Unit 1 Task 4

 The Brand

As an entrepreneur, it's obviously very important to consider the more financial and business aspects of running your own creative enterprise. However, it's just as important to consider how you display yourself and your business as a brand to the wider public. If you don't have a good brand name for yourself, you'll appear as less of an effective business. Your brand has to have a good place in the market, a good image and the ability to spread itself out to a wide range of potential clients across your demographic. When building the brand of your business, there are several things one has to consider.

Mission Statements

The first thing you have to consider when building up your business' brand is the mission statement of your enterprise. Put into simple terms, the mission statement of a business is a statement that declares the purpose and services of a company in a short digestible sentence. A good mission statement will show the reader exactly what the business will do for them in an ideally emotional and impactful way (although it can be rather hard to put emotion into a single sentence about how you sell things).

A good example of a mission statement from the creative industry would require me to go back to one of my case studies - the National Centre for Writing. I've researched both the mission and vision statements for the NCW, and found their examples to be both fitting and effective. According to their website, their mission is "to support writers at all stages of their careers", clearly telling us that the NCW aims to help writers with their work no matter how skilled or famous they may be.

Brand Positioning

The next thing one must think about when creating the brand for a business is the company's brand positioning. According to The Branding Journal, business positioning can be described as "how a brand is different from its competitors and where or how it sits in customers' minds". Considering this, we can assume that a company's brand positioning will decide how the general public sees them and what opportunities they take within the global market, potentially encompassing the company's USP. If your company doesn't position itself well within the market, there'll be no reason for people to go to your business compared to another that offers the same services for a better value/better service.

An example of brand positioning within the creative industry would be a rather small subscription service called StitchFix, which aims to provide a variety of nice fashionable clothes for a variety of different demographics, although primarily targeting women. To set themselves apart from other similar fashion subscription services, StitchFix included a unique feature for their service - personal stylists. When you sign up for a subscription with StitchFix, they assign you a personal stylist that'll learn what kind of look you want over time as you both get more used to each-other and what your needs are. This adds a nice personal touch to the service, giving it a nice edge over other similar businesses that might appear more corporate.

Values & Drivers

Whilst not as closely related to your company's brand, it's still important for you to consider the values of your company and what drives your company forward, known as drivers. To start off with, the values of a company determine how they will run their business and what they will be focusing on with the day-to-day operations of their business. Without any values, a company will have no idea of what they stand for and what is important to them. Values are notably important for companies that don't have a profit-based focus, such as social enterprises that we looked at in Task 2. A specific example of company values can be seen with the National Centre for Writing once again - as a charity, their main values are based around expanding the writing scene within Norwich and promoting literature, therefore attempting to produce social change.

As for the drivers of a company, it's not quite as clear-cut according to my research. From a website called "Market Business News", I found that Business Drivers are resources, assets or anything similar that can largely impact the finances of a business, whether positive or negative. In simpler terms, a business driver is something that has a large impact on the performance of a business - a factor that can drive the business either to success or to failure if left unchecked. If a company is unable to decide on what its business drivers are, it'll have trouble figuring out what to focus on improving in order to make a better profit. An example of business drivers within the creative industry could be the prices of art materials dropping in the local area for an art commission business, driving the business to be able to make a higher profit due to the larger amount of materials available to create more commissions.

Marketing

All of the earlier things could end up meaning nothing if a business doesn't do anything to market themselves. After all, if nobody knows you exist then it doesn't matter how you position your brand or what kind of drivers your business has. But how does a business market itself? There are multiple different routes a business could take.

The first, and by far easiest, route to marketing a company is via social media. By creating a social media account for your company, you can get a good number of people following you who will see your content feed and potentially get interested in using your services or even spreading the news of your business to their friends. This method is particularly effective as it can be done by any kind of business: big or small, individual or group-oriented, it isn't hard to make a social media account. Additionally, due to the huge number of social media platforms available currently, you've got a wide market to spread yourself across.

Another method for marketing your company is through word of mouth/credit. This is harder for a company to control, as it relies solely on how successful your clients are with their endeavors regarding your work. If your company is focused on photography, then a client could use your photos on their website with credit. Someone visiting this website could find your photo on the website and get interested in getting some photography for themselves, hence upping your business. This is still possible for a number of different business types, although is far harder for any business to rely on due to its unpredictability.

There's a method of marketing that's available to larger companies too - advertising. If your company/business has a lot of money to their name already, it wouldn't be an issue to purchase some ad space. Whether this be on a billboard, an ad for a YouTube video or even a whole advert on TV, it's a guaranteed way to get people to see your business; after all, there's a lot of people watching YouTube and/or TV. Whilst this method can be extremely effective for a bigger company, it's almost impossible for a small company (and especially an individually run company) due to the prices of getting ad space.

For a specific example of a creative business marketing themselves, I'm going to look at another one of my case study businesses - Jon Gibbs Photography. Jon Gibbs has given himself a number of different marketing streams to get people seeing his work. He has a number of different social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Flickr and even a YouTube channel. In addition to these marketing platforms, Jon Gibbs also has two other ways to present himself to the public - word of mouth and his gallery.

As a freelance photographer, Gibbs can obviously get some potential business from people seeing his work on someone else's website and wanting to get some photography for themselves. More importantly, however, Gibbs owns a gallery in Norfolk. This gallery presents quite a bit of his photography for people to purchase as prints or to just look at as they visit the gallery. By having this sort of resource at his disposal, people could come to the gallery and see some of his work, eventually deciding to request a specific commission from him to decorate their home.

Blueprint

Another thing to consider when working on your business is the business blueprint. According to 'HowToEntrepeneur.com', a business blueprint is "a strategic plan that tells those operating the business the productivity requirements, the necessary jobs, the milestones, the targets and the expected outcomes." Considering this definition, we can assume that the business blueprint is similar to the business plan in terms of structure, although I believe it's more for the benefit of those running the business rather than to show to other people. The blueprint is a plan that shows what the business will need and what it'll need to do in order to achieve a series of specific results. The business blueprint can link to marketing and the customers of a company quite easily, as the blueprint could go into detail about what kind of marketing strategies the company is planning to use in order to grow their business. Additionally, the blueprint could talk about what area of the market they're planning to target and what demographics they're aiming to attract for their customer-base, showing a link to customers with the business blueprint.