simply means growing it, and you can scale your brand in a variety of ways:
- Ramp up your marketing efforts. Do more of what you’re already doing: building community on social media, advertising, blogging, podcasting, pursuing promising partnerships … everything I discuss in earlier chapters.
- Set up an affiliate program. Recruit people to sell your products or services, and pay them a small commission. An affiliate program is a great way to build a sales force without having to go through the formalities of hiring and managing a dedicated sales team.
- Pursue new market segments. Throughout this book, I encourage you to focus on specific markets for maximum impact. Well, now may be the time to add some new market segments to the mix.
- Add new products or services. Expand your product/service line to offer customers more. Just make sure that the products and services you add are consistent with your brand.
- Expand into other businesses or industries. Follow the lead of Amazon and Virgin by adding new business units. You may not have the bandwidth to start your own airline or music streaming business, but you can branch out into different product or service categories.
Don’t lose focus. I recommend ramping up your marketing efforts to promote what you already have in place before branching out into new product lines, businesses, or industries.
Conducting a Brand Audit
Before you invest one iota of effort in scaling your brand, conduct an audit to evaluate your brand’s current condition and determine whether it’s performing up to your expectations. Scaling a brand makes no sense if it’s not already headed in the right direction; you’ll just end up going farther in the wrong direction.
A brand audit provides insight into whether your brand’s image (in the minds of customers) aligns with the brand identity you envisioned and how well your brand is performing in the market compared with its competitors and your expectations.
Recognizing the benefits of a brand audit
Conducting a brand audit offers the following benefits:
- Enables you to gauge your brand’s performance
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Reveals any disparity between what customers think and feel about your brand and what you want them to think and feel
Disparity isn’t necessarily bad. It could reveal something about your target market that you overlooked. When you encounter a disparity between what customers think and feel and what you want them to think and feel, ask yourself, “Is that a bad thing or a good thing?” These thoughts and feelings may be things you want to nurture to your brand’s advantage. - Uncovers any inconsistencies in how your brand guidelines are being practiced across your organization (See Chapter 6 for more about brand guidelines.)
- Highlights your brand’s strengths and weaknesses, along with possible improvements you can make to strengthen your brand
- Identifies any emerging threats and opportunities
Auditing your brand
Take the following steps to conduct your brand audit:
- Identify the areas of focus for your brand audit, such as the following:
- Your branding goals (see Chapter 4) and whether you’re on track to meet those goals
- The alignment of what your customers think and feel about your brand with what you want them to think and feel
- Threats to your brand posed by competitors, changes in legislation or regulations, or other marketplace challenges
- Threats to your brand internally from people who aren’t following your brand guidelines or from a toxic work environment that’s reflecting poorly on your brand
- The people you’re serving and their needs, desires, and values, which can change over time, creating a disconnect between your brand and the people you’re trying to reach
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Survey your customers and prospective customers to find out what they think and how they feel about your brand.
Ask questions such as the following:
- What words would you use to describe our brand?
- How does our brand compare with competing brands?
- If you were searching online for a brand like ours, what keywords would you use in your search?
- What could we do to improve our brand?
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Survey suppliers, vendors, and any employees to find out what they think and how they feel about your brand.
Ask questions such as the following:
- How would you describe our business culture?
- What could we do to improve the way we do business?
- Do we practice what we preach? or Do our business practices align with our stated mission and values? If not, please describe the misalignment.
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Review your branding guidelines (see Chapter 6).
Identify anything that needs to be changed to achieve better alignment between what people think and feel about your brand and what you want them to think and feel about it.
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Review your website, blog, webstore, and other online properties.
Determine whether what you’re doing online is strengthening or weakening your brand, and highlight any areas that need improvement.
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Review your marketing campaigns, paid advertising, and email marketing.
Determine whether they’re strengthening or weakening your brand and highlight any areas that need improvement.
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Examine your market closely.
Your aim is to spot potential threats from competitors, regulations, emerging technologies, and anything else that might disrupt your supply chain or other business operations.
- Examine your market closely for potential opportunities that would be a good fit for your brand.
Although branding is about consistency, your brand audit is about alignment. You’re looking for inconsistencies that cause misalignment between what you’re doing and what you’re trying to accomplish in terms of strengthening your brand.
Before you start to invest time and effort in scaling your brand, address any issues that your audit reveals.
