Dec 4, 2019
A brand and a business sound pretty similar but in all reality, they are really different. A business is offering a product or service and delivering it. A business is only able to stand apart and compete on price. a brand has a personality, has interests, things that make it stand apart, it evolves over time, it grows just like we as individuals grow. Today we are chatting about what a brand is, and how we as photographers can work at building a brand instead of just a business.
what is a brand trying to find a good definition for a brand
is hard. It’s hard because it encompasses a lot.
Originally the word brand was used by rangers in the late
1880s when they would physically brand animals to identify
them.
So I live on a farm and ranch myself. For years we
only used ear tags on our cows and calves to identify them.
When calves are born we tag one year with their calf
tag. This has the same number as their mom's cow
tag.
For the heifers, we kept they would get their own cow tag in
the other ear.
If you have never seen an ear tag is a rubber tag that
is pierced through the ear just like we would
wear earrings. This system works pretty good for a few years,
but over the years the tags get worn down, and you can’t read the
numbers after a few years. Sometimes cows will rip out their
ear tags if they get caught on something, or stepped
on.
About two years ago we started freeze branding our
heifers. We raise black Angus so by
freeze branding the heifers they now have a white
letter and number that is all their own.
It won’t fade over the years, and it is easy to see
from across the pen.
We use brands to identify each cow individually, but may
ranches have their own unique brand that use to represent
their ranch. This makes it harder for someone to steal your
animals and pass them off as theirs at the sale barn. Cattle
wrestling sounds like something out of the 1800s but I ensure
you it still happens today!
Each ranch has it’s own reputation, as the ranch is
passed down from generation to generation that reputation will
change. Each generation will have its own spin on
how they conduct business, what bloodlines they decide
to integrate into the heard, and the final product it
produces. All of that will go into how people feel about the
brand.
While we won’t be physically branding our clients or
customers we do want to create that
reputation, perception, and feeling that people have when they
think about our businesses.
Much like a ranches brand reputation and preception is
going to evolve over time so should ours. This gives us the
ability to pivot. Businesses who are able to pivot
are the ones who are able to keep the doors open. So what
does pivoting look like?
A pivot usually occurs when a company makes a
fundamental change to their business after determining
(usually through market research) that their product isn't meeting
the needs of their intended market.
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