How to Build a 'Brand Vault' For Your Business – With a Little Help From Steve Jobs No matter how big or small your business is, use Steve Jobs' philosophy to get greater customer satisfaction.
By Jessica Wong Edited by Mark Klekas
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In the first article in this series, we introduced the concept of brand bank accounts, courtesy of Apple founder Steve Jobs. It is a very simple yet powerful idea to help startup founders and small business owners build trust with customers and other audiences. In this article, we are focusing on how to make deposits into your brand bank account.
If you want to build a successful brand, you have to view it like a bank account. It's more than simple marketing and a sleek-looking product. Here's how you can adopt Steve Jobs' mindset on branding to help make more money and create a business that consumers gravitate towards.
What Brands And Bank Accounts Have In Common
Brands and banks rely on trust. The higher your trust in a bank, the more money you may choose to deposit with that particular financial institution. The higher the trust in a brand, the more likely consumers are to purchase a product without spending hours researching it. They may also recommend the brand to others, even if they are not using a specific product. As a result, the more trust you can build with your business, the more money you can make in the long run.
Trust in a brand does not grow on its own. It relies on a steady stream of positive interactions between the company and its public. Whenever one of those positive interactions takes place, a small deposit is made into the "brand bank account." Like with real bank accounts, even small deposits accumulate and add up over time to form a substantial amount of capital.
How To Make Deposits Into Your Brand Bank Account
You need to understand that every single time potential customers and other stakeholders interact with the brand, there is a chance of a deposit being made. One of the best ways to ensure the deposit reaches the bank account is to do things for the benefit of the other party.
This approach starts with offering a solid product or service that solves problems for your customers. Think of it like your first big deposit when you open a bank account. That product is a huge deposit in your brand bank account, but you can start building your balance even before your first product launches.
Imagine being a startup founder getting ready to launch the first version of your product. At this stage, you and your team have the luxury of replying to the first customer inquiries personally. Use this opportunity to build the foundations of strong connections. A handful of meaningful, personal interactions can make your product a success.
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These interactions also give you an unparalleled opportunity to share your unique brand messages with audience members personally. Large household name brands no longer have that chance. Every single email response you write at this time can become a deposit. Every social media comment that your team replies to counts just as much.
Learn to Say the Right Things
When crafting your brand messages, try to think from your audience's point of view. What problems can your business solve for them? How can you improve your audience's work or personal lives? Avoid focusing too much on pure advertising messages, and try to focus on your audience.
As the CEO and Founder of a nationally recognized marketing and PR firm, Valux Digital, we successfully used content marketing to build a substantial brand bank account. Rather than talking to potential customers solely from a "get more clients" point of view, our team focused on sharing industry insights and contributing expertise that helped our audience and solidified our reputation.
Consistency has been a crucial part of this approach. To become a thought leader, your company needs to communicate regularly. Marketing and PR are highly dynamic landscapes, and you will only stand out, build your credibility, and make regular deposits into your brand bank if you communicate consistently and reliably.
Remember to replicate these messages across all your platforms to allow them to reinforce each other. Consistent communication is equally important in times of crisis. Dealing with a crisis, such as a product launch that went wrong, does not necessarily mean your brand bank balance is dwindling. Handled well and supported by open and consistent communications and fast action, something that seems like a crisis initially can turn into a positive event for your brand.
Steve Jobs and Apple faced many setbacks, but they always communicated and saw every hardship as an opportunity to strengthen their relationships with their consumers.
Let Others Make Deposits on Your Behalf
Not all deposits rely on your own team or your customers. A skillfully crafted public relations strategy creates third-party endorsement for your brand as bloggers or journalists talk about the company and its products. Asking bloggers, influencers, or journalists to test and review your product or service is a great way of generating this type of endorsement and encouraging others to make deposits on your behalf.
Of course, your reviewers may not only have positive comments, and they may also have suggestions for improvements. Those suggestions represent opportunities for further deposits if your team takes them seriously and acts on them diligently and in a timely manner.
Media coverage generated about your brand can translate into some of the most valuable deposits you make into your brand bank account. Aside from the opportunity for third-party endorsement, media coverage also opens your brand up to new audiences that may not otherwise have known about you.
The same is true for partnering with other businesses whose audiences may be similar to yours. At my company, we decided to partner with some of the industry's most respected publications and contribute high-quality content as part of a group of industry experts. Delivering useful insights to readers as well as reaching new audiences resulted in numerous deposits in our brand bank account.
Final Thoughts
Regular deposits in your brand bank account soon accumulate and grow your brand's capital over time. Even small deposits made by replying to an inquiry in a timely fashion or taking the time to solve a problem for a potential customer accumulate over time. Using PR to generate positive media coverage further increases your brand's credibility. Stay tuned for the third article in this series to learn how to avoid making too many withdrawals.
