Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

Several times a year I get asked the same basic question about how to choose a brand name for your business or a product. The question (or some variation of it) is:

“Is it better to choose a descriptive name, or is it better to make up some unique word that never existed before?”

There are different schools of thought on this question. Let’s look at the pros and cons of each side.

DESCRIPTIVE NAME

A descriptive name is something like “Mary’s Bakery” or “Toledo Plumbing.” Names like these have several advantages:

• Inexpensive to convey what business you are in — You don’t have to spend a lot of money on advertising to establish a brand identity that the public will come to know and recognize for the line of business you are in. With a name like “Smith’s Towing,” for instance, people will know exactly what your company does based on the name alone.

• Easy to think up — You don’t typically need to go through the expense of hiring a brand naming consultant. For a small business on a tight budget, a naming consultant may be out of reach, and the task of thinking up a unique name on your own too daunting. No wonder so many small businesses opt for simplicity, choosing something like “Sally’s Candies” or a similar descriptive name.

• Easier to get found in the search engines – If your business name is Toledo Plumbing, you already have a natural advantage for getting found when someone searches for Toledo plumbing companies.

But of course you have to weigh these advantages against the negatives of using a descriptive name — and there are indeed some downsides.

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Yes, if you have a small business, even a one-person shop, you have a brand. Many small business owners don’t think this way, but when you grasp what a brand really is, I think it may become a clearer.

A brand is little more than the collective perception and association of your business in the minds of your market. So, even if only half a dozen people know your business exists, their thoughts about your business make up your brand.

I like to define small business branding as the act of intentionally becoming more knowable, likable and trustable – in a way, much more aligned with how we might think about a personality.

Let’s face it there are certain traits that make one person a more attractive total package than another – so, I’m wondering, could your business stand a brand (personality) upgrade?

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In my last post, I discussed how to get the golden touch by producing a DICEE product or service. This advice was at the 2,000-foot level. Now I’d like to take you up 48,000 feet and provide a higher-level view of innovation by discussing the business of ice.

Ice 1.0. Did you know that there used to be an ice harvesting business in New England during the late 1800s and early 1900s? It involved “Bubba” and “Junior” cutting blocks of ice from frozen lakes and ponds. This was no cottage industry—in 1900, people harvested 10,000,000 tons.

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This may surprise you, but “Guy’s Golden Touch” is not “whatever Guy touches turns to gold.” If only that were true. Instead, Guy’s Golden Touch is “whatever is gold, Guy touches.” The concept is that something that’s gold is easy to brand and sell, so the task is simple: find or create something gold.

This recommendation may impress you for a second but probably not much longer. It’s really a duh-ism as in “Duh, of course I should create something great. I had to read this blog post to learn this?” What I need to do is take you from this 50,000 foot strategic view right down to a 2,000 feet tactical view.

For this, I invoke the acronym DICEE. It stands for deep, intelligent, complete, elegant, and emotive. These are the five salient qualities of stuff that’s made of gold.

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Think of a megabrand—Coca-Cola, Apple or McDonald’s. Their logos and brand colors immediately jump to mind, right? Unfortunately, omnipresence isn’t achieved overnight. So let’s forget about logos and design for a moment. Not that those aren’t key elements when building a brand, but as a small business with limited resources, you’ll have to tap into other ways to make people remember your brand and your product.

One of the most effective—and cost-effective—brand identity tools is storytelling. A good story doesn’t just create a connection between you and your customers, it’s also something they’re likely to share with others.

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