A company’s brand is much more than their logo and slogan. (However, if you speak to a trademark lawyer, they’ll say that this is EXACTLY what a brand is.) Indeed, a brand does encompass these two physical elements however it is about so much more that people can’t put their fingers on.
A brand rests in the minds of your customers
So besides the logo, colours, look and feel of a brand, the power of a brand rests in the minds of the consumers. Ultimately, the people who you want to be buying from you need to trust that you will deliver the goods and/or services that you promise.
However, if this trust is broken and your brand is damaged in the minds of your consumers, you run the very significant risk of turning your customers against you. Even worse, those customers – whose trust your brand has broken – may very well turn other people who they know against them.
Think about this in a practical sense:
- Say, for instance, that you have a particular brand of car. It starts to overheat and you take it to the dealer to get it fixed. However, instead of fixing it in a couple of days – or even a week – they struggle to find the problem and keep it for two months.
- Finally, once you get the car back, the problem happens again. And, when you take it back, they say that another part needs to be fixed. When you get the car back after the second round of fixes, the problem hasn’t gone away.
- When you take it back the third time, the dealers throw up their hands in despair and say that they don’t know what the problem is. Are you ever going to trust the brand again or the after-sales service? Probably not. And, what’s worse, you’re going to tell your friends and colleagues about the shocking service that your received which may well dissuade them from buying that brand of car.
So even though the problem may have rested only with your particular car – and the other cars under that brand name are 100% fine – when the people who you’ve told about your particular experience decide to buy another car, they will steer clear of the brand that you’ve cautioned them against.