Branding for one person businesses

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Question - Is it worth branding a one person business?

Answer - In many ways it may be more critical to brand a small business than a larger one

Key action points

The critical steps in branding a one-person business include:

• Getting the buy-in of others who help build and deliver your brand
• Assessing the market opportunity
• Articulating your brand as a compelling customer experience
• Delivering your brand consistently through customer relationship marketing (CRM)
• Tracking performance and the value of your brand
• Identifying opportunities for obtaining additional revenue by exploiting the equity of your intellectual property to the full

On this basis, branding may be even more critical for one person companies than for any other, because shortage of resource requires focus.

Clearly the first step is potentially easily achieved in terms of the one person, but many other people can be co-opted into building your brand if they believe in what you do. How to get them on board becomes the issue. A stakeholder analysis is a good place to start.

Assessing the market opportunity is about careful segmentation on the basis of demographics, situation, behaviour and needs/values/attitudes. Which segment has the best fit with your capabilities? How can you build a sustainable competitive advantage? Is it big enough (if you are a small company, probably). Segmentation is critical for a small company, targeting tiny but profitable niche segments a larger company would not see and could not afford to address.

Articulating your brand as a compelling customer experience – that works for everyone. Make sure you protect your gains via branding, and that you don’t infringe anyone else’s brand property.

Delivering the brand consistently through CRM – a one person company is likely to have a level of consistency built in, but nonetheless it is a good discipline to ask whether everything you do, and everything you are, delivers and builds the brand. There is also, of course, a lot of work that can be done on each element of the CRM mix.

Tracking performance – this is something it is easy for a small organisation to do, but which many will skip. For a small organisation which has been going for a while, this may be a good place to start – building customer loyalty via a committed customer loyalty tracking programme.

Licensing etc. – for that minority of small companies who want to be large ones.

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