Have you noticed that a lot of businesses out there are pretty hard to tell apart? One business may sell a product that’s completely different to the product another sells, but when you check out their website, or interact with their staff, or research their business models and practices, you end up seeing that they’re basically two sides of the same coin.
This is something you’ll want to avoid with your own business. You don’t want to contribute to the popular mindset that a business is just this faceless, soulless thing that doesn’t actually have an identity of its own. It doesn’t matter what you’re selling. You may not think what you’re selling is particularly exciting, even if you think it’s a good product and it ends up selling well, But if you don’t carve out an identity for your business that makes it unique, then you risk being lost in an ocean of other faceless businesses. And that just makes it harder to stand out to customers that may have done business with you!
So here are a few things you should be keeping in mind when it comes to carving a unique identity for your business.
Your values
A lot of companies don’t really have a lot of values. Not particularly moral ones, anyway. Businesses can really stand out from the crowd by aiming to do some social good with their influence.
You should come up with a set of core values that affect everything from your employees to the general public. Once you have these values created, they need to be set in stone. Be consistent. If you don’t stick to your values – for example, claiming that you are pro-environment but working with a company that causes massive pollution – then those values will just seem like a waste of time. You’ll look like any other empty, virtue-signalling company.
The danger of trends
Trends are often very ephemeral things. You may notice that a bunch of other companies are doing something, so you invest a lot of resources into pulling off the same thing. All of a sudden, the trend dies. And, in the process, you probably wasted money.
The problem is that following trends is precisely what will prevent you from standing out. That’s not to say you should buck every trend you should come across. Website design trends, for example, are often there for a reason! (They please visitors the most.) But others can just stifle your innovation. Don’t mindlessly follow trends!
What others think of you
Despite what many recent college graduates may think, identity is comprised, in large part, of how others perceive you. You can try to carve something for yourself all you want; if others see you as something completely different, then there’s probably a good reason for that.
Figuring out what others think of your company is crucial to this process. You can conduct surveys, check out Internet comments, ask for customer feedback, set up some interviews, and others in order to gauge what other people are saying about your business. If it doesn’t line up with the identity you want to achieve, then you need to make some changes.
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