Instead of planning for the market conditions your company expects for 2023, you can proactively influence them to favor your strengths. Business enterprises do this all the time when embarking on a new brand growth strategy.
One definition of a brand is all the emotional and tangible touch points surrounding it. Take Apple, for example. The iPhone is the most successful product in history, but fans and investors equally admire the intangibles of its retail stores that redefined the category.
The qualities that shape a brand’s perceived value translate to margins that have made Apple one of the most profitable companies of all time. Likewise, your landscape services business can prosper by taking steps to strategically enhance its brand.
Landscape brands typically speak to tangible product qualities, but the right strategy can amplify intangibles that often reflect leadership embedded in its culture. These intangibles may include attention to detail, customer communication or environmental leadership. These attributes are nearly always evident in the way the company fulfills its mission.
The challenge is communicating these benefits to buyers, so they understand how the benefits will make potential buyers’ lives better. When that happens, you effectively raise the perceived value of your brand and the incremental margin it supports.
Choose how your company can win
If you don’t have a distinctive quality that gives your company a competitive edge, you only need to find one aligned with your strengths that exploits a market weakness. Then you must dedicate resources to establish the conditions for successfully fulfilling that brand promise.
1. Ask what buyers value that aligns with your capabilities.
2. Establish conditions to fulfill the promise of providing it.
3. Communicate the brand story that shows why it matters.
My residential design/build company was already successful when we decided to take the confusion and mystery out of buying landscape services. We reasoned that making everything transparent to buyers would result in a more enjoyable experience that also promised outcomes greater than they had imagined.
Most importantly, we did not try to be everything to potential customers. We decided the opportunity for our market was removing the fears and doubts of acquiring high-end residential landscape services. We reasoned that getting that right would establish sufficient trust to take care of everything else associated with delivering exceptional projects.
Branding is a way to choose your destiny. It’s an intentional process of strategically establishing how you want to win in the marketplace, as opposed to simply responding to the status quo. Our greatest challenge was perfecting how we communicated the difference our business offered and why it was in the best interest of our customers.
Over time, we became known for taking the fear out of buying high-end landscape solutions. Occasionally, our customers would refer friends who told us they heard we were expensive but worth it. They meant it as a compliment, but we were careful to reframe our service in terms of value.
The unexpected discovery we made is that because our brand value is personal, it cannot be easily copied. One of our competitors tried, but they never figured out that you cannot copy what’s personal to a business and its culture.
