In the fourth of a series of posts on the crucial role played by branding in influencing client choice, we explore ways that brands can be successfully managed in the long term.

ONCE YOUR brand ‘promise’ has been formulated, you must consider how you’ll communicate this, and then how you’ll manage and develop the brand over time. The following are a number of techniques and issues that you should consider.

Brand management technique 1: Storytelling
An established technique in branding a business is to tell its story through corporate identity, packaging, stationery, marketing materials and so on. This can be quite low key, but it paints a picture of the heartbeat of the company, and its products.

Whether you employ 500 people or run a butcher shop, the same principles apply. Take Sheffield butcher John Crawshaw, for example. He hand-picks the meat sold in his three shops, while most of his competitors have their meat delivered in vacuum packs from an abattoir. Crawshaw consequently has a strong story to tell his customers

Brand management technique 2: Credibility
The credibility of your brand’s offer must also be solid. For example, a Yorkshire drainage company called Naylor launched a range of lifetime-guaranteed flower pots, but the Naylor brand was inappropriate to market this range, because it was associated too directly with the drainage side of the business.

So the company set up a new brand called Yorkshire Flowerpots, with its own tone of voice, personality and visual identity so it could sell the products with greater credibility.

Brand management techniques 3: Differentiation
A great deal of branding is about defining and presenting a point of differentiation in the sector you’re operating in. Get this right and your organization will stand out brightly against your competitors.

Construction company Hilti provides an example of differentiation in a crowded sector, because while most construction companies use images of buildings and products in their communications, Hilti emphasizes its relationship with the people involved in construction, using black and white photographs of workers using Hilti tools, which are highlighted in the company’s corporate red.

Brand management technique 4: Engaging clients and customers
If you stand out of the crowd for positive reasons and your tone of voice and communications are credible, clients and customers will look at what you’ve got to say.

When Orange launched in the mobile phone market in 1994, its identity, language and offer were distinctive from its established rivals. It presented an optimistic vision of the future based on technology, but from a human rather than technical point of view. Its logo and name were abstract, creating stand-out against BT Cellnet, T-Mobile and Vodafone.

Brand management technique 5: Focusing your portfolio
If you have a number of different products or services it may help to consider how you can streamline or organize them to make the offer easy for consumers to understand.

Sometimes, the logic of internal company structures can dictate how a product offer is organized, but this does not always make sense to clients and customers. Think carefully about the best way to present what you do, even if it means setting things up differently from your internal organization.

This blogpost is drawn from ‘The power of branding: a practical guide’, a special resource for small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs) produced by the Design Council, the national strategic body for design in the UK.

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