Brand Value and the Exit Strategy

A client recently experienced the value of brand marketing – the kind that makes a small business appear larger or more influential than its size would normally warrant.

When we first took his company to market several years ago, he had just bought the business. For long-term planning purposes, I asked him about his exit strategy, and he replied that there were two options: build up the business to a point where revenues from a large installed base allowed him to cruise into retirement, or to sell the business one day.

In order to maximize resale value, it was key for the company to build brand awareness – superior technology doesn’t promote itself, I don’t care what engineers say. As a new player, another challenge was credibility. Plus, the company had a small marketing budget. When you run into this situation, the client has to be willing to commit a fixed budget every year so that even if the marketing campaign is low-key, it’s consistent every year. When there are good years, you can bump up the marketing activities, but the baseline remains consistent.

We allocated the major part of the company’s marketing budget to placing ads in the premier publication for his industry. Not full page ads, and not in every issue, but decent size ads running in every other issue to create a consistent, credible presence and to get across the key messages.

Nothing gets a message across as well as quotes from happy customers, so we also ran a case study campaign, pitching ideas for contributed articles to the editor of the publication and building a relationship so that we could have some influence on the timing of the stories; the goal was to have the contributed articles run in issues where the ads didn’t. We didn’t make this happen in every issue, but on the whole, the strategy was successful, nearly every issue contained something about the company, and the market noticed.

Over the next few years, the company got tangible proof these activities were making a difference: from the number of enquiries through the company’s website to the number of attendees at trade shows who came to see the product. The client came back from one show and told me, with a big grin, that one of the major players had been heard to ask “Who ARE these guys?”

Now a competitor has approached them about buying the company. The client is convinced that a consistent approach to marketing has helped establish brand value, making the company a valuable target for acquisition.  Love it when good things happen to good clients.