As promised in my video, I am going to address 5 ways you can revive your dead or dying brand.
We previously discussed how your brand is how you are viewed through the eyes of your client or your market. If this image has been diminished or tarnished and you desire to stay in business, you must now embark on the task of recreating your reputation for your market and the world to see.
So let’s recap the reasons a brand may die:
- Unwillingness to change
- You are your brand
- Sales focus vs branding focus
- No relationship to your customers
- Too many products/services
Some of the common factors in this above list are a failure to communicate with your market. The other common factor is turning off (or at least not turning on) your customer with the overall experience. This means when looking to reviving a dead or dying brand you must ask yourself if you have communicated your value or purpose to your market. The answer to this is more than likely, no.
Getting a fresh start here means more than creating a fresh image. You must make real steps towards solidifying who you are, why you’re here, and correcting the mistakes of the past that caused your brand to die in the first place.
- Complete a truthful assessment of both yourself and your business. This can be tough because it causes you to stop making excuses for why you lost so many clients and shine a light on your part in this. That can be difficult to face those realities, but let’s remember, you are the common denominator in all this! This means that you may realize that some damage control is in order and you may need to make some apologies or set some things straight. It may also be helpful to complete a SWOT analysis (Download one for FREE) on your business.
- Research your market. If your brand has died, it is a good possibility you haven’t spent enough time determining what they want, what they are willing to spend, where they are located and how they think or what’s trending. Having this information will allow you to develop or modify your product or service to what your client wants or needs – NOT what you want your client to have (big difference).
- Spend some time redefining your position in the market. This will likely require you to re-identify your Unique Selling Proposition (USP). What makes you different from your competitors and why would your client want to use your service or product? Tying this back to the research piece, once you have a better idea of what your client wants/needs, you should have an easier time understanding this.
- Communicate who you are. Remember that you brand is the total experience your client feels when interacting with you and your company. You want to communicate what a client should expect to get from your company. This needs to be clear and consistent…and spread across multiple platforms. This is where having a consistent image is helpful, but your messaging must be clear and consistent as well. To revive your brand you want this information across as many mediums as you can where your market will see it.
- Be sure to exceed expectations while you are bringing life back to your brand. To do this, you must walk through your entire experience as if you are the client and then go above and beyond what your messaging says you do. When you do this, you should feel more than comfortable asking clients for testimonials and referrals or even asking them for good ratings on any platforms you may be on such as Yelp or Facebook.
In business, especially small businesses, we are all liable to make mistakes. Don’t let that stop you from putting in the work to reverse any detrimental effects those mistakes may have had on your business. You can revive your brand from the dead. It may take some time and creativity, but it can be done.
I hope these were helpful tips for you or someone you know. Please share and drop any comments in below. If you have a story of how you brought your brand back to life, please share with your fellow business owners. We all grow from the experiences of each other.
~JMJ
