Making a Business Profile

The Business Details

When you begin, gather the details listed below. These items should appear at the beginning of your
company profile. Keep them accurate and up-to-date.

 Company name
 Established date
 Physical address per location
 Phone and fax numbers
 Website URL
 Email address

The Company Basics

These items will vary depending on your business type. So, just keep in mind that they may not all apply to
your company, but you should include those that do.

 Description of the business including the mission and/or vision

 Product descriptions
 Description of services
 History, expansion, and growth
 Public relations
 Advertising
 Industry information
 Safety, health, and environmental policies
 Core team details
 Client portfolio

The Highlights
The next set of items also will not apply to every company. These are some of the types of notable
achievements and accomplishments that you should include.

 Awards
 Certifications
 Special programs and projects
 Testimonials
 News or media recognition

Optional Items
You may see the following items in other company profiles or within the samples and templates below. If
you feel that any of these is noteworthy for your business, then you should include them.

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  Annual sales
 Financial targets
 Number of employees
 Partners
 Photographs

Terms and concepts:

1. Brand architecture

Brand architecture is the structure that organizes the brand portfolio. It defines brand roles and
relationships among a company’s brands, e.g. the role between a car brand and the model brand (as in
Volkswagen Golf). Some corporations choose to communicate the corporate brand to the market while
others choose to market product brands to specific segments and keep the corporate brand in the
background.

2. Brand community

A brand community is a social entity where consumers interact socially with a brand as the pivotal point
of their interaction. Brand communities take place in Internet-based settings, in geographically bound
clubs, and at so-called brand fests (social gatherings arranged by the marketer). The emergence of
brand communities implies a shift in negotiation power between marketer and consumer as consumers
claim more power when acting in groups.

3. Brand culture

Brand culture is a term that has been increasingly used over the last few years. It sometimes refers to
the organizational culture of the brand and sometimes to the brand as part of the broader cultural
landscape.

4. Brand equity

Fundamentally, the goal for any brand manager is to endow products and/or services with brand equity
Brand equity defines the value of the brand and can refer to two understandings of brand value, namely
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a strategic, subjective understanding or brand equity as a financial, objective expression of the value of
the brand.

5. Brand icon

6. Brand identity

7. Brand image

8. Brand loyalty

9. Brand positioning

The idea of brand positioning is based on the assumption that consumers have limited mind space for
commercial messages and that the most successful brands hence are the ones able to position
themselves in the minds of consumers by adapting the most congruent and consistent commercial
Message.

There are around 7 approaches that can be taken into consideration in building a brand:

Brand and Its Importance

The best way we can define it is that it is a process of creating value to consumers. It encompasses all
things that consumers know, feel, and experience about your business in its entirety.

Having defined brand building, we shall now look at 3 popular types of brands and what they stand for.

i) Service brand- this brand is built on knowledge, culture, and experience that one has with the
service delivering agency/company/people. Think of Geek Squad or Molly Maid.

ii) Retail brand- this brand is built on a mixture of products and service experience. Think of Chick-
fil-a, Kroger, or KFC

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iii) Product brand- is built on the experience that one has with a specific product. Think of Nike,
Ford, or Sony.

Customers experience your brand in numerous ways: products, packaging, price, marketing, sales
personnel, etc. Each of these contacts or touchpoints molds the customer's impression of the brand.
Some of these touchpoints are obvious, like product performance, and one-on-one customer
interactions.

Your brand image creates expectations. It defines who you are, how you operate, and how you're
different from your competitors. In essence, your brand image is a promise - a promise that must be
kept.

In today's world, branding is more important than ever. But you can't simply build a brand like they did
in the old days. You need a cultural movement strategy to achieve kinetic growth for your brand. With
that, the sky's the limit.

There are a few reasons for this. Firstly, the world has come online and there are many new markets
and a growing middle class in places like India, China, Brazil, Russia, South Africa, Nigeria, Indonesia
and in many more places. These consumers buy brands. They buy premium brands. The best branding
today is based on a strong idea. The best brands have remarkable creativity in advertising to help them
break through people's wall of indifference to create brand heat and product lust.

The sophisticated strategy is a cultural movement strategy. I believe that building brands now requires
a cultural movement strategy as opposed to simply a brand building strategy. A cultural movement
strategy can accelerate your brand's rise to dominance. Once you have cultural movement, you can do
anything in a fragmenting media environment, maximizing the power of social media and technology.
The world has changed. We are now living in the age of uprisings and movements.

No branding, no differentiation. No differentiation, no long-term profitability. People don't have

relationships with products, they are loyal to brands. In a movement strategy, brands have a purpose
that people can get behind. Brands can inspire millions of people to join a community. Brands can rally
people for or against something. Products are one dimensional in a social media enabled world, brands
are Russian dolls, with many layers and beliefs that can create great followings of people who find them
relevant. Brands can activate a passionate group of people to do something like changing the world.
Products can't really do that.

Here are five easy steps to building a strong brand and an optimized customer
experience:
1. Identify your reasons-to-believe.

Your brand promise is irrelevant if your customers do not believe it. Therefore, your promise must be supported by reasons-
to-believe. This will automatically add substance to the promise and define specific expectations for the customer.

2. Identify customer touchpoints.

Each individual step in your business process contains a number of touchpoints when the customer comes in contact with
your brand. Your ultimate goal is to have each touchpoint reinforce and fulfill your marketplace promise.

3. Determine the most influential touchpoints.

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All touchpoints are not created equal. Some will naturally play a larger role in determining your company's overall customer
experience. For example, if your product is ice cream, taste is typically more important than package design. Both are
touchpoints, but each has a different effect on our customers’ experiences as a whole.

4. Design the optimal experience.

Once you have completed the above three steps to building a brand, you should be able to design your optimal customer
experience.

5. Align the organization to consistently deliver the optimal experience.

A holistic approach to aligning your organization to consistently deliver the optimal experience is essential. Identify the
people, processes, and tools that drive each key touchpoint.

Look beyond employees that have direct contact with your customers. The impacts of behind-the-scenes employees are less
obvious but no less important. Similarly, the impact of workflow processes and tools (i.e. technology systems) on the
customer experience may be less intuitive but crucial to consistent delivery.

The Final Word: Every product or service you bring to market yields a customer experience. Is it the experience you
intend? Does that experience fulfill the promise you've made to the marketplace?

By identifying the people, processes, and tools that drive your customer experience, you can actively design and control your
own, unique, optimized experience.

Books:

Brand Management: Research, theory and practice. Author: Tilde Heding, Charlotte F. Knudtzen

and Mogens Bjerre, Routledge.