One of the biggest pieces of advice that entrepreneurs get is to “Build a brand!”. There’s more advice than one can consume on building a brand, with a heavy emphasis on colour psychology, pricing strategies, catchy slogans, impactful copywriting, landing pages, brand personality, increasing the brand’s visibility and consumer awareness etc.
But among all that, an important factor gets overlooked – What value does your brand provide to the customer?
- JanSport provides durable backpacks.
- Asics provides performance shoes for your foot shape and gait.
- Levi’s provides durable jeans.
- Amazon provides financial peace of mind and a diverse offering to their customers – both in their marketplace and web services.
What is your brand value? Is it something immaterial or something material?
Can your brand be easily discarded by your customers? Or will your customers remember your product, recommend it, and come to you themselves when they need the value it provides?
If your consumers are cutting back on consumerism, is your product one of the first things consumers will discard, or one of the last things they’ll want to discard?
Hopefully, it’s the latter.
It’s important to continually focus and emphasize on your brand value at all levels of the business, to make the customer immediately aware of it when they discover you, and to relentlessly back it up. For example,
- If a customer isn’t satisfied with the product, Amazon takes the loss and ensures that the customer is satisfied and comes back to them.
- JanSport backs up its durability by providing a Lifetime Warranty, and even repairs/replaces 15-20 year old products.
Your Brand Value is a subset of the value proposition. It may or may not make it a unique value proposition (several successful companies provide the same value propositions as their competitors), but it is still the heartbeat of your business and an important factor in the value proposition and monetary valuation of your brand.
Providing a valuable and not-easily replicable brand value contributes heavily to the company gaining a loyal and ever-increasing user-base — this directly translates to better long-term revenue and constantly increasing valuation.
Update, March 2024: Images generated using DALL-E 3 by copy-pasting this blogpost
