Building a brand from the ground up: A practical guide

Understand your business: The starting point of every successful brand

Before we deal with sales and marketing, we need to understand the business itself. We need to know what the company wants to achieve, how it is currently performing and how we can measure its success. Only when we know how to measure our success can we ensure that we are investing our money wisely.

So let’s say you have a cleaning company with a small team. Your target group is offices and private households in the surrounding area. Let’s imagine that each cleaning takes about two hours and you charge 100 francs for it. This means that, under ideal conditions, you can handle three jobs per day per employee, earning you 300 francs a day. If you work five days a week, that’s 1,500 francs per week.

Setting goals and measuring success

Now we need to find out what your actual goal is. If your company currently only carries out one cleaning a day, even though it has the capacity for three, then the task of marketing and sales is to increase this output. But by how much? Is the goal an increase of 300%? Or are you aiming for much more? Without a clear idea of your goal, we can’t judge whether your marketing spend is justified.

In the end, it’s all about hard facts: Have my sales increased? Have my conversion rates improved? Has my brand become better known? These metrics are crucial to evaluate the success of the marketing strategy.

Set short-term and long-term goals

Once we’ve established the current goals, we also need to consider long-term goals. You may want to grow your business and hire more cleaning teams to take on bigger jobs and expand your reach. If we manage to grow your team from one to three employees, you can handle up to nine jobs per day, which translates into a weekly turnover of 4,500 francs.

The faster you reach your current target, the faster you can grow. And once we have reached this first growth phase, we can redefine your goals and adjust your marketing strategy.

Who is active in your market?

The next step is to analyze the competition to understand who is active in your market. Who are your competitors? Where are they strong and where are they weak?

Let’s imagine that “Clear and Clean”, a cleaning company in your area, is good but often late for appointments. This is a weakness that you can exploit by positioning yourself as more punctual and reliable.

Then there are “glitz & glamor” companies that do good work but overprice their services and often pressure clients to book additional, expensive services. While customers are happy with their work, they often feel put off by the high costs.

Finally, there is “Pure and Fine”, a company that competes directly with you as they offer similar services and have a solid reputation. Here it is important to not only look at the weaknesses of the competition, but also to understand how they do their marketing. Do they use specific selling points or do they rely on general statements such as “We offer a thorough clean at the best price”?

Your brand promise

Now let’s talk about how to develop a strong brand promise for your business. Brand promises are a big topic these days, and there’s a lot of information out there about them. But most people, and frankly most companies, get it wrong. So here’s a quick guide on what a brand promise should be and what to look out for. A brand promise is a promise to your customers about the value and experience they can consistently expect from your brand.

That sounds pretty good, right? But here’s the problem: most companies focus on generic values like trust, quality, value, experience, innovation, authenticity and integrity. However, these words are too generic. These are the basic requirements that everyone expects from a company they do business with.

A strong brand promise, on the other hand, should offer something unique that only your brand can give your customers.

Let’s take Nike as an example. Nike’s brand promise is “progress”. If you engage with their products, you will be better today than yesterday and better tomorrow than today. That’s the promise. It’s not about trust and quality – that’s already expected. It’s about you developing through your interaction with the brand. Disney promises to take you back to your childhood, to awaken your inner magic. Harley Davidson promises freedom from the stresses of everyday life and adventure on the open road.

These simple but powerful promises have made these brands so strong because they clearly communicate what customers can expect from the brand. If you want to develop a brand promise, make sure it doesn’t fall into the trap of generic values. Your brand promise should be clear and unique and make it clear to customers what specific benefits they can expect from your brand. This is the key to building reputation, momentum and ultimately sales.

Pricing and service: Are you competitive?

In addition to analyzing the competition, you also need to take a close look at your own pricing and the efficiency of your services. In our example: How much do your competitors charge for similar services, and how long does it take them to complete a cleaning? This information will help you to optimize your own prices and processes in order to remain competitive.