Reilly Newman | For businesses to see a large return or impact of an investment, it’s surprisingly sometimes the small changes that will make the biggest difference. If you’re familiar with the 1% improvement rule, you’ll know that improving anything by 1% each day for even just a year will lead to massive results. From fitness and health to building a business, by making the smaller refinements, you can achieve stellar results.
This is why brand is so powerful. Brand is naturally a leveraging mechanism. As we’ve covered in other articles, brand can leverage everything from associations, personalities, lifestyles, aspirations, and perceptions. It’s a bit of a head-trip because the more you acknowledge this leverage, you see how brand is more of a psychological game than anything else.
Brand specializes in the small adjustments. The refinements that help take the business and experience to the next level. This focus on the small changes is because “brand” is leveraging through quality, not quantity. The more quality a brand the higher impact it will have. On the other hand, you have quantity or “mass” — this for example would be a business spending a large amount on an ad campaign or casting a very wide net with their marketing that lacks strategy. It won’t be too effective and will ultimately need to be repeated to maintain the momentum.
Peter Drucker said: “Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things. There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”
A brand is effective because it focuses on doing the right things, not just doing things correctly (deliberately not doing “that which should not be done at all” in efforts to strengthen the leverage of the brand and make every ounce of effort work for the business). These small changes can be subtle refinements to the brand’s visual identity like the logo, packaging, color palette, or other touchpoints. They can also be less subtle, but just as deliberate like a full name change or rebrand. The “smallness” of the change isn’t about size, but the precision of the change. It’s not about casting wide nets, but solely focused on being more deliberate with everything the business does.
The goal is to find an accurate focus based on the listening being done and how the brand has been crafted. Any other reasoning to make an investment or to release a new campaign, may need to be checked for a proper motive. It is in error for a business to be making a large investment or decision out of desperation or as a knee-jerk reaction to a competitor or change in the market. Brand’s focus on the deliberate points of leverage ensure that we don’t act out of desperation or reaction. Brand will help your business respond and be effective in a big way.
