As a business owner, the building and maintenance of your brand are one of your most important responsibilities. Customer loyalty is what ensures you have a steady, regular stream of revenue and its brands that customers feel loyal to – not the cold reality of companies, which are made up of financial and legal instruments. Your brand is how your customers perceive your business on a human level, ascribing to it human qualities like reliability or good humour as well as corporate values like good value for money or an emphasis on sustainability.

Before we go further you need to remind yourself that as a CEO you need to have the latest and best tools and gadgets to help you build the brand you are making. You need to procure the best phones, computers and gadgets to make things easier and more efficient for you. You can also buy the best bluetooth earpieces which you can possibly get your hands on to help give you the ability to communicate hands free and give you more leisure and ease of access as you build that brand from the ground up.

Today we’re taking a look at how you can build a brand that works – and make sure it keeps working.

What Makes a Brand?

The difficult truth is that you are only partly in control of what your brand is. Your customers make your brand, and they use the information you knowingly give them, as well as every other tiny interaction with your brand to construct an image of your business. This could include experiences in-store or on your website, your advertising (including where and how they see your adverts: irritating pop ups could taint a customer’s perception of your company as seriously as poorly designed ads), word of mouth and mentions of your business in the media.

This means that every decision you take has the potential to make or break your brand – not just the overtly customer facing ones.

Understanding Your Customers’ Values

The first thing you need to do is get to know your customers: what are they looking for from a business in your industry and what values build their personal connection and commitment to brands like yours. Market research companies can help you build a demographic understanding of your market, so you can target your customers and specifically and consciously build a brand that will appeal to them.

The Most Important Values

Whatever the specific values you want your brand to embody, there are some keynotes you will always want to hit. Consistency is very important: if different parts of your business are sending different messages, it’s going to undermine the brand you build – if you’re trying to create the perception that your products are a luxury status symbol, then publically cutting corners to reduce costs will undermine that effort.

Authenticity, particularly social media authenticity, is also important. Customers of all ages are now mature, nuanced users of email and social media, and can detect when they’re being manipulated. It’s well worth making sure your communications are ‘living the brand’, and picking values that you can wholeheartedly embody without hypocrisy, to avoid customers feeling that you’re being any less than authentic.