What does your brand say about you?

Is your marketing doing its job, and making a difference, asks Mike Rigby, CEO of MRA Research?

Most of us can easily name the brands behind straplines such as ‘Every little helps’, ‘Should’ve gone to…’, ‘Good things come to those who wait.’; ‘Fit the Best’ and ‘Just do it’ because they’ve been drummed into us by constant marketing.

Construction was slower than other industries to adopt marketing, but now it’s a believer. So, how many industry-brand straplines can you think of? As a brand missionary, I set myself the challenge. I listed: ‘Let’s colour’, ‘Proper Builders Merchants’; ‘Built on relationships’; ‘Building digital right’; ‘Showering spaces’; ‘Does exactly what it says on the tin’ and ‘The Plumbers’ Merchant’. But it was a bigger challenge than I expected. Many brands weren’t saying anything. Even big brands I was sure would have straplines didn’t have one.

At its simplest, your brand is a collage of memories. It’s what people say about you when you’re not there. Good or bad, it’s your reputation, the sum of who you are, what you do, and your relationships with customers, prospects, suppliers and influencers like specifiers. It’s the trust you’ve built up in the market. It’s why people buy from you, not someone else. And marketing and customer experiences build your brand.

Marketing isn’t tools and techniques like advertising, it’s a set of ideas and a way of looking at your business, your customers, and prospects, and a way of managing your growth and margins. Done right, it’s the strategy behind your sales forecasts, and how you identify and grasp the opportunities for profitable growth.

Every business needs to ask: are we in the right place, heading in the right direction with the right business model, doing the right things? Are we saying the right things, in the right way, to the right people? That leads directly to three key marketing questions:

• Who? Who do you sell to, who do you want to sell more to? National Housebuilders? Housing Associations? White Van man? Mrs Brown? How old are your installer or builder customers? Young or middle aged; how many are near retirement? Are you selling to the customers you want? Are you selling what they want?
• Why? This is your difference, your relative advantage. Why do customers buy from you, not competitors? And if you don’t have a competitive advantage, start with research to create a sustainable advantage. Where do your prospects buy now, and how do they buy or want to buy? Instore, online or omnichannel? Why would they switch? As we learned while shopping online during Covid, price matters, but not as much as we thought. Most people switch for, and keep coming back for, convenience, great service, and the ‘come-back-again-and-again’ customer experience, rather than price.
• Where? Not much beats being in the right place at the right time. Concentrate and position your strengths against important gaps and your rivals’ weaknesses.

David or Goliath? Every brand can be a Goliath somewhere.

Research says challenger brands need to be 3.5 times as effective as leader’s marketing to level the playing field. Over time, in very round numbers, for every £1 Coca Cola spends it gets £1.30p back. For every £1 Pepsi spends it gets £0.30 back. It’s hard work toppling Goliath, because if you’re not No.1 you need to do more and shout louder and longer to overcome the leader’s ‘defender’s advantage’. Do research to direct your marketing so your SOV (Share of Voice) is greater, and you can make a difference so your target market notices and remembers you. Repetition builds your brand.

Marketers by nature love the new, so they tend to quickly get bored with their own ads and messaging long before their target audience has even noticed them. So, a phenomenal amount of money and marketing is wasted. Creativity matters but it’s more about saying the same thing in a fresh way than finding a new message. We only know BMW is ‘The Ultimate Driving Machine’ because it’s been saying that since 1975!

Want to measure your brand awareness and positioning? Email Yvette@mra-research.co.uk

This article was first published in the Builders Merchants’ News May 2021 edition.