Building brand…

Dont bounce off looking at the topic, this is one of the most discussed topic and everyone hates it 🙂 . A startup specially internet startup spends most of the time/resource thinking how to build brand ? how to increase direct traffic ? blah blah…..

Here i do not want to get into 10 steps for building brand but rather would like to ask some very obvious questions, so when next time there is a brand / direct traffic meetings with a brand consultant, you know what to look for..

Do you know what user wants? This is the most important question and should be answered completely before even getting into any meetings forget brand/direct. If you do not understand your users, what they want? why are they coming to you? and whether u are able to answer their queries. Go get this first, talk to users/read analytics/understand them.

One example stands out for me: We were suppose to have a consumer call with one of our power sellers, this was in one of the marketplace website where power seller can sell products to users. We were about to release a major enhancement which all the power sellers were aspecting and I was very skeptical about the meeting. I was aspecting a good bashing about the feature not yet released and loses the power seller is incurring because of delay in release etc. Guess what he was waiting for a minor bug fix which was not even added in our release cycle, it was a simple address switch based on country selected by users, so that buyers are comfortable with this seller. Infact he did’nt wanted any of the hi-fi feature we were building and told me upfront in the meeting. Moral of the story is talking to the power sellers (Our user/customer) made me realized the actual user problem and solve it much faster making him happy customers. Now that builds brand!

So next time you walk in to any of the brand meetings ask What does user want? If none is aware, initiate a user interactive session, that will be much more productive rather than brand consultants and these unnerving meetings with no conclusion.

As the saying goes “User is the king”!!

 

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