Importance
- Your brand identity is conveyed and associated with every experience your client has.
- Make sure you manage every interaction your client has with you to uphold your promise and your brand.
How will your potential client identify you in your market space? The answer is your brand. Your brand is everything that distinctly identifies you among your competitors and associates you with your value proposition. Managing your brand will be a constant part of your business to ensure you measure up to your promise to your client and remain properly positioned in your market space.
What's In a Name?
Defining and aligning your brand is the first step in the brand management stage. The preceding stages in the business planning process set the stage upon which your brand identity will be defined or refined.
Your brand should
- target a specific market or audience
- clearly distinguish you from the competition
- support your organization's brand and marketing guidelines
- be in alignment with your goals and objectives
- define your value proposition for your client before and after delivering on your promise
Your brand is not limited to your branding elements such as your name, logo, catch phrases, and appearance. More than a name and visual identity, your brand is at the heart of every interaction between you, and your prospect - both directly and indirectly. This means your identity extends into the associations, impressions, and experiences people will make with you and your service offering.
The commercial real estate industry, in particular, offers unique challenges in brand management and offers a significant layer of complexity in the branding process. There are an endless number of individual brokerage professionals who brand, or "mis-brand", themselves to the commercial real estate market.
A practice may range from an individual broker to a high performance production team, a national group of brokerage professionals, an entire organization, or a hybrid of any of the previous mentioned practices. They often even all target the same client; working with each other, or competing against each other.
Aligning all these factors and interests to create a cohesive brand creates a unique and challenging environment. Alienating the marketplace, deteriorating your brand, and undermining your own business can result from not effectively managing your brand.
Your brand is your gateway through which you will deliver your value proposition to your market. It is no coincidence that brand management sounds similar to the process of defining and managing your value proposition. The distinction is the brand is how you and your value proposition are presented, positioned, and interpreted by your market. If done effectively, it will keep you at that forefront of your clients' mind when their need arises.