“While you’re trying to position yourself for leads today, tomorrow, and the next day,” says Joe Talmon, vice president of Larmco, a siding and window company in Cleveland, “you also want to position yourself so that people feel good about your company and come to your Web site. Because they’re going to be in the market eventually.”
Say you set out to transform your home improvement company into a brand. Start by asking: Who am I? What does my company offer that competitors don’t?
What makes you unique, experts say, is what your brand is about. It’s your promise to the customer. So the trick is to pick some aspect of what you do, some process, some desired result, and hang your brand on it. Select something “valuable, rare, costly, or difficult to imitate,” suggests branding maven Sandra Sellani (see “On the Record,” page 20), author of What’s Your BQ?, i.e., brand quotient. The reason or reasons you stand above the rest. Then define it so it’s completely clear. “It could be, for example, a lifetime guarantee,” she says. “It’s what you mean. If I say, ‘Volvo,’ you think: ‘safety.’”
Hanke Brothers, for instance, is a name as well-known to Arkansas homeowners as Pepsi. The siding, window, and sunroom company built a brand position around the guarantee that it will service any product it has installed, “for the rest of your life,” at no cost. Then it spread the word via TV. In an industry swarming with fly-by-nights, that promise carries weight, especially since the company has been in business since 1977. Branding is both the process and the promise. “Unless you’re willing to make that commitment to quality and service,” says owner Kim Hanke, “you’re never going to brand yourself. If you live by price, you die by price.”
DIFFERENTIATE YOURSELF Once you decide what you are — i.e., how you’re different — the next step is to let people know about it. Does that mean you need to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an ad campaign? Not at all. Most home improvement companies would be throwing money away on that kind of “instant branding.”
Instead, get your brand difference into every communication. Then take it to another level by developing a tag line. The tag line could be just one word, or as much as a sentence. A tag line summarizes your difference and embodies your promise. Hanke Brothers, for instance, uses the tag line: Relationships that last a lifetime. Unique Home Solutions, in Indianapolis, promises: We’ll make your house a better home!
Yellow Steel, the Portsmouth, N.H., marketing firm hired by MWS to re-brand the company as True North Home Systems, developed this tag line: The right direction for your home.
Since MWS/True North spends a lot of time and money training salespeople and installers, carries top brands, and uses project managers to ensure installations meet or exceed customer expectations, “it really ties the whole story together,” says Jack Meehan, owner and president of Yellow Steel. “It’s about product, service, and getting value for your dollar.”
Tag lines are critical. Put them in every marketing piece, and on every truck, sign, uniform, and piece of stationery.
“It’s just a short phrase, but it gives people a clear understanding of what makes you different,” Sellani says. It plants your company’s name in people’s memories. “Clients and prospects have seen it all and heard it all. Give them something simple to remember. If you use it consistently, and if it’s clever enough, it’ll work,” she says.