Creating a Scaling Plan
Scaling a brand is like starting one, in that planning helps ensure success. Every scaling plan is a little different, depending on the nature of the industry, business, and brand and on how you’re planning to scale — such as by increasing your marketing efforts or adding a new business to your brand. In most cases, a scaling plan should cover the following areas:
- Strategy: Your strategy is how you’ve decided to scale the brand. Refer to “Surveying Different Approaches to Scaling a Brand” earlier in this chapter.
- Goal: your branding goal (what you hope to accomplish by scaling your brand) and how it aligns with your overall branding goals. (See Chapter 4.)
- Management: Decide who’s going to lead the scaling initiative. The person who starts a business often isn’t the best candidate to grow the business. If you’re currently in charge, be honest: Are you the best person for the job? If you’re great at innovation and starting things but not so good at following through, you may want to hire or partner with someone who’s better at managing a growing business.
- Documented procedures and policies: Small-business owners often run their businesses without formal, documented procedures and policies in place. Everyone involved just knows what to do or learns through on-the-job training. That approach doesn’t work for larger operations. Any scaling plan should include the development of documented procedures and policies so that the business can essentially run itself, without the direct involvement of executive leadership.
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Capital: Small-business owners often finance their own operations, but a growing business often needs capital in the form of grants, debt, or equity:
- Grants are free money from government agencies, corporations, people, or not-for-profit organizations that believe in or stand to benefit in some way from what another organization is doing. What’s great about grants is that you don’t have to pay them back or give up any control of your business.
- Debt financing involves borrowing money, usually from a bank, but also potentially from private lenders.
- Equity financing involves selling a stake in the business, such as selling shares of stock to investors.
See Chapter 2 for more about finding capital to build or grow a brand.
- New technologies: A new technology can be the driving force behind a business expansion. It may enable you to create better products or lower their cost, improve or automate customer service, or deliver new products or services to the market.
As many successful entrepreneurs advise, “Failing to plan is planning to fail.” Growth doesn’t always lead to success. If scaling isn’t planned and managed properly, it can destroy a previously successful company, usually due to cash-flow problems (more cash flowing out than in).
Setting milestones
With plan in hand, establish milestones for all your objectives — everything you need to accomplish to scale your brand, including hiring, documenting procedures and policies, securing financing, and integrating new technologies or methodologies. Milestones enable you to break down large, complex projects into manageable tasks, and they keep you and your team on track and accountable for progress.
Set a milestone for each step of every objective you must meet, along with a brief description of what must be accomplished (the deliverable) by the specified date. If you’re going to hire an assistant to reduce your workload, for example, specify the dates on which you’ll start and end the recruiting process, the date by which you’ll select candidates to interview, the date by which you’ll choose a candidate, and the date by which the person you choose will be in place.
Sourcing products at larger quantities without sacrificing quality
If you’re scaling a product brand, one of the biggest hurdles involves increasing production without sacrificing quality or taking a big hit on your profit margin.
If you outsource production to a manufacturer or obtain products from suppliers (who buy them from manufacturers and sell them to you), the first order of business is contacting your manufacturer or supplier to discuss your plans to scale and find out whether they can deliver the quantities you need. In other words, find out whether they can scale along with you.
You and your manufacturer/supplier have, or should have, a mutually beneficial relationship; their sales and revenue growth is directly dependent on yours. They should be happy and eager to scale along with you. If they’re not, you may need to find a new partner or another one to pick up the slack.
You can find manufacturers and suppliers by searching the web for the name or a description of the product followed by “manufacturer” or “supplier.” Alibaba (https://www.alibaba.com) can connect you with suppliers in China, and other online directories are available to aid you in your search (both in the United States and internationally), including the following:
- Maker’s Row (
https://makersrow.com) - Kompass (
https://www.kompass.com) - IndiaMART (
https://www.indiamart.com) - Sourcify (
https://www.sourcify.com)
As you contact suppliers, gather the following information:
- Whether they can manufacture/supply the product you need in the quantities you need to your specifications
- Lead times (when you can expect to receive products after placing an order)
- Cost per unit
- Any discounts for bulk orders (and what constitutes a bulk order)
- Shipping costs
- Minimum order quantities
- Intellectual-property protections (if the supplier will be manufacturing a product that you invented)
- Setup fees
- Defect/return policy
- Reputation and reliability (check references and sample products)
If you manufacture your products yourself, figure out what you need to ramp up production, such as
- Additional materials and supplies
- Technology or machinery that saves time and effort
- A bigger space
- Hiring personnel or outsourcing work to freelancers (see the later section “Outsourcing Responsibilities to Lighten Your Load”)
Scaling a service brand
If yours is a service brand, you basically have two ways to scale: get more clients or provide more service to existing clients. If you’re a one-person business (you are the business), scaling up is especially challenging, because you need to increase efficiency to have the time and other resources to fuel your growth. Here are a few suggestions for scaling a service brand:
- Focus on increasing efficiencies first. Analyze all your business processes with an eye toward maximizing efficiency.
