How Do You Establish and Refine Your Business Identity?Establishing and refining your business identity is a critical part of small business marketing. The American Marketing Association, the pre-eminent marketing association in this industry, defines marketing as follows: "marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large."(Approved October 2007).We, however, prefer Jay Conrad Levinson’s sage definition of marketing. Jay, in his brilliant book GUERRILLA MARKETING Secrets for Making Big Profits from Your Small Business gets right to the point as he defines marketing this way: Thus, everything to you do to create and refine your business identity is ultimately about marketing the business—to paraphrase Jay—to get your customer to buy your product or service and begin to patronize your business on a regular basis. Where To Start with Your Business Identity The company identity begins with firmly establishing what your business is about and that begins by conceiving and refining your idea for a business and then testing it among potential customers through market search. Your ultimate goal of marketing research is to see if your idea, and thus your company, will fly or if it is a dud. It is vital for you to prove or disprove your idea. Proving that your idea works will put you on a path to potentially succeeding in the business—BUT IT DOES NOT GUARANTEE IT--because there are 100 other things that could torpedo you. Disproving your concept is equally important because it will save you agonizing months or years stumbling along in a business that has low potential to succeed. Sometimes careful marketing research will neither prove nor disprove your concept but rather indicate that you need to refine and adjust your concept. Therefore, begin with your best idea and refine it until it shines. We suggest that you do not take a raw idea and try to market research it. Rather take the idea and refine it to the point where you feel you are ready to launch the business—except for the fact that you do not know if you have enough customers, and if you do, will they buy at the price you need to sell, etc., etc. Check out our page on undertaking market research for your new business idea. Once you firmly establish your idea and come up with strongly positive marketing research analysis of the idea, you need to take care of the essentials of the business. You need to:
It is important to set up items like the business telephone number and post office box before you register your company so that you do not have to use your personal telephone number or address for company contact reasons. It is critical to firmly establish the separation of business and personal at the very beginning of the venture for business and tax reasons discussed elsewhere. (It is also a discussion you need to have with your accountant.) Virtually everything about your business becomes part of your business identity in one way or another. Here are key items to include as part of your business identity. Here are frequently asked questions about creating and refining your new company identity:
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