What is your Brand?

When I think of a go-to pizza, Shakey’s is the first thing that comes up to me.

When I think of an old-school but stable bank, it’s Metrobank.

When I think of a sports brand that most athletes wear, it’s Nike.

To me, this is the true meaning of a brand. The customers brand you and not the other way around.

The problem with most businesses or marketers is that they create their brand message based on the image that they want to project, not based on how customers are branding them.

I always ask in interviews, “if I call your former colleagues, what do you think will they tell me about you?”. That’s your brand.

I am writing this because I\’d like to share the proper mindset in discovering your brand. Also, Hilsoft never used a tagline, only a slogan \”Loved by Filipino SMEs for over 17 years\”. I think its about time to use one this coming 2019.

Looking back, I often hear from customers or partners that if you want your problem to be solved then call Dennis. Even in our team, if the devs couldn\’t solve the coding problem, then they call me. Debugging that takes days, I can solve in minutes.

So I am branded as a guy who can solve anything. Relative of course to business automation problems whether if it is a user issue or a software issue.

Just recently, I encounter different cases during sales meetings with clients. So we in the sales team always come up with solutions. It can be a simple software customization tweak, hardware integration or even iOT.

Now I can confidently say that not only me but we are tagged as a company who can provide solutions to each business process problems that the customer have.

A few years ago, I printed and posted a message in our office wall, \”You can solve anything.\” I posted it to impart to our team that with resourcefulness, creativity and having an innovative mindset, any programming problem can be solved. So I figured, why not use this as a company tagline to tell the world that there\’s a solution to every problem and Hilsoft can help and collaborate with you in solving them.

My next job is to make sure that I communicate this tagline to our team, so we are all aligned as to who we really are and how we are different from the others.

The most important thing is to create a process of how our team can systematically execute this brand to customers.

So in your case, what is your brand? Or should I say, what do your customers tell about you? I hope this writing can help you in discovering them.