With spring behind us and a summer of servicing and all-important customer relations to look forward to, now is the time to start thinking about how to build your company’s brand. How do your consumers see you? How do they perceive the quality of your services? What promise does your brand make, and what do you do to keep that promise? These are all things you should consider as you think about how you intend to build and nurture your company’s brand.
In our industry, as in countless others, there are three essential elements to building a successful brand: 1. identify your differential advantage, 2. clearly define who you are, and 3. make sure your consumers are familiar with 1. and 2.
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Be Different — Naturally, your brand wouldn’t be your own if it was the same as everyone else’s. That’s why the first element in building a distinctive brand is identifying and focusing on your differential advantage. Ask yourself, “What makes my company different from my competitors? Why is my company unique?” And most importantly, “Why do consumers want to do business with my company instead of a competitor?” Your differential advantage is what separates your business from the crowd, and it’s the element that causes consumers to take notice.
That’s not to say that you won’t want to stay abreast of what the competition’s doing, and learn from what they do right and wrong. Rather, you need to take what you can learn from your competitors and use that to help carve out what it is that makes your company stand out; what makes your company better.
For example, Lawn Doctor’s differential advantage lies in both our consumer convenience and our quality of service. Inherently, Lawn Doctor’s model of having local entrepreneurs operating each of our franchises allows us to provide the highest quality services from operators who have a vested interest in each customer’s satisfaction. Secondly, Lawn Doctor’s use of patented application equipment that leads the industry provides a level of quality service and efficiency that truly differentiates us from the competition.
Define Your Brand — Clearly defining your brand’s personality and what type of image you want to project to your consumers can be a lofty task. However, keeping it simple is what makes your brand memorable. Ask yourself, “What does my company stand for? What are our goals, and how do we hope to achieve them? What’s my company’s plan to differentiate us from the competition?” That’s where differential advantage and brand definition overlap. Recognizing the importance of having a cohesive, unique brand is the first step in building something consumers can invest their trust and their dollars in.
Lawn Doctor has clearly defined who we are as the company whose goal is “Keeping Lawns Healthy for Life” — not only for the lives of the lawns and landscapes we service, but also for our consumers’ lives. With that overarching philosophy in mind, the overlap between our differential advantage and our clearly-defined brand becomes apparent.
Communicate With Your Consumers — Once you’ve established what it is that makes your company different and your brand personality is clearly defined, it’s time to make sure everyone knows it. All the effort you put into identifying your differential advantage and defining your brand loses its value altogether, if you don’t develop an effective strategy to communicate it to consumers and make your brand easy to access.
Although not a walk in the park by any means, in the grand scheme of your company’s strategy, this is the easy part. There are countless mediums you can utilize to communicate your brand message to your target demographic. Ask yourself, “Who are my consumers? What do they read, listen to on the radio, watch on television and respond to in advertising? How do they like to communicate?” And most importantly, “How can I most clearly and effectively communicate my company’s differential advantage and unique brand to them?”
Research and a solid understanding of our industry, and who our consumers are, is the starting point for any powerful marketing plan. Be it through television, radio, Internet or any other of a wide array of advertising and public relations opportunities, Lawn Doctor has made one of our primary organizational goals that of achieving unaided top-of-mind brand awareness on the national level. By way of maintaining an easily accessible brand, initiatives like 800/4-LAWN DR and LAWNDOCTOR.COM keep Lawn Doctor at arms length of the consumer all times.
So, what’s the next step? The first thing you have to do is evaluate where your company stands and who you are right now. This will help establish the fundamental building blocks for your brand. Once you’re familiar with how you’re viewed by your consumers today, you can start thinking about where you want to be in the future, and you can begin setting goals and laying out plans to reach that future. Although brand building can be a complicated endeavor, focus on the simplicity behind what your company’s true goals are, and you’ll be well-positioned to establish your brand just in time for the coming season.
Scott D. Frith, CFE, is the vice president of marketing and franchise development for Lawn Doctor, Inc. He has been involved in the green industry for over a decade and serves on the board of directors for Project EverGreen. Frith also sits on the International Franchise Association’s Marketing and Public Relations Committee.