This is taken from pages of my ebook titled 'BRANDICULOUS: the ridiculously simple way to build a profitable business'. You can read more of it here http://yoxstudios.com/home.php if you want.


PREFACE

If you are a top ranking bank executive (or any other executive for that matter) trying to increase the fortune of your commercial banking business to a point where demand for branches across the entire radius of the Atlantic becomes so overwhelming, please drop this book NOW! Even though I'm certain you will get loads of helpful tips from it, there are already so many very expensive books on brands and branding with magnanimous grammar suitable for your calibre of person. I can tell from the number I have read.

After studying so many books, websites, blogs, notes, training and tutorials on brands and branding, and discovered all of them concluded that the key to building a successful brand is Relevance, Differentiation, Credibility and Consistency (though with different big words), I pondered intensely on why small business owners are constantly scared away from this simple and necessary key to business success by creating the illusion that branding is rocket science explored only by blue chip companies.

To ease my troubled mind, I decided to make an attempt at ensuring every tiny business becomes big and successful (or at least stand a very good chance of doing so) through the development of a brand in the simplest way. Yep! That is my reason for writing this book.


INTRODUCTION

Except you are the only one offering a particular product or service that people must either use or die, you must build a brand to be successful.

Brand, brand, brand... What exactly is this new rave of a phenomenon called brand.

There are two things that it is clearly not
1: it is not rocket science. It is easy to understand and implement
2: it does not work like magic: yes, it will improve your fortune if rightly done but it will not happen overnight.

So what exactly is a brand, how do I create one and how can I improve my fortune with it?

The answers to these relevant questions exist in the simplest most understandable terms in the following four chapters of this book.

Chapter 1: Brand and Branding
Chapter 2: Creating Your Brand
Chapter 3: Developing your Brand Identity
Chapter 4: Cost Effective Marketing Strategies


CHAPTER 1: BRAND AND BRANDING

What is a brand?

A brand is PEOPLE'S IMPRESSION of something. It could be of a person, product, service, business, etcetera.

It is created by kept or broken promises communicated through visual and verbal identity.
Big English? Let's break it down. Shall we first take a walk down memory lane?

By way of the fact I studied agricultural science back in high school, I got to hear of the word branding very early in life. My teacher explained it as the act of creating a symbol with metal, heating it up in fire and stamping it on the bodies of his livestock (example, cow) to differentiate his animals from that of other farmers in the open market.

My friend, many years later, I discovered that is how brands and branding actually began.

Back to our definition. Let's imagine a real business for ourselves and let us name it Yox Farms. Yox Farms claim you can count on them for robust and healthy cows (that is their promise) and then they create a metal star (that is their visual identity), stamp it on all their cows and send the town crier to go round all the villages shouting "Yox Cows! Yox Cows!! Fat, sexy Yox Cows graced with the mark of the star are now available at the Kokiri farmers market (that is their verbal identity).

By way of this, people will go to the market with the IMPRESSION that Yox Farms is the number 1 company to provide them with well fed, healthy looking cows. When they get to the market, they will look for the cows with the mark of a star (Yox Farms logo), they will see fat, healthy cows, they will happily buy, they will go home and they will tell others that if they want robust and healthy cows, they should buy the cows with the mark of a star. Yox Farms have made a promise, they have communicated their promise and they have kept their promise. By that, they have created an impression in people's mind and they have sustained the impression. Simply so, they have created a brand.

However, assuming on getting to the market, people find lean cows or they buy fat cows, take it home, eat it and then they suffer from mad cow disease, no matter how loud the town crier shouts FAT AND SEXY COWS, people will not buy because Yox Farms have successfully repositioned their brand as 'incompetent liars'. That is the impression people will now have about Yox Farms, their star and their cows.