Inside Small Business | Small Business & Home Business Marketing

Branding

LW: Talking about Brand, why do you think Brand is an important part of a company?

Brian: It's critical to be able to establish an identity in what makes you different. As I indicated in the opening comments, we were one of literally hundreds of companies in our area that provide staffing. If you want to think of us as a staffing company, there's a Roladex of hundreds of them. And if you just need resumes of qualified resources for a particular position you can call anybody and get a stack of resumes in less than 48 hours. What we've tried to do with branding as I send any communications to our customers, I want to make sure our brand is on it and our messaging is on it about how we actually provide some differentiated services that allow us to help you build systems better, help you identify your processes, and our specific expertise is in requirements gathering and requirements developing for business systems. It's an area where it's not done well by any business that I've ever consulted with, and it's something that as we get those messages out there and people begin to understand the value proposition of, here are some guys who not only have good resources but these are resources who know how to gather requirements and can actually build systems correctly and get it done in a much better and more efficient fashion than anybody else. Those are the messages we put out and try and consistently enforce in all of our communications.

LW: Did you start doing that right away, was the brand a priority for you? Or was that a few years down the road?

Brian: I'll be honest, it wasn't an immediate priority, but at the same time we needed to have that brand be something that we could circle all of our marketing collateral around. We did a lot of things that were just word of mouth and through our own professional network and associations, but it was important that we continued to maintain that brand presence. We started off using it on our website and kind of built up some graphics around the brand logo on our website and then we continued to keep that message going in all of our communications. It kind of grew over time, there were things we didn't necessarily brand every communication at first, and now we view it as an opportunity to communicate with our customers.

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