01-19-2015
Make a Plan: Investing in Your Company’s Brand Potential
Dear House Rules,
After making the start-up investment in my company, my accountant asked me to project the budget for strategic planning and growth over the short, mid, and long term. I understand how to estimate legal, financial and administrative expense. Can you help me understand the marketing, including branding needs for which my company should plan in these timeframes?
Sincerely,
Predicting Our Brand Future
Dear Brand Future,
Brand strategy and development is a vast field limited only by budget, technological advances and your role as a visionary. Estimating the financial investment for your brand evolution is one way to ensure that you continue to grow the top line and keep your business on the cutting edge of sales and marketing growth. Given that technology is unknown, we will work with the core marketing tools we have today. Since most companies fail to budget for marketing, you will be ahead of your competition even as technology improves. Follow this sample brand evolution schedule:
Plan a Brand that lasts a lifetime:
- Base brand decisions on a well-developed positioning statement and competitive analysis that considers target market and competition.
- Engage the start-up team and your marketing expert in selecting a company name, logo, colors, vision, mission and values.
- Assign a brand manager and one administrative person to monitor and evolve the brand in the early years.
- Cross- train these team members for other start-up duties during slow periods
- Plan to outsource any large campaigns beyond their capacity or expertise
- Report on marketing analytics at regular strategy and leadership meetings to determine effectiveness, ongoing strategies and budgets.
- Identify and plan for marketing campaigns to back up your sales strategy, be it traditional sales force, social selling, point-of-sale or other.
- Create and update scenario plans annually, which explore a 10% growth in sales, 50% growth in sales, 0% growth in sales, or losses.
- Based on each scenario, complete commensurate market strategies. As changes and challenges arise, use the scenario plan that best matches current conditions.
- As the company grows, expand the marketing team with experts in technology, design and strategy. Continue to build this team in the same proportion as other key areas such as finance, sales and operations.
Putting equal importance on maintaining your brand in the same way you would invest in customer retention ensures that budget dollars are well spent and contribute to the top and bottom lines. Part of controlling expenses is not wasting money on strategies that are passé or fail to answer current buying trends. Elevating the importance of brand is the key to enabling your business to react to the market and serve customer needs for a lifetime.
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