By Mark Taylor –
The Scottish Business Network is famed for a question, ‘What’s your ask’?
Ensuring the ask is heard by the right people in the network, anywhere in the world, who could help their fellow Scottish business, often a fellow Scot, find the answer.
The ‘ask’ represents many things that are fundamental to any strong business looking to grow and move beyond the shores of Scotland.
Clarity– the framing of a single question, that can help a business make progress, is like the clarity and focus any business needs to effectively project its compelling and competitive pitch and positioning, to stand out from a global crowd.
Clarity is how you want and need your business to be viewed as a brand. What makes you special, relevant and different? Why you Vs everyone else? The more clarity you have, the less likely your business is to lose its way, as you go further and faster in the world. Your brand is your beacon that guides you to where you need to be, from who you really are as a company of people from Scotland.
Energy- the positive energy coiled in a question, that could make such a difference in the answering to you, is central and universal to business success. Your business is growing, and that energy that needs to be channelled.
Understanding the brand you need your business to become, is to channel and focus vital business energy into a fundamentally customer-driven and competitive perspective and definition around what you do. Shareable by all.
But branding is often cast as a dark art in those business circles erroneously viewed as not yet big enough to afford it. Brand is what we’ll do when we get that more investment and are a bit less busy. But having worked on the frontline of defining and building brands for over 35 years, from Artemis to Unilever, GWR to Virgin, and many, many smaller, mid-sized and start-up’s in between, I can say hand on heart, that your brand and branding must be an inescapable ‘Day 1’, ongoing activity. Which initially requires belief, focus and imaginative action, more than deep pockets, marketing departments and PE investment.
Building a brand is mapping out space inside other people’s heads. Your customers heads alongside your colleagues too. It’s creating mental equity. Brands are what people think and feel about what you do as a business. Like a filing cabinet in the mind with your business name on the draw tab, with all the files of associations, perceptions and meanings you generate from being the business you are and the things you do and say, and the experiences you create, inside that mind. Philosophically and pragmatically, It’s about being customer-centric from the start.
But you’ll need to make up your own mind, in advance, of what you need and want people to think and feel about you over time. Which will of course need to be relevant to their needs, compelling against their wants and competitively differentiating in your market space. You will need to blueprint that brand, placing your brand for the customer at the centre of your organisation, informing everything everyone says and does, the decisions you make, initiatives you take, partnerships you forge, distribution you open up, people you hire, prices you charge, products and services you deliver and communications you create. Day in, day out.
But that’s not a big, new, budgetary thing, it’s an everyday, blueprinted mindset and action thing. Do what you need to do anyway as a functioning business, just with your brand always in mind, shaping it all in that direction.
Without the CLARITY + ENERGY of knowing your brand, like a brilliant ASK in the Scottish Business Network, your business may fall on deaf ears in the wider world and you might find it harder to grow with confidence and find your feet the further you travel on your business journey. As people appreciate within the SBN, we need the injunction to ‘get out there’ and ‘get connected’. Both of which are fundamentally better enabled, when you have CLARITY + ENERGY in and around your brand.
So, understand what you want your business to become in customers minds over time, and define that brand now for the Clarity + Energy it can deliver to your business every day. Then you can get out there and connect with some greater confidence and charisma, in front of customers or clients and all those you need to convince of your value.
And if you want to know more about how to transform your business into a more valued brand in 2025…just ask and I’ll provide some free time for us to talk informally about the basics of how it’s done, with some big questions for you to ponder.
Mark Taylor is the founder and principal of Branding Counsel MT, acting as bespoke branding counsel for CEO’s and C-suite, founders, startups and private equity investors. On a mission to help any business realise the power and rewards of defining the brand your business can become. He’s a Welshman based in Edinburgh but works with companies anywhere in the world.
