Building a Brand or Producing a Product?

I'm supposed to be swimming right now but got stuck in some pretty ugly traffic thanks to a jackknived tracker trailer accident combined with professional baseball traffic. As such, after sitting in the car chugging through my $4+/gallon gas for about 30 minutes without making much headway I decided to turn around.

The upside? Those 30 traffic minutes gave me some time to think about - what else! - the business. I'll warn you upfront that this isn't a fully formed blog thought but more something that's been wrattling around in the back of my head for a few days and I'm hoping by getting it out here it may help clarify my own thoughts at the end of the day.

I'm a firm believer in "the brand." That if you're a small business owner you're not just producing a product (whatever that "product" may be) and sending it out the door but that you're creating an experience that has to permeate every aspect of your business so that from the outside people associate your product and your name with an entire brand experience.

Yeah - it may all sound good - but it's not cheap to create a brand. Right now we're revamping our website to bring it up to par with our brand identity and next year my focus will be on redoing all our print marketing material (I'm trying to use up all existing material this year as I just can't stomach trashing it all from either a financial or environmental standpoint). But for me it's also little stuff like a call today from a retailer who bought some product and one piece of her order didn't turn out the way she wanted. I could have simply said "well, sorry to hear that" since she wasn't looking for a 'freebie' but instead we'll be reimbursing her for that one piece. As I explained to her on the phone, I want to make sure that she's happy with every piece of product she puts out to her customers since it's her brand that's in question then and I understand that she only wants to put her best foot forward (I gotta admit - she was pretty happy!).

Don't get me wrong, we don't have it all figured out by any stretch of the imagination. But as I watch some of the newcomers to my workspace it's interesting to watch those who seem to be solely focused on producing a product versus those who seem to be focused on building a brand. In a way it's like a mini experiment since many of these newcomers are only here for the summer season.

That's the idea...I'll watch how the product vs. brand battle plays out with the summer workers and see if my thoughts that brand should reign supreme actually brings successful results.