BRAND MANAGEMENT
Brand Cultivation: Why Nurturing and Protecting Your Brand is an Essential Practice
Brand Cultivation is a hugely important part of brand management. It refers to the practices, processes and mindset that ensure your brand is both nurtured and protected. And when you nurture and protect your brand, you create a catalyst for growth in your business.
Why it’s Important to Protect Your Brand
When it comes to brand strategy and creation, we often focus on the inception. The fun parts where we brainstorm, develop the ideas, craft the visual identity, and bring it all to life. The sexy bit.
But like anything, if you don’t take care of it, it won’t stand the test if time. Things slip through the cracks, communication becomes inconsistent, visuals get messy, and assets go missing. Before you know it, things are out of control and your brand perception is suffering!
Why it’s Important to Protect your Brand
When it comes to brand strategy and creation, we often focus on the inception. The fun parts where we brainstorm, develop the ideas, craft the visual identity, and bring it all to life. The sexy bit.
But like anything, if you don’t take care of it, it won’t stand the test if time. Things slip through the cracks, communication becomes inconsistent, visuals get messy, and assets go missing. Before you know it, things are out of control and your brand perception is suffering!
Your Brand Has Real Value
If you think of your brand as an intangible ‘nice to have’ with no ‘real’ monetary value, you couldn’t be more wrong.
Your brand is an asset with a tangible value. It attracts pre-qualified leads who already know you, are drawn to you and want to buy from you. It makes you a magnet for the best talent in your industry, encourages great quality referrals and partnerships, and allows you to charge a premium. All things that will grow your business bottom line.
If you ever decide to seek investment in your business or even sell it, your brand value is an essential piece of the puzzle. Having a strong brand that has magnetic appeal, faultless perception and lots of goodwill in the mind of your audience is essential.
What is Brand Cultivation?
What is Brand Cultivation?
Brand Cultivation is about having a growth mindset rather than a defensive mindset. It is built on the principles of protection and nurture. The purpose is to put the processes, practices and mindset in place to nurture the growth potential of your brand, considering both your brand image and your brand’s assets.
There are 4 key practices of Brand Cultivation which work together to ensure your brand potential is nurtured and it’s value protected.
1. Excellence
This puts the focus on ensuring everything about your brand is the best it can be. Your brand can be brilliant or bang average. The good news is you have the power to choose. The idea of ‘done is better than perfect’ is a dangerous one when it comes to your brand. And whilst I agree that procrasti-branding is a slippery slope, time invested in crafting each and every touchpoint to be polished and professional will never be time wasted.
2. Consistency
Why does everyone in brand carry on about consistency so much?
“Consistent presentation of a brand has seen to increase revenue by 33 percent “(Lucidpress, 2019).
Think of it this way. If someone is erratic and unpredictable you lose trust. They can make you feel insecure and uncomfortable because you’re never quite sure what you’re going to get or where you stand.
The same applies to brand. When your message, visual image and experiences are erratic it impacts trust, brand recognition and clarity of understanding. Would you buy anything from that brand?
3. Ownership
I am constantly surprised by how many business owners don’t have control over their brand assets. They don’t know where their high-resolution images or logos are, they’re not sure who their website host is and don’t have access to the backend of their website.
Having a structured professional approach to your assets is so important. It’s your responsibility to look after them if you want to create a sustainable business and brand.
Part of this is about protecting your IP. Have you trademarked your name and/or logo and done enough to protect your unique identity from copycats?
4. Maintenance
Brand is not a set and forget. It’s essential to check in on a regular basis to ensure things are working as they should be. Test your website forms, ensure all the links and pages are working, check email automations are being sent and your subscriptions and accounts are up to date.
It’s easy to ignore these things until things go horribly wrong. Effective Brand Cultivation is about staying on top of things. And in the long run it will save you money and prevent a brand image train wreck.
Brand Cultivation and Your Mindset
Not having conscientious Brand Cultivation practices is what I refer to as ‘brand neglect’. Letting things slip, and not doing anything about it, is more common than you might think. Before you know it, inconsistency, loss of control, poor quality or lack lustre performance creep in.
Brand neglect is one of the biggest mindset blocks I see in brand management. Things go into the too hard basket because they’re too technical, costly, or tricky to fix. It can be hard to face up to mistakes or feeling out of control. Burying your head in the sand seems like the easier option.
However, brand neglect can have dire consequences for your business and brand. An enquiry not received, a website that doesn’t load, an unrenewed domain name or social posts full of typos can be damaging. And whilst they’re causing the damage, if you’ve taken your eye off the ball, you may not even know it’s happening in order to rectify it.
So, it’s time to become the cultivator of your brand growth and put the practices, processes and mindset in place to nurture and protect one of your more valuable assets.
I’ll be covering Brand Cultivation in my Elevate & Expand Your Brand Program launching in Feb 2022. If you’d like to know more and to join the waitlist, click here to pop on over and take a peek.
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