Of branding and marketing: What businesses must know

What drives businesses? According to Martin Zwilling, businesses are usually the result of a personal dream or need. Thus, the ability to communicate your dream or align your product to the needs of a particular community almost always sets the tone for business success.

However, as simple as it seems, branding and communication are arguably placed on the secondary list by some SMEs and entrepreneurs – marketing (sales) occupies the central position.

But how do you effectively market a product without an identity?

Building a brand and discovering channels to engage potential customers with your value proposition are important to the growth and development of businesses. According to Chizor Malize, Managing Partner, Brandzone Consulting LLC, “No matter how amazing your product is, no-one will hear about it until you create an identity.”

Mrs. Malize, a Mara Mentor, also outlined points on branding and marketing for SMEs and entrepreneurs. According to her, businesses must have a clearly defined vision (where you are going?) and mission (how would you get there?) and highlight their value propositions in communicating their brands. “You must define what you want to offer, its uniqueness and point of differentiation,” she says, “[Then], you can build visibility around that.”

Mrs Malize further explained that this implies “defining your point of strength”, i.e.  What can you do better than competition? Where do you need to improve on?

On the challenge of allocating resources to fund branding and marketing campaigns, SMEs can leverage technology and new media to tell their stories without incurring any cost. “Explore new media,” Malize quips. “It reaches where you ordinarily would not reach… 1 billion viewers at [your] finger tips.”

She also admonished business owners to always remind customers about their brands.  “Have a voice in the market place,” she says, adding that business must create simple and coherent branding messages devoid of nuances.