Taking your brand from a position where it is merely decorative and viewed as undefined vapour, to a state where it is truly valued requires a mind-shift to understand that brands require investment. Branding is not a product, but a process of continual growth, evolution, learning, research, investment and focus. To build a brand you must make it a living, viable and visible part of your everyday environment. When you can do this, you will shift your brand essence from an invisible to a visible form that you can see, hear, talk about, measure and experience.
To increase the value of your brand you need to address and focus your energies on four key areas, which unlock the potential to turn vapour into value.
1. Respect Governance
It’s very important to make sure that the brand you’re building is a brand you can own and protect. You have to value your intellectual property – so many of us spend our days working hard, generating intellectual property, only to leave our ideas exposed and unprotected for others to hijack, take and use. Do you have the right governance mindset to protect the things that make your brand unique? If your brand is to have value, you need to defend and protect the intellectual property that defines your unique position in the market and sets you apart from others. There is a lot to know and learn in the field of good corporate governance, registered trademarks and patenting; but understanding these things and effectively taking responsibility for protecting and valuing your worth is key to unlocking the true value of your organisation’s intellectual property and brand assets. It is so important to ask the right questions when it comes to building the best governance framework for your business.
2. Develop Process
To unlock the value of your brand, you need to develop and capture what you do that makes you unique, and bottle it. If you can identify these processes and teach, replicate and scale them, this allows you to innovate and continue to lead the market. It also means that you can identify the intellectual property that makes you unique and different in that process, and go about protecting it.
3. Measure the Value of Process
Once you have established the processes that make you unique, you can constantly monitor how these are performing. Being able to measure how particular behaviours and changes are giving you a positive return on investment is critically important. If you can’t measure the value of your processes, you need to ask yourself why you are doing them.
4. Understanding and Utilising Feedback
When you understand your processes and the effect of these processes on your brand, this gives you the ability to collect intelligence. It’s important to close the loop on all feedback, whether internally from staff and suppliers, or externally from your markets’ responses to your brand. Collecting this feedback and intelligence enables you to strategically innovate in the right direction, in the directions that ensure the most possible success. Innovating means developing new intellectual property, and here the whole cycle of protecting your work, turning it into a process, and measuring its success begins again.
Taking your brand from vapour to value is a cycle of continuous growth and change. Brands must constantly evolve; they must always reinvent themselves and align to the desires, essence and attitude of the markets in which they exist. When you can master this cycle of innovation and re-ignition, your brand will have a tangible value that you can build on for years to come.
