BRAND has the potential to be the single most valuable part of your organisation, worth tens of times more than the combined value of your plant, equipment and earnings.

A strong brand is the difference between selling raw commodities and selling value or services worth more than their combined components.

A customer pays more when buying a product or service with a strong brand, because they are buying based on an expectation that the brand is known to deliver.

What is a brand? We have asked this question to many CEO's, directors and even marketing managers and designers from small and large companies all over Australia.

The most common responses are; a brand is a logo, a colour, a name, the colour of our cars, stationery or signage.

These however are just the brand identity, they are the identifiers for customers to recognise your organisation in a crowd, on the street or within any media.

The brand though is much deeper, it is every single interaction point that your customers have with your organisation from the very first introduction to you from your advertising, your store presentation and your sales force through to the actual quality of your product and the quality of the service that you surround your product with from the sale through to delivery and after sales support.

How you go about growing your brand and enjoying the value that comes with
it is to move away from selling your product, and instead selling the thing the customer is buying, which is often two
very different things.

Lets consider the example of selling a boat, is the customer buying the components, ie: a 75 foot cruiser with this brand timber, that colour finish, this height etc or is the customer buying weekends relaxing in luxury with their family and friends or clients, or just personal fishing time.

Understanding the customers personal motivation and selling a solution to it is the difference between selling the components that make up the boat, and selling a dream - that's brand positioning.

A great example of selling what is being bought as opposed to what is being sold, is a project that we conducted with an Australian group launching a new investment fund recently.

They asked us to create sales materials to present the investment opportunity, the process, the return on investment etc.

But once we researched the target customers "very high net worth individuals", we found that they were not interested in the product or the process, in fact they would never read any materials we created for them - as that task would be delegated to their assistants or advisors.

We quickly realised that while the product was finance, we were not selling finance at all, what we were selling was access to likeminded men to get together for adventure.

This analogy works well because it allows us to "brand" the product and create an overall theme that will carry through the entire process.

Here is a quick table illustrating the corporate brand, the product brand and what's being sold versus what the consumer is actually buying.Corporate Brand Product Brand Being Sold Being Bought

Apple Ipod Music Player Coolness

Harley Davidson Heritage Softail Motorbike Freedom, Lifestyle, Rebellion.

Quiksilver Roxy Clothes Surf, Sexy, activeThe components that make up the bike Harley Davidson is not what's being bought - in fact you could buy the same quality bike far cheaper from various other companies, but buying a Harley Davidson is buying into an American legend, its buying a piece of history and branding the buyer as a seeker of freedom with a bit of rebellion thrown in, and customers will happily pay 20-30% more for that story.

The purpose of the diagram above is to illustrate that when you market your product, if you are explaining what's being sold - then you are probably selling and competing on price.

If you are explaining what's being bought, then you are probably selling a concept, a dream or a solution - and you're more than likely making a lot more money than your competitors.