Your brand and its perception is of paramount importance as you build your business.
Any brand you come into contact with will provoke some form of emotional response – good, bad, or indifferent.
It is important to know what you want your brand to stand for and then make sure all aspects of your marketing, communications and every interaction with your customers or consumers reflects this.
Attributes and values
Your brand is like any person you know – it will have its own personality with a whole set of attributes and values. It is essential that you work out what these are. Customers largely buy from you because of the emotional connection they make with your brand, especially when pricing across competitors is much the same. Importantly, customers will sometimes pay a premium when they truly love a brand and examples of this are well known.
If all of this is successfully executed then you will build brand equity, which will play a big factor in your company’s overall valuation. However, one word of caution – all of the above must be genuine and authentic!
Add more than just your core offerings
At Talent, everything we do is based around seeking ‘a better way’. Whether this is creating a better value proposition to clients and candidates through Talent Engage, or supporting and acknowledging bold ideas and brave leaders through the Talent Unleashed Awards, to enabling youth at risk through Talent RISE. We continually look for ways to make a greater contribution and add much broader value to our core services and offerings.
We are a challenger brand, often punching above our weight which requires us to be Bold and Intrepid – 2 brand attributes we identify with. We see ourselves as Innovative and can confidently say that we have undertaken initiatives that no one else in our sector has attempted.
We want our brand to be associated with Empowerment and our vision is based around creating a massively enabled tech workforce through the far reaching and holistic offering of Talent Engage and the Human Cloud. We are excited to have signed an agreement with Bluewolf/IBM to develop the next phase of this ground breaking initiative in the Salesforce environment.
I was at Dreamforce last week where I was treated to the amazing potential of AI through IBM’s Watson and Salesforce’s Einstein. I also witnessed a leader who certainly embodies being bold, intrepid and innovative – Marc Benioff.
Show leadership in your industry
Finally at Talent we see ourselves as Leaders and we try and demonstrate leadership in all of our activities and initiatives.
It’s important to show leadership in your industry and the wider business community. Be seen to set the example. The recruitment sector is too often guilty of poor customer service, lack of value and short term thinking. It is our mission to ensure we do whatever we can to demonstrate that there’s a better way.
This is a cause for which we are prepared to continually invest, overlook short term profitability and build real value. We have no doubt that the longer term rewards will be immense in more ways than one.