The Most Important Asset You Have

When you’re running a business or taking
high-level decisions for one, the most important thing you can do is understand
the value of the assets you have available. It’s these assets you can use to solve
problems and pursue opportunities so you have to know what you have at your
fingertips.

The list might include the money your
business has in the bank, and its capacity to obtain funding and credit; the
products on the shelf and in the warehouse, its capacity to make or obtain
more; the skills of its employees, be they customer-facing or employed in
research, HR or executive-level skills; even the contacts you have in the
business community are an asset you could make use of. None of these are your
most valuable asset though, the one that’s intrinsic to your business, and that
can be built or undermined with every decision you make. Your most important
asset, your most irreplaceable resource is your brand, and it’s important to
understand how and why it’s so vital if you’re going to make use of it
effectively.

Building a Brand

Your brand is made up of every interaction
a customer has with your business – a pooled, consensus identity that’s
assigned to the company and that people can then relate to, similar to how they
would with a person. It’s this brand, this identity, that tells people that
your business is right
for them.

You can build your brand by focusing on
consistency and customer interactions – your brand values need to be expressed
every time a customer interacts with your business, from seeing an advert to
buying a product to browsing your website. If you’re trying to build a
reputation for being a responsible, caring brand you need to make sure that
isn’t being contradicted by some part of the customer experience – delivery and
courier partners often let down retail businesses here.

Tracking Your Brand

It’s important to keep track of what
customers think of your brand, so you can lean into the qualities they most
strongly associate with your business. Running a brand tracker survey over
time doesn’t just give you a snapshot of what the market thinks of your
business, it lets you see, almost in real-time, how customers respond to
different decisions you make. This means you can judge how each marketing
campaign, new product or sale affects your brand strength, and optimise your
decision making process for a strong, consistent
brand!

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