From the outside, it may appear that successful businesses “just happen.” While it’s true that some successful businesses exist because someone was in the right place at the right time with the right product or service, most successful businesses succeed because they plan to succeed.
One of the most helpful things a business owner can do is brand planning. If you’ve never heard of brand planning, you wouldn’t be alone. Many entrepreneurs start their businesses without ever having written a business plan, without knowing exactly what their target market looks like, and without having considered ways to differentiate their businesses from other competitors who are already in the market. And sometimes these businesses succeed in spite of not having done any significant planning.
When you’ve first opened your doors, it may be easy to get by without a business plan. Chances are good that you’re more involved in getting work done than anything else. When you have work in front of you, it’s easy to focus on day-to-day operations and needs.
In the longer term, however, you will need to consider your vision for your business, basic balance sheet issues like profit and loss, budgets, elements of your marketplace that can either encourage or inhibit growth, and strategic goals. Once you have considered these things, you can also work on strategies you can employ to take advantage of the unique conditions of your marketplace and develop an executable plan that will get your business to where you want it to be.
Brand planning also has the intangible benefit of forcing you to think about your business in the bigger picture of the overall marketplace. It gives you the opportunity to see your brand both as it is now and as it could be in the future. It also helps you to understand the needs of your potential customers, and find creative ways to meet those needs in ways that your competitors have not.
Finally, brand planning gives you the opportunity to control the growth of your business, and ensure that it grows neither too slowly nor too quickly. Expansion is a natural part of a healthy business, and brand planning helps you to determine when to put efforts into growth and when to bypass opportunities that may make your business less manageable, or steer it away from your initial vision.
Grantstreet Creative can assist you with all elements of brand planning, including the creation of branding materials, logos and other visual elements of your brand. We can also provide support for other services, such as creating business plans, branding and marketing plans, sales kits, website designs and other marketing materials your new (or established) business may need.
For more information about branding and brand planning, please contact Dave Ramsell, the Creative Director at Grantstreet Creative, for more information about creating brand and business plans for your venture!
Photo Credit: Laura Leavell, via Stock XChng
