Page 105 - Duct Tape Marketing

Chapter 7

Establishing Your Position
and Brand

In This Chapter

ᮣ Understanding how brands lead to marketing success
ᮣ Determining your company’s market position
ᮣ Writing your tag line
ᮣ Forging your creative strategy
ᮣ Developing an image style guide

“We’re just a small business,” you may be thinking. “We’re not
Nabisco or Nike, with a bazillion-dollar ad budget and a global
market. We’re just 12 people trying to build a half million dollars in sales. We
hardly need a brand.”

Guess what? You do need a brand.

A brand isn’t some mysterious, expensive treasure available only to the rich
and famous. And it isn’t just for mega-marketers, though most certainly they
all have one.

Branding simply (well, maybe not all that simply) involves developing and
consistently communicating a set of positive characteristics that consumers
can identify with and relate to your name. If those characteristics happen to
fill a meaningful and available position in their minds — a need they’ve been
wanting and trying to fill — then you just scored a marketing touchdown, and
that half-million-dollar sales goal will be way easier to reach.

This chapter is about paving the road for marketing success by building a
brand, focusing on a market position, and aligning all your communications
under a creative strategy that leads to a single image customers trust and
rely on. That’s how small businesses become large, and that’s what marketing
is all about.