The rise of the internet has completely changed the way most professional services conduct business. Gone are the days when there are simple barriers of entry to providing a product or service. Those days were fine, in some ways, but they did prevent a lot of people from living out their business goals in a way that was financially stable. Now that we have the internet, the game has entirely changed and opened to a whole new stage. We’ve cleared the first levels of this capitalist enterprise and have now entered a whole new game with all new monsters and bosses. With all of these new ideas swirling around, it can be scary and painful to ask what should I do? Should I consider strategy and tactics? How do I cope with customer satisfaction and providing adequate service to as many people as possible? These are all difficult questions and there are no easy answers. It all depends on the type of business you are running and the resources you have available to you at the time. Despite all of this, the opaqueness without answers and the ideas without end, there are a few things you can do to make your business stand out among all the others. Follow along.

How to get people to identify who you are
In order to better how to make the best customer experience, you have to understand how it is that people interact with any brand, not just your own. Let’s build a little story to better facilitate an understanding of this idea. Hightail’s is small sized grocery chain located in northern California. It has a few stories in a few towns and one big one located in the suburbs of the Bay area. They specialize in fresh produce and spices and they are known throughout the area for being of high quality. So, all in all, a good position for a business to be in. But the board who runs it wants to expand to more places in the bay area as well as other places in central and southern California. They even have stretch goals of selling in other nearby states. This is an ambitious plan and they think they can accomplish it but not without some sort of strategy. The members of the board all know they have to approach this problem with tact and sophistication lest they reach too hard and overspend. But how to do this? How to stretch out and take a risk while still being a manageable business?
The identity and usefulness of branding
There are a couple ways they can do this and every single one of them has to do with branding. Now, branding gets a bad reputation in some ways, from other businesses and the public as well. It’s necessary, of course, for any business to survive but if you do it badly then you are liable to end up a laughingstock at best and possibly legally acted upon at worst. So the board members of Hightail’s want to be careful. They know all of this and need to proceed with caution. They need to make their brand identifiable while still being authentic and sincere. They are perfectly knowledgeable of the scandals that have plagued other bigger businesses when they touch on subjects or aim for demographics without caution and sophistication. Strategy counts, above everything else. So they are left with a few interesting options.
All the ways you can do branding right
They come up with plenty of ways to get people to notice their brand and sort them out. There are mascots, of course, which can be useful when used sparingly. A character is often very useful in getting people to interact with a brand so long as the character is likable and useful. There is also music which they can write. Jingles have been a time honored advertising mechanism for nearly a century and for good reason. Music is known to imprint itself upon memory easily and is not easily forgotten. Strategy. Again, that is key. The folks at Hightail’s will do alright so long as they remember that they need strategy.