Branding is a vitally important component of your overall business and marketing plan. A strong branding strategy ensures the public will clearly understand your company’s value proposition. Poorly implemented, however, a brand strategy can leave clients perplexed and unimpressed.
There is a lot of confusion over exactly what is meant by branding. Most simply defined, your brand is the total sum of people’s perceptions about your company. A brand is not a logo or your mission statement. In fact, your brand is not even whatever you say it is! Your brand actually exists outside of your company at the intersection of your corporate intent and the way the public perceives your performance. Your brand is whatever the public says your company is all about! You can certainly shape those perceptions, therefore smart travel agencies spend a lot of time developing, maintaining and communicating their brand.
Every travel agency seeks visibility in its marketplace. Through advertising, niche marketing, and solid networking, agencies work to raise the profile of their travel practice above the crowd, so the public immediately associates the agency’s brand with the word “travel.” Creating an association strong enough to be top of mind anytime someone thinks of “travel” is no small feat but, especially on a community level, it is achievable. No doubt in your own community, there is at least one travel agency with more than its proportionate percentage of “mindshare” – many people immediately think of that agency when they think of their next cruise or vacation.
For most travel agencies, the task of creating a local visibility is one of public relations and advertising. Social media also can play a very important role in building a local brand. The agency advertising must clearly spell out the company’s position in the market place and the credentials of the agency and its advisors. Moreover, each of these features has to be clearly related to a benefit to the consumer. The consumer must, over a period of time, be exposed to the agency’s advertising and public relations with sufficient frequency to remember the agency brand.
When an agency has properly positioned itself in a marketplace, not only does it create its own identity, but it also clarifies the demographics of its client base. Knowing who your clients are assists in the identification of the appropriate venues for advertising and helps to focus the agency’s marketing efforts. Positioning a brand, then, takes place not in a vacuum but in relationship to the other elements of the market place: differentiation relative to competition, credentials relative to the industry as a whole, and marketing relative to the consumers of the agency’s services.
A brand requires diamond-like clarity and an explicit promise of value. Consumers are capable of differentiating strongly between similar commercial experiences on the basis of brand. For example, can you differentiate between Wal-Mart and Target? Volvo and Mercedes? Apple and Dell? CNN and Fox News? Most people can easily and consistently differentiate between these brands.
A strong brand allows you to retain your loyal customers and greatly benefit from word of mouth marketing. If you want to charge a premium service fee as a travel consultant, in fact, if you want to rise into the top 20% of your industry, you can only do so with a strong brand.
There are three critical steps to building a strong brand:
- Brand Development
- Communicating the Brand
- Maintenance and Fine-tuning
Goal: When your client thinks “travel”, your client thinks about YOU (in a positive light!)
Too often, branding happens without any intentional thought or direction – the company’s brand simply evolves from customer experience. If the travel agent is very good at what he or she does, excellent at communication and customer service, an unconscious approach to branding will work, but never as well as a directed, focused branding strategy.