You can have a name, a logo, brand colors, uniforms, truck wraps, and all that jazz, but if you don’t have this one thing, you don’t have a brand.

What’s the thing?

Mental Availability in the mind of the customer.

You have to show up as something good in the mental search engine residing inside your customer’s minds.

That means if most people have either:

  1. Never heard of your company, or
  2. No feelings one way or another about your company

Then you don’t have a brand.

Want an example?

Without looking online, name as many hearing aid brands as you can, right off the top of your head.

How many could you name?

Most people can’t name any. Some few might mention one (usually Beltone).

And yet, there are dozens of brands of hearing aids, and undoubtedly the CEOs and CMOs of them firmly and falsely believe they have a brand.

But they don’t.

Because brand is determined by what’s in the minds of the customer base and general public, not by things like names, logos, and color schemes (though all of that is necessary and helpful).

Now, you may have a brand in the minds of your customers — they may have very strong feelings and associations about who you are as a company, what you stand for, etc.

And that’s great for pushing solid word of mouth and repeat customers.

Unfortunately, word-of-mouth can’t really help you grow nearly as much as you’d like to believe.

The good news?

If you’re in that position, all you need to do is engage in brand-building advertising to grow your business.

Whereas a business whose customers have no definite conception of the brand needs to first create their brand identity and then advertise it.

And note that if you are advertising, but your ads:

You very likely still don’t have a brand, despite running an ad campaign.

The only way to have a true brand is if your prospective customers already know about you and like before they need what you sell.

That’s how you grow market share.

That’s how you keep your profit margins high.

And that’s how you use mass media branding to become king of your category within your locations.

So… do you really have a brand?

Would you like to?

Let’s create — or improve — your brand identity and launch it into the minds of customers.

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