If you doubt this, consider how easily you can identify Coke and Pepsi by their logos alone. Or  think about choosing an airline for your next trip - whether you’re booking first-class or coach, you’re unlikely to choose any airline, regardless of how good a deal it offers, if it hasn’t established a consistent and proven reputation for safety. 

Your brand is what your company stands for and how it is perceived by the rest of the world. Well-known examples include Volvo, which is synonymous with “safety,” or FedEx, which is known for “on time delivery.” 

1: Establish a Clear Hotel Brand Position

2: Build Your Hotel Brand on an Emotional Benefit

3: Build Your Hotel Brand as Early as Possible

4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets

5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position

6: Make Sure All Your Products and Services Embody Your Brand

7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position

8: Don`t Dilute Your Brand

9: Always Monitor Your Brand

10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organization`s Most Valuable Asset 

Commandment 1: Establish a Clear Brand Position

A brand position is a clear, unambiguous statement that communicates what your company stands for and what it offers. For example, we all know that FedEx is an overnight delivery company that promises, above all, to get your package to its destination on time. Most of us make a nearly instantaneous connection between FedEx and “overnight reliable delivery.” 

This is what a good brand should accomplish: an instant connection between the company and its key offering. If you’re FedEx, you want your brand to become synonymous with overnight reliable delivery. 

Commandment 2: Build Your Brand on an Emotional Benefit

You should always strive to build your brand on an emotional benef it rather than an economic or functional benefit. There are two reasons for this: 

1-Emotional benefits are harder to copy.

2-Emotional benefits have more of an effect on people’s behavior. 

When you think of emotions, you think of impact. And in the world of branding, an emotional impact is a very powerful tool that can be used to create recognition for your business. Your goal is to find an emotional benefit that is far superior to that of your competitors and to associate that benefit with your brand. In other words, you want to own that benefit. 

Energizer is an example of a company that offers a functional benefit. Their batteries “last longer” than their competitors’. What’s a good example of an emotional benefit? Consider “Peace of mind.” FedEx gives you peace of mind because you know that when you use the company’s services to mail important business documents, those documents will reach their destination overnight (and you’ll still have a job). Volvo’s promise of safety is clearly an emotional benefit: 

Your family’s lives are at stake when you drive on the highway. Michelin similarly provides confidence that your children are riding on safe tires. 

Commandment 3: Build Your Brand as Early as Possible

If you don’t build your brand as quickly as possible, someone else may take the position that you want. That’s just a hard fact. There are two issues at stake here.

First, your customers will create an image of your company in their mind’s eye nearly immediately, so you need to be ready from the get-go. Second, there’s a lot of competition in the world of branding; your direct competitors may be the fast followers who have entered the market soon after your launch. The earlier you establish your brand, the more customer loyalty you’ll gain.Ideally, before a competitor tries to knock you out of the market, you have established your company as the leader in a certain area. 

Commandment 4: Be Consistent Over Time and Over Markets

Marketing strategies need to focus on the attributes of the product or service so that they are effectively positioned in the marketplace. Brand strategies must do that too, but a branding strategy must also focus on the associations and identifiers. 

Developing brand associations requires consistency over time and across markets. This simply means that everything your company does and everything it says—in short, all of its communications, packaging, and management practices—should be going in the same direction as its brand. For example, if the key benefit of your product is safety, then everything you communicate across all your markets should be about safety. This kind of consistency and repetition will stay in the minds of customers; they will have the same experience every time they see your product, and they will remember it. That has been the strength of the world’s most valuable brands, such as Disney, IBM, GE, and Nescafe. 

Commandment 5: Make Sure All Your Employees Know Your Brand Position

You want all the touch-points in your company to reflect your brand. For example, if your brand is built on “friendliness,” everything in your company must embody that, from the employees to the logo to the company lobby. 

Branding should extend across all aspects of your internal communications. These include: 

-Business cards

-Business environment

-Employee appearance

-Employee interaction with customers

-Ambiance

-Signage

-Stationary

-Bulletin boards

-Brochures 

Commandment 6: Make Sure All Your Products and Services Embody Your Brand 

We mentioned before that a brand is a promise. It builds trust with your customers. If you come up with a brand position and your product or service doesn’t embody it, your brand will have no credibility and will quickly fail. If Southwest claims to embody friendliness, then they must live up to that promise in everything they do. If FedEx promises overnight delivery, they must ensure that happens. If Volvo makes a promise of safety, they should test every last detail in their cars to make sure they are as safe as possible.

Commandment 7: Make Sure All Your Customers Know Your Brand Position

If your product or service embodies your brand and your customers don’t know it, it’s useless. You must always remind customers of what you do well, and then remind them again. Sounds extreme, right? It isn’t. Don’t count on your customers to tally up what you do for them. This is not their job; it’s yours. 

          Philip Normann

Commandment 8: Don’t Dilute Your Brand

Once you have established a clear brand position, don’t dilute it. What this means is that you shouldn’t keep extending your brand or adding to it indefinitely. If you extend it, you might actually hurt it. In particular, you should never extend your brand to products and services where customers won’t let it go. Remember, branding is about what customers will let you do. 

The goal of your brand is to make an immediate and clearly identifiable impression on people, one that links your company to a clear benefit. To that end, you not only need to stay on message, but you need to keep your product offerings consistent with your brand. 

Commandment 9: Always Monitor Your Brand

 Let’s say after your launch that your brand position resonates extremely well with your target market. You’ve done everything you should do and your brand is a success—great. What’s next? The work isn’t over—far from it. You need to continually monitor your brand position to make sure it remains relevant to your customers. Trends change. Your brand needs to change with them. At its simplest, monitoring means continually asking people what they think your brand stands for. The key here is to look at what the associations of your brand are. 

Commandment 10: Maintain Your Brand as Your Organization’s Most Valuable Asset

 It means maintaining consistency, communicating and monitoring. It means putting Commandments 1-9 into practice every single day. The companies with the world’s most valuable brands have mastered this process.  

If you maintain your brand, your chances of success are far greater. And remember, branding is essential for all businesses, not just large companies. It’s equally relevant for small companies.