Putting a label on your brand is a challenging thing to do: you have to know exactly where you position your brand – and consequently your company – in the market.
Questions that you must think about before you decide to label your brand should be:
- Who is my main target audience?
- What do I want to achieve?
- Do I want to improve my position or stay in the same place?
These are the questions that you should try to find the best answers to, when you want to start labeling your brand for some purposes.
The purposes are: getting more popular / visible, getting new clients, achieving a target, creating an image, building your brand. Or even more – you tell us yourself.
There is one thing though: you should really be careful because once you start labeling your brand, it would be hard to change afterward, so think carefully before you put any label on it.
Appreciating your own brand to reach a better position in the market
Often, people are so desperate to attract clients that they market themselves lower than they should. They try to grab clients by the means of “Hey I’m cheap, use me, you won’t waste your money”.
But they often forget, too, that the right quality demands the right compensation.
We are in the right position to say that, because the websites we do are relatively high-end thus demanding better compensation, and despite abundant offers left and right from other cheaper vendors, our clients are still willing to hire us and pay the fee we ask, because what we offer is what they are looking for.
We appreciate our own brand and we try to give a good label on it: a digital agency that does advanced web development, not for less, nevertheless reliable and very much sought for.
And when you start giving an image of yourself as “cheap” in hope that due to your quality of work, people will start pay you more, then you are wrong – if you label your brand this way, people will never pay you big – because in the first place, you’re the one who says that your services can be bought with a low cost budget.
Recently, I stumbled upon an advertisement on Google that says: “Low cost design agency for all your needs. You shouldn’t pay so much for such jobs.”
This kind of thing makes me wonder if the advertiser really does appreciate his own brand. Never, never will we, even in our wildest dreams, want to put a “low-cost” labeling on our brand – for one simple reason: we are NOT cheap – we are worth something good! And we want to do projects we can be proud of, as well!
And the thing about “You shouldn’t pay so much for such jobs” – I really disagree with this. Digital development is not something you can “bargain for”. Even though it’s something non-physical, something you can only see on screen and only exists in a virtual world, it has a price. It has a combination of research, effort, skills and work hours behind it.
By saying “You shouldn’t pay so much for such jobs”, you are condemning your OWN job, your own skill, research, effort and work hours unworthy. You are actually telling clients “What I do is crap so don’t pay so much, it’s not worth your money”. That is the message that comes across to them, while, we’re sure, most of the time, the message you originally intend to send out is “I do great job for less”.
Of course, being low-cost, positioning yourself at the bottom of the ladder, means that you could have bigger opportunities to get projects because more people are able to afford your services.
Being selective like we do means that we don’t get to get as wide a range as the low-cost vendors get, but at least we are sure that everything that comes will be worth the wait and the effort.
Labeling your own brand is a reflection of how you define yourself.
Good? Bad? Cheap? Worth the price?
It’s for you to define.
At IdeBaik, we definitely put ourselves in the positive polar, so that the label we get are the correct one, the message we send will come across properly – and our position can only get better in the future.
So, start thinking about your goals now, think about what you want to build, what you want to do with your brand, and don’t settle for less!
