How to build a brand

Hear Flight Centre’s Geoff Harris, MYOB’s Craig Winkler and Rip Curl’s Brian Singer talk about building a brand.

Watch our video of top entrepreneurs.

SmartCompany has teamed with Nine Network’s Your Business Success to bring you lessons from top entrepreneurs, including Flight Centre’s Geoff Harris (right).

Every week we take a different theme and share entrepreneurs’ insights, tips, challenges, mistakes and triumphs.

Brand! It’s one of the biggest misconceptions about marketing: that to build a brand successfully from scratch a company needs to spend large sums of money on advertising in mainstream media.

You can build a brand cheaply, if you are clever.

1. Use viral and word-of-mouth marketing. It is the most powerful and cost-effective way to build a brand.
2. Target a small number of customers to begin with, and ask them to act as advocates for your product or service.
3. Identify opinion formers in your industry sector, such as analysts, and devote as much time as it takes to establish a relationship with them.
4. Spend money getting the fundamentals right, but do not cut corners: get the best design and the best consultants.
5. Do not follow big established brands down the media advertising path. It’s too expensive and you will be lost in clutter.
6. A great website is essential.

Watch Flight Centre’s Geoff Harris, MYOB’s Craig Winkler and other top entrepreneurs talk about building their brands.

Your Business Success — Sunday mornings, 8.30am on the Nine Network.
The Your Business Success series on the Nine Network provides practical business advice from Australia’s leading entrepreneurs applied to a real life businesses. Each week a different entrepreneur shares their business knowledge: from Maxine Horn of Fone Zone, Brian Singer from RipCurl, Paul Cave of the Sydney Bridge Climb, Geoff Harris from Flight Centre, and many of Australia’s other leading entrepreneurs.