- Examine your existing client pool with an eye toward serving them better. Can you improve existing services to do a better job of meeting your clients’ needs? Can you offer any additional services to expand your business by meeting more of their needs?
- Examine your best clients to find out who they are, which channels they came from, and what they value most about you. This information gives you insight into where to find more best clients and how to pitch to them most effectively.
- Delegate and deputize. Ask yourself whether you’re working in your business or on it. If you’re working in it (doing everything), you’re not a business owner; you’re an employee. You want to create a business that can run on its own, without you, so that you can use your time and resources to improve and grow the business. Your ultimate goal should be to create a business you can sell, whether you decide to sell it or not.
For a service-based business, keep a close eye on variable costs — materials and wages or time you need to deliver the service. Because a service-based business focuses on someone performing the service, your variable costs will rise as you scale up. Just be sure that your profits will increase enough to more than make up for the rise in costs.
Outsourcing Responsibilities to Lighten Your Load
As your brand evolves, especially if it’s growing faster than expected, delegating and deputizing to free your time and energy for higher level tasks can be a challenge. You built the brand from the ground up, so you may struggle to trust others to take it to the next level. Keep in mind, however, that you’re not doing your brand any favors by trying to do everything yourself. You’ll do more good at the top — and there is no top without people below you to handle the daily operations (or at least some of them). You just need to hire the right people and train them well.
Think in terms of the three Ps: people, positions, and processes. Hire the right people for the right positions, and give them effective processes to follow, and your success is almost guaranteed.
Hiring the right people
Hiring the right people and putting them in the right positions is first and foremost. The most valuable part of any business is its people. Whether you hire contractors or employees, screen them carefully. Pay special attention to the following criteria:
- Competence: Does the person have the knowledge, skills, and experience to do the job?
- Confidence: Confident people with positive attitudes tend to succeed even in the face of adversity. They’re willing to take risks and don’t feel threatened or insulted when a superior offers help or guidance.
- Reliability: You want people you can count on to show up and do their jobs.
- Strong values that align with your brand: Do the person’s core values fit with your brand and with the work that needs to be done? Some values are important across your organization, such as honesty, integrity, and a strong work ethic. Other values may be job-specific, such as innovation, creativity, independence, and collaboration.
- Familiarity with your industry: This quality may not be essential, but it’s good to have people who “get it” — who understand how the industry operates and how your brand fits in that ecosystem.
- Personality: Does the person have a personality that’s right for the job and that fits with your brand’s identity? If your brand is built on creativity and innovation, for example, someone who’s more practical and systematic may not be the right fit.
- Communication and interpersonal skills: Does the person have the communication and interpersonal skills necessary to play well with others on your team?
Choosing a contractor or employee
You can outsource work and responsibilities to employees or contractors. Which of the two is right for you depends on the situation:
- If you have steady work and need someone who’s available onsite and during business hours, hire an employee — someone who’s dedicated to serving your business.
- If you have specific jobs or responsibilities that a contractor can handle offsite and outside normal business hours, you’re probably better off hiring a contractor.
Hiring a contractor is often a good way to test-drive someone before adding them to your team as an employee. It’s also a good approach if your business is seasonal and needs to scale up and down over the course of the year.
The gig economy is exploding. More and more people are freelancing, so they can pick and choose the work they want to do, the businesses they work for, and the hours they work, all while maximizing their income. Be prepared to make accommodations for gig workers; you may be able to attract better workers for less money by being flexible.
Using your brand style guide for training
Whether you hire employees or contractors, you should have procedures, policies, and standards in place to ensure that the work is performed to your expectations. To ensure consistency for your brand, be sure to include your brand style guide in your training. All members of your team — especially those in marketing, sales, and customer service — need to review the brand style guide so that they have intimate knowledge of the desired look and feel of the brand and how you want customers to perceive the brand.
As you bring employees and contractors up to speed on your brand’s look and feel, highlight the following elements in your brand’s style guide:
- Mission/vision statement
- Core values
- Brand identity
- Key differentiators (what makes your brand different from and better than the other options on the market)
- Customer avatars
- Your brand’s voice and tone
Having clear branding guidelines in place simplifies the process of outsourcing work to contractors and educating new employees on your brand’s essentials.
See Chapter 6 for more about creating and using a brand style guide.