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Branding a small business product seems unrealistic because most branding ideas involve large sums of money consistently spent over a long period of time.
If your business is small you should think of your marketplace in small terms. Branding requires the high maintenance cost of frequency and consistency. Creative cost controls allow for multi-media campaigns.
Can you identify a very small market within a larger market?
Is there a neighborhood where you can employ low-cost promotions?
Is there a potential for spillover or cross-advertising to adjoining areas for future growth?
Avoid advertising media that distributes far beyond your small target market. For example, you want to target a ten-block area (about 1,000 prospects) that is served by a newspaper with a citywide circulation of 50,000. The money you pay to reach 49,000 readers will bring enquiries from prospects outside your target area. Do you want the travel cost of running from one end of the city to the other? Consider the portal-to-portal time involved. Consider the purpose and consequences before selecting the larger medium.
See other samples in the Story section below.
We had a story to tell that required more space than we could afford in the only mass circulation available to our target market. One option was to fill an envelope with several promotional messages and product details that had been produced in-house. We had enough children in our family to distribute items to the entire market during one week of after-school hours.
How could we entice people to open the envelope to view the contents?
At that time, a magazine had reproduced a copy of an abstract painting consisting of wavy lines that was an optical assault on your eyes. It was impossible to ignore. We had a print shop copy that onto large white 9" x 11" envelopes with the brightest blue ink they had. Our kids placed the envelope on the doorstep rather than in a mail receptacle. We got that idea because the younger ones couldn't reach the mail slots.
The results of the campaign yielded all the sales we could handle. Because the printer's minimum order was 5,000 copies, we used the surplus envelopes for several subsequent campaigns.
A local carpet cleaner distributed apologies for the noise his truck-vacuum was making in a neighborhood.
The 5" x 7" cards contained his handwritten note printed in blue ink to simulate a personal written message.
One note read, "Please forgive the noise coming from our customer's driveway. We hope your neighbors will do the same if you invite us to make a noise in your driveway." I suspect his success was the negative sound of the word 'noise' was offset by the absence of a sales pitch on his fine service.
A home renovator bought a new truck. He decided to keep the old truck as a spare. Despite having a lot of mileage on the power train, the old truck looked pretty good. He did a little body work on it before applying paint that included attractive advertising messages about his services.
At the end of each day he would strategically park this eye-catching display in different locations in his target area.
Our product differential was high quality product and service. We invested in a high quality advertising medium. It was a top-of-the-line coffee cup with an excellent curved drinking rim. The shop's logo was duplicated on both sides. The drinker associated the message with the pleasure of enjoying a good cup of coffee while others received the message with a high frequency rate.
Extraordinary investment in medium required extra careful distribution.
We selected office buildings and other areas containing people with the discretionary income to expend on a high quality product. Before entering each office we estimated the number of cups we wanted to offer as gifts. Our wheeled luggage was left outside the office as we entered with our selection from the eight colors. Positive feedback singled out the convenience of color "individualizing" for each person at the coffee machine.
As the occupants of the office selected their favorite color we would quickly depart. We would carefully monitor the distribution of cups to persons visiting our shop requesting an extra cup. Incidently, the males invariably chose the darker colors.
This was branding with high expenditure on one factor, the medium, and controlled expenditure on the other factor, distribution.
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