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Building a brand

Published on July 30, 2015   17 min

A selection of talks on Marketing & Sales

Please wait while the transcript is being prepared...
0:00
JAN WARD: Hello. My name is Jan Ward, and I'm CEO of Corrotherm International. Corrotherm is a global supplier of specialist materials to the oil and gas industry with offices in 10 countries. I'm going to talk today about building a brand, which is something that I've strived to do with the Corrotherm brand since it was first founded 22 years ago.
0:25
Branding often gets confused with marketing. But building a brand is all about establishing an identity for your company or product. Marketing, on the other hand, is focused on the methods you use to reach your customers with your brand. Whilst the two things do go hand in hand, they are not the same thing. Branding is often perceived as something that only large corporations do. However, it's even more important for young businesses, whatever their size, than for larger, established ones. Starting the company with a brand scoped out is the key to establishing an identity and getting that recognized by customers. It's also essential for hiring the right people for your business. It's crucial that your team must understand and own the brand.
1:17
Establishing your company's identity is more than deciding on a name and a logo. It's about what the company does, what does it stand for, its values, how it's perceived by customers, suppliers, and staff. To be able to create an identity, you must first decide on what it is your company is for. What was the perceived or known gap in the market that the company was founded to fill with its products and services? In order to begin the process of building a brand, you have to characterize your vision, the reason why you wanted to start the company, what you wanted it to stand for. It's a picture in your imagination of where you would like the company to be in the future, and how you would like the company to be perceived. It's also about what sort of person you want to employ and how you want to employ the staff and the company and how the company is viewed by the staff.