Discover your brand and transform its weaknesses into strengths

Brand discoveries

Interrogate your brand until it confesses its entire characteristics: good, bad and ugly. A time-honoured way to achieve this is to undertake a form of analysis known as SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats):

Strengths

Perhaps the secret of this tool’s enduring appeal is that it starts with the good news (that is, the brand’s strengths)! Remember, however, that to qualify as a ‘strength’ the factor has to make a genuine and positive difference to the consumer.

What are your brand’s differential advantages versus the competition?
Are these advantages functional or emotional? Or both?
Are they genuine strengths or merely ‘hygiene factors’? For instance, the fact that your planned site is easy to navigate, entertaining and true to your brand character is not necessarily a strength; it is merely the minimum requirement set by your potential customers.
Can these advantages be emulated by your competitors?
If so, how long will this take? What advantages – if any – will you be left with? How will this affect your brand’s performance, both in the immediate term and in the longer term?
If your search fails to reveal any advantages, then clearly it’s time for a serious re-think. At the very least, you can console yourself with the thought that you have saved yourself a serious amount of time, effort and money in taking this particular proposition any further.

Weaknesses

Every brand has an Achilles heel; it doesn’t necessarily mean that the brand is a no-hoper; merely that it needs to be managed with these limitations in mind.

What are your brand’s liabilities/shortcomings?
How did they develop?
Are these disadvantages functional or emotional? Or both?
Can they be overcome and if so, how?
If they cannot be overcome, what impact are they likely to have on your brand’s performance, both in the immediate term and in the longer term?

Opportunities

This is the part where you get to ‘dream big’ for your brand. As the brand’s proud parent, guardian and fairy godmother, you are likely to get carried away by your offspring’s seemingly endless possibilities (‘organic wine today; organic bath salts/newspapers/private jets tomorrow’). The trick, therefore, is to temper your dreams with a huge dose of realism: keep your head in the clouds but your feet planted firmly on the ground.

How will your brand be able to grow – and keep on growing?
Can it create new audiences/distribution channels/product offerings/ strategic alliances?
What ‘outside’ factors (for example economic trends, political climates, technological innovations) are likely to have a positive effect upon your brand? How can you use these to maximum advantage?

Threats

Not a pleasant task for anyone with a nervous disposition. This is where you force yourself to confront a whole raft of ‘nightmare scenarios’, any one of which could spell curtains for your brand, your business, your mortgage, your early retirement plans… So why put yourself through this agony? Because ‘forewarned is forearmed’; it may help you to prevent the very disaster you fear, or at the very least, minimise the damage.

What factors are likely to damage your brand?
Internal factors, for example lack of funding, or core members of the team defecting to the opposition
Competitive brand factors, for example new brand launches
Category factors, for example City scepticism
‘Outside’ factors, for example unsympathetic economic trends or hostile political climates.

If you are a new start-up, this exercise will be particularly tricky. So play the ‘brand fantasy’ game. Dream your dreams and write them down. Then be realistic, identifying the potential weaknesses and threats which your dreams may face. Positive thinking is absolutely vital, but it must of course by tempered by a huge dose of reality. Many Internet start-ups seem to assume that they own a unique position in the world. Unfortunately, this is the wrong way to think: your reason for being is entirely defined by your customers; put yourself at the centre of the universe, and you may face a rude awakening.

In thinking about the future, remember that you have to plan for multiple futures. The only safe prediction of the future is that it is uncertain. The most difficult changes to spot will relate to those factors which you take for granted, and have thus become invisible to you. So think the unthinkable, and see where that gets you. If nothing else, it may create some new ideas for the next stage of your business development. By the end of this exercise, you should have a pretty good picture of your brand’s potential.

1. Online businesses must provide quality to buyers in order to succeed
Seller agents The greatest opportunity yet to be fully exploited online may lie in the area of providing value to sellers. Seller agents focus on helping produc...

2. Internet business context and fulfilment providers and payment enablers
Context providers Context providers create value for customers by simplifying access, providing information, and creating online spaces where customers can ga...

3. The European market appeals to online businesses
Attractive geographies While the European market is very attractive because of its size, it is highly fragmented and can not be treated as a homogenous whole. T...

4. Target audience for an online business varies by countries
How attractive is your target audience and how will this vary by country? When businesses segment their markets and decide which segments to target, they eval...

5. Best idea for online business is to create new value
Create new value The best ideas are those created by the Internet itself. These ideas create new value in the market, rather than just carving out a piece of th...

6. Internet business launching with a local regional or global offer
There are three options open to any business. They can create a worldwide offer with no localisation, go for a regional launch, or introduce separate local offers. Th...

7. Study your competition and beat it by improving your business
Communications discoveries Spend some time looking at what other relevant brands are doing. Look at your competitors in all the different categories in which yo...

8. Use team work to bring your online brand to life
Unleashing the dynamic force of ‘co-creation’ If you were working directly with JWT, this process of developing/defining the Brand Funnel and Brand Vi...