Branding essential for SMEs to be competitive and profitable

Joy S Rwamwenge Many small-and-medium enterprises operate without names. You could be running a small shop, a neighbourhoud bar, or an agro-processing plant, and you may have wondered why some people fuss about having attractive brand name or image. The answer is simple... Any business owner will want to spend their marketing resources where they will have the greatest impact. Every business wants to be a customer’s ﬁrst choice in a market that is saturated with other businesses selling the same product or service. A well thought out brand is, therefore, an asset that adds value to your product or services to spur sales and business performance. A brand name positions your enterprise in the consumer’s mind. Once the brand is established, it will not only help the firm retain long-term customers, but will also attract the attention of a great number of potential customers. This will eﬀectively enhance the competitiveness of the enterprise in local, regional and international markets. An enterprise may have the best products or services in the market, but if it does not brand its offerings well, consumers may not even know of their existence. Branding efforts can also enhance an enterprises’ attractiveness to talented prospective employees. On a macro-economic level, a good brand can spur the creation of local employment and increase earnings derived from outside the local economy through exports. Branding enhances the products and services’ reputation of any given economy, outside the brand’s political boundaries, hence a reputation-centric asset or commonly known as brand equity. In short, branding will help drive diﬀerentiation which feeds into your competitive advantage. Brand assets, such as original designs for logos, slogans, colours, shapes, typefaces or fonts, characters, celebrities, jingles and/or music, sounds, advertising style, tastes, textures and scents, not to forget a ‘clever’ brand name should all communicate a particular message to your intended ‘audience’. A brand should be exclusively yours; the purpose of branding is defeated when brand assets specific to a particular enterprise are copied without giving thought to the fact that your enterprise has its own mission, vision and has a market segment that it wants to reach out to. Copying of brand assets can be a serious drawback to your enterprise, especially when the finances meant for expansion are spent on law suits. By making full use of your own unique features, wisely using resources and strengthening competitiveness with a combination of quality and other brand assets, your SME brand will begin to emerge and will be built up gradually to deliver higher value. It is, therefore, advisable that SMEs should be customer-centric, innovative, and should build their own differentiated brand strategy. Branding is a promise of performance and, therefore, calls for integrity, consistency and efficiency. Your brand messages ought to be original and clear; always being flexible and reacting to the ever-changing needs of your customers. Most SMEs operate with limited resources, the approach taken to brand-building should, therefore, suit their financial muscle. SMEs can adopt brand-building through easy-step development, in a reasonable and segmental manner, taking a step at-a-time towards their goal. Brand-building is an on-going process and the success of any given business is built on leveraging their brand. That’s why it is imperative for SMEs to prepare a long-term plans before establishing a brand and the plan should be implemented in stages. Building your brand identity is much more than fixing your logo in every possible space and dishing out business cards to every seemingly prospective customers; it involves identifying the core values of your enterprise, deciding how you would like people to perceive your enterprise, creating the perception that you are good at what you do and that you will do what you said you will do. Customers are eager to know what it is that makes your product or service different from others, and what satisfaction they will derive from its consumption. SMEs should, therefore, start with building their brand in service; use simple actions and reflections, like how you handle a customer, how the company image is portrayed is the quality of the product worth branding, do you have an expansion plan for sustainability and is the promise of performance guaranteed, to mention but a few. The sustainability of your brand is critical. Quite often businesses come on the market with a big bang, and raise high expectations among customers, after a while they wither out, resulting in broken promises, making it hard and costly for the firm to rebuild customers’ trust and confidence. It is important to reservedly set up the stage for your brand by not giving everything away at once, but gradually arousing the curiosity of your potential customers. SMEs can also systematically and consistently utilise the social media sphere to their advantage by increasing brand awareness, building a responsive network of suppliers, staﬀ, customers and other stakeholders and also extending their reach on a national or international scale, which undoubtedly will put their brand on centre-stage The already existing government initiatives coupled with a well-structured marketing effort through branding can give SMEs the competitive edge they need to survive and succeed in an aggressive business landscape. The writer is an SME development expert joy shiphrahrwamwenge@yahoo.com

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Branding essential for SMEs to be competitive and profitable