Finding the Right Image for Your Firm

Making decisions about the right image for your company can be a difficult and confusing experience. There may be several areas in which you can focus your firm’s identity, but it is often hard to make good choices.

Part of the problem in choosing an identity is being sure that you understand what consumers perceive your firm’s mission to be. Your firm’s identity is as important as your own. It gives your company personality. It makes your organization live and breathe, almost like a human being.

Your firm’s image gives it personality, appearance and meaning. Businesses may provide hands-on products and services, but on their own they are intangible. One’s only involvement with a firm is how they are treated as customers, suppliers or employees.

We make our decisions about what a firm represents based on all of these experiences, as well as word of mouth, and the quality of products and services provided. But even with such company presence, we still need a way to package the entire essence of the firm.

Your company’s image is its essence. It is the package that everything that your firm is and does is rolled into. Just as a good package will sell a product and enhance its overall appeal, so will your good corporate identity.

Your firm’s image can both enhance, and be enhanced by, the rest of the elements that make up your firm. As your firm’s identity becomes better known, your revenues should increase. As you continue to provide good products and services, your company image should improve. This is a two-way process.

So, when choosing an image you must consider the entirety of what your firm is, has been, and will be. However, most entrepreneurs are more caught up in the financial aspect of image building, seeing it more as an expense than an investment.

When choosing an image you need to consider both internal and external markets. The internal markets are those who work within the firm. Employees take pride in their relationship with your business, providing that it has a good company image.

Your external markets don’t just consist of your target customers, but it also consists of other firms that yours interacts with to conduct business. This may include, but need not be limited to, suppliers, competitors, regulators, bankers and investors.

Even non-customers make up part of the many stakeholders of your firm. Perhaps they aren’t customers today, but with the right image they may well be customers tomorrow.

The whole modern day emphasis on building customer loyalty, lifetime value of the customer, and share of customer, are heavily dependent on the kind of image your firm can create, who values it, and how you maintain it over time.

When designing, or redesigning, your corporate image, take stock of three things:

- your own internal mission and the ideal identity to meet internal market needs and desires

- customers and what they value in your firm

- your competitive niche regarding other firms in the same industry.

What is the niche that your firm should be appealing to? Is it a low-end or discount image, or a higher-end, more polished image? Is it a viable market? Don’t mess with your image by taking on low-end products if you run a high-end shop, or vica versa.

What is your firm’s unique selling proposition? What does it do and how does it do it better than all of the other firms that provide the same good or service? If you can’t find a unique selling proposition you will have a difficult time coming up with an image.

If your firm has a mission statement that describes its unique selling proposition, or other information that you feel will be valued by your customers, try using a tag line, or slogan. Using such branding, even though it is short and sweet, is highly effective in relating your firm to a particular target market.

Try to not position your firm’s image too close to major competitors. If you can’t see the difference between your firm and the others, your customers won’t be able to either.

Research has shown that product differentiation is a viable marketing strategy, as is focusing on a niche, or having real cost advantage in providing your good or service. All of these can easily be folded into a positioning statement. The positioning statement helps the firm to craft an image that is consistent with the rest of its marketing strategy.

When choosing your image, be clear, be honest and don’t oversell. If you can’t deliver on your promises your image will become tarnished. When building a company image it is better to do it right the first time than to try and to do it over!