SME Branding & Brand Designing is a crucial component of the success. If so, then…

– Why is there no planned focus on branding at the start of the business?

– Why is entrepreneurship a journey of ups and downs?

– Why don’t entrepreneurs design their success at the very start?

In the video, Vishaal S Shah, Founder & CEO at Phi; attempts to answer the above mentioned questions, from the perspective of branding, based on his journey of 20 years and his experience of working on branding projects with 100’s of SME Entrepreneurs.

Click on the PLAY button to view the video

Transcript: The journey of an entrepreneur is filled with great excitement, from giddying highs to giddying lows so much so it should be termed as an adventure sport. Hold on just adventure. Because the term “sport” would require a competitor; and if you look at it the entrepreneur has got no competition except his or her own self.

Image Source: www.shutterstock.com

If you have been living in Mumbai, you are probably used to the traffic snarls which keeps Mumbai’s motorists fretting and delays their daily commute on the road. But now with the construction of various Metro Lines going on in a full swing and work in more corridors picking up the pace, the congestion is about to get worse.

Step out of office for a meeting anywhere in the city and it takes you endless hours through the slowly moving traffic and congestion to reach your destination. The recent Metro works have only added further to the traffic woes. A study conducted in 2018 has revealed how traffic jam in just four metro cities costs India a whopping Rs 1.5 lakh crore!

Some time ago, a client came to us with a problem that we see all the time. Victor Manickam was an organization that works in the arena of providing knowledge and education to people from different walks of life. But their branding was too complicated and complex, and the stakeholders – be it internal or external, remembered the company as the program they were leading or participating in. This totally diluted the brand loyalty.

Their immediate problem was that they lacked proper brand architecture. What they needed was a new way of structuring their brand to bring their full range of services into focus, and at the same time, to simplify things for the end customer.

When you search on Google for a specific service or product in an area, you have probably noticed a small green “Ad” label next to the topmost search results. This is known as a Paid or sponsored result. And this kind of marketing is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM), where companies pay for their ads to display in search engine results.

SEM is no rocket science. It is a self-serving model that anyone with a little common sense and understanding can do. But then why do some Companies seem to be using it more effectively than others?

As an entrepreneur, you might have come across various branding terminologies – the primary being “branding” itself and “positioning statement.”

So to get this straight, branding creates positive user expectations of reward from your products or services. Positioning establishes a preference for your brand relative to competitive offerings based on the perception of a unique and important difference.