Your brand has a story. You are a part of that story. The days of hiding behind the corporate ladder are no longer. Everyone is watching.
Even if you are an employee, an intern, or just a temp. You represent the company you work for. With your LinkedIn profile, and your name tag, and your smile. Every single person in the organization makes up the whole.
The sum of all parts, is in fact greater than its whole.
Because it’s not just what your PR campaign says you do.
What matters is what your actions say about you.
Your actions say you care about quality, or you don’t. Or you care about getting it right, or you don’t. They say you respect people from all walks of life, or you don’t. They say you value the local economy and keep your business local, or you don’t.
So, while you might really invest a lot of time in a quality experience, or the best quality of products or service, or a marketing campaign that paints a beautiful picture about who you “are,” you need to think about a few more things before you can depend on your brand to be enough to get the job done.
Things like who you hire, how they feel about their jobs — how they reflect the experience of working for you, says more about your brand than your words or actions would.
Taking care of the little details that most people won’t notice, and that, to you might seem silly — like the garbage in the bathroom, or actually purchasing the name brand ketchup instead of using the name brand bottles with the fake stuff. Things like making an option for purchasing online. And, realizing that your customers don’t really need to be the ones thinking about how much the credit card fees are.
Running a business isn’t for the faint of heart. But no one is forcing you to choose this option. So, if you want your brand to mean something, make sure you make the decisions that will reflect a brand that is worth following.
And then, keep doing it.
Building a brand worth following is just the beginning. You can’t count on the launch, or a good start to sustain you. The businesses that make it, are the ones who invest in the work it requires to provide the quality, for the long term.
If you are thinking it’s your customers that don’t get it, think again. If people aren’t buying from you, what are you going to do about it?
