Branding Matters

ALEXANDRIA, Va.—On this week’s episode of Convenience Matters, “Brand Strategy,” NACS hosts Jeff Lenard, vice president of strategic industry initiatives, and Donovan Woods, director of operations for the Fuels Institute, discuss all things brand-related with Mike Lawshe, president of Paragon Solutions.

“The problem is that people have a very limited understanding of what brand is,” Lawshe said. “Brand is really every way you communicate as a company. It’s your culture, it’s certainly the logo and certainly the name.”

Lawshe pointed out that the logo and name should be just the starting point of a company’s brand strategy. To build a successful brand, a retailer must establish what the logo stands for by promising what they will deliver—and then delivering that. “Then it starts having that recognition and that association with the brand.”

Your brand and your story “have to be cohesive and work together,” Lawshe said. Customers play an important role in making the brand work. “The customer isn’t an afterthought—the customer has to be on the forefront,” he said. “We all have rose-colored glasses, … and you need dispassionate, third-party observations.”

Above all, Lawshe cautioned retailers to remember that “a logo’s not going to fix it, a brand is not going to fix it” because it must start with the company’s culture. “A brand is a reflection of who you are, what [your customers] see, what they feel, what they touch, when they come onto your site, and it starts from the time they roll onto your site until the time that they leave. … A brand is a living, breathing thing to me and creating a brand is not a one and done thing.”

Each week a new Convenience Matters episode is released. The podcast can be downloaded on iTunes, Google Play and other podcast apps, and at www.conveniencematters.com. Episodes have been downloaded by listeners more than 110,000 times in 90 countries.

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