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Let’s talk about  Brands.  First, exactly what do you think a brand is?  Is it simply a logo or is it something more?   How will developing your brand help your home-based business to be more successful?

Try This Definition On For Size.

A Brand is a collection of ideas and experiences that exist in the minds of your customers and the public at large.

Or How About This One?

A brand is not a name or a logo. It is not a product, service or business. It is a promise, an expectation and ultimately an experience. The strongest brands in the world own a place in the consumer’s mind and when they are mentioned almost everyone thinks of the same things.

Or This One From Wikipedia

Brand is the image of the product in the market. Some people distinguish the psychological aspect of a brand from the experiential aspect. The experiential aspect consists of the sum of all points of contact with the brand and is known as the brand experience. The psychological aspect, sometimes referred to as the brand image, is a symbolic construct created within the minds of people and consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product or service.

These definitions all state that brands create emotions and expectations in the minds of others.  Now, who do you think sets the expectations for the brand?  The customer or the business owner?  Consider these opposing views.

“Brands are defined by the customer. They exist as a feeling that extends beyond the product itself.” - T. Scott Gross

Versus This

Your brand is NEVER defined by the customer. You strategically determine what your brand identity is and then deliver that internally and externally so that your brand image becomes it.

Volvo was not defined by it’s customers as the safe car company, Volvo became the safe car company first and it’s clients acknowledged this. - S. White (BigKahuna)

We know people by their names and their faces.  We recognize hundreds of brands by their name or logo.  But just like people, the more you learn about a brand, the more it seems to have its own individual personality.

We know people by their names, but we don’t say they are their names.  This is where we come to the core of what branding really is.   Branding is the essence of a company’s identity. Look at these logos.

Simply seeing these logos evokes an emotional response. You experienced thoughts and feelings about each company.  In fact, while you looked at the Aflac logo, you may have heard the duck in your mind quacking “Ah Flack.” (Did you know the voice of the duck is Gilbert Gottfried?)

Logos are not brands.  They are representations of brands.  They are like a desktop shortcut to the brand for your mind.  Brands are the thoughts, feelings, and psychological relationships between a business and its market. Your brand should be the foundation of all your marketing activities.

Very nice to know you say, but what’s this branding stuff got to do with my home-based business?  That’s a great question.  Glad you thought of it.

Let’s say you are a distributor for company ‘X’.  You’ve been following their system to a tee, and are making decent money.  Then one day, you get an email telling you the company is changing it’s distribution method.  And it doesn’t include you or anyone else who has been working the business.  You try to log in to your back office, but they’ve already shut it down.

Or what if they changed the compensation plan so it was a lot harder to earn money with them?  It’s happened before.  It will happen again.  Hopefully, not to you.

What would you do?  Your list was saved on their servers.  It’s gone.  You can’t place or check on orders.  You don’t have a clue what they still owe you.  What are you going to tell your customers?  How would you recover from this kind of disaster?

When you brand yourself, “You, Inc.” as Mike Dillard calls it, you create a company around your marketing activities and promote that.  Sell yourself first, then your company, then your opportunity.

For example, Lifestyle Design Partners is my company.  My primary opportunity, Joint Venture Group, Inc. is blended into the mix of other companies and activities I’m involved in.  If any one company closes down, my list and records are still intact.  My own multiple income strategy only suffers a fender bender – not a total loss.  Plug another opportunity into the open space, let my friends on the list know about it, and keep on moving ahead.

Being ready is an attitude.  The benefits achieved by branding yourself and your company are many.  You can market anything you want under your own personal business umbrella.  Your list and records are safe with you.  And it’s waaay more fun.  More on this topic next time.

Hope you’re great and getting better.

Writing tonight from Lakeville, MN.

P.S.  If you notice a bit of a change in the look of the blog, I installed a couple of new plug-ins. Tweetmeme replaced the blue follow me button that some of you hated because it got in the way of reading the posts.

SexyBookmarks has proven time and time again to be an extremely useful and successful plugin to get readers to actually submit articles to numerous social bookmarking sites.