Getting a company website is easy. Get a Wordpress or Joomla! template, add your logo, maybe tweak the colours, add the content and Bob’s your uncle. Many startups and small companies have taken this route to getting a presence on the web. And it’s fine, up to a point, but a website that has been thrown together at the last minute, at minimal effort, a sort of knee jerk reaction to a perceived requirement, seems to me like a wasted opportunity. It takes vast amounts of time and money getting a business off the ground, but a lack of vision when it comes to managing peoples’ perceptions of that business will make that all worthless.

Lets take a look at the websites for some of the most powerful brands in the world. Virgin, Coca-Cola, BBC, Ferarri. All of these sites have been created based on a brand framework that has been established for years. The solid foundation for their brands has been developed and tweaked, redeveloped and re-tweaked over many years. The website – the most important public facing element of that brand has been built on that long standing foundation.

But do smaller businesses really need to take any notice of this big-corporate approach? Surely all this “brand strategy” stuff is really only important to global giants that have so much to lose if their brand equity drops in value?

Well, in our opinion yes and no. Companies with huge brand equity to protect absolutely have to continuously develop their strategy and communicate with their stakeholders to stay ahead of their global competitors. It’s a game that has become so huge that the law of diminishing return begins to apply. Take the petrochemical companies for example. BP has spent millions upon millions of dollars on its new brand and communicating it to the world over the past decade, and for what? We maybe now perceive them differently, but not dramatically. The level of brand differentiation they’ve created seems small compared to the gigantic expenditure it took to achieve.

Small companies have less or nothing to lose, but a great deal more to gain, from investing in some kind of integrated approach to communicating their brands. In a marketplace full of SMEs and start-ups, one-man-bands and family enterprises, a company that can be seen to have a differentiated brand, a distinctive visual style and clear messages communicated effectively is already ahead of the curve. Innocent is a great example of this. They started small, but had a clear strategy for differentiating their brand from the multitude of other competing fruit drink companies that were springing up during the early part of this decade. What is more, the way that they made themselves stand apart from that horde had as much to do with brand communication as it did with their products. They and their creative services team created a way of speaking to their customers and stakeholders that was, and still is, unique. Many others have tried to copy them (Pret a Manger, Green and Blacks to name just two), but Innocent are still there with their friendly irreverence, their trusted and trusting tone of voice that makes them different.

A small company that can effectively define what makes them different to their main competitors and put that at the heart of their brand communications is one that has a better chance of carving out that niche recognition. The way that your brand is communicated should be at the centre of your strategy, and your website should form just one arm of that strategy. Stationery, catalogues, advertising, packaging, signage, uniforms – they all need to take their lead from the central brand and communication strategy.

Then when your customers, peers, competitors, neighbours, suppliers and partners see your company they see a complete, cohesive brand working to support and reinforce the activities of your business; a business that cares about and has invested in the way it appears to public eyes. And yes, a template-driven website may still be the most cost-effective way to communicate that brand on the world wide web, but at least that will be part of a larger plan to improve your business, and can be made to integrate with the other parts of the strategy, rather than being just a knee jerk reaction.

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Tags: Advice, brand, branding, business, corporate, creative services, marketing, Small business, strategy, website

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 1st, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under tmd Blog. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

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