Why Being Useful Builds a Stronger Brand

When I worked in property, we had local marketing budgets that branches could use to engage with their communities. It was a relatively small part of the overall marketing budget, but I always found it interesting how differently people approached it, and the impact that seemed to have on their businesses.

Some branches would sponsor a local event, put their logo in the programme or pay for a banner at the village fete. Others would get involved in organising things, spend time with local groups and generally make themselves useful.

There was nothing inherently wrong with the first approach. Community organisations need financial support, and businesses are often in a good position to provide it. But in my experience, the branches that took a more active interest tended to see significantly better commercial returns.

The difference wasn't necessarily the money they spent. It was what they did alongside it. The more involved branches got to know the people in their communities and, equally importantly, those people got to know them. They built relationships that existed independently of any immediate need to buy or sell a house. When that need eventually arose, there was already some familiarity and goodwill.

Of course, the people who were good at community engagement were often good at other aspects of running their branches too. I wouldn't claim that helping organise the village fete was solely responsible for winning more instructions. But the relationship between participation and business performance was difficult to ignore.

It also made me question something about the way we approach marketing. We spend a great deal of time deciding what we'd like people to think about our businesses. We define our values, develop our positioning, commission creative work and invest in getting our message in front of the right people.

All of that has a place. But perhaps we don't spend quite enough time thinking about what we could actually do to give people those impressions in the first place.

What people remember

I saw something similar when I worked with chiropractors. The practitioners who were particularly successful at building referral-led businesses weren't necessarily the ones with the strongest sales technique or the most forceful opinions. They were often the people who were best at listening.

They took time to understand why someone had come to see them, what they were concerned about and what they wanted to achieve. They explained things clearly and made people feel comfortable asking questions.

A patient who feels listened to and well looked after has a very different reason to recommend a practitioner than someone who has simply been asked to refer a friend.

And that difference matters. An incentive might encourage someone to pass on a name, but a personal recommendation carries something much more valuable: the willingness to put your own reputation behind someone else's business. It's difficult to buy that kind of endorsement, however much you spend on marketing.

These two experiences, from quite different industries, have influenced how I think about brands. Businesses often invest heavily in telling people what to think about them, while underinvesting in giving people reasons to think it.

A good reputation is partly about the service you provide, of course. But it's also built through the everyday interactions, relationships and contributions that shape people's understanding of who you are.

You might describe that as brand presence rather than simply brand marketing. I'm less concerned about the terminology than the distinction: what people experience matters at least as much as what we tell them to expect.

Being useful is a good place to start

This doesn't only apply to local service businesses. Outdoor clothing company Finisterre is an interesting example. Its commitment to making products last extends beyond its marketing into repair services and workshops that help people get more use from the clothing they already own.

Repairing a customer's jacket is a practical expression of what the business says it believes in. It also gives people another reason to engage with the brand beyond buying something new.

There's a similar principle behind the parkrun practice initiative, which encourages GP practices to become involved with their local parkrun events. Rather than simply advising patients to be more active, staff can participate, volunteer and develop connections within their communities.

Neither example means every organisation needs to launch a community programme. What makes them interesting is that the involvement makes sense for the organisation and is useful to the people it's trying to reach.

That's an important distinction. Businesses can be tempted to attach themselves to whatever is popular, visible or culturally relevant at the time. Sometimes it works, but people are generally quite good at recognising when a brand's interest extends no further than the opportunity to get some exposure.

A business that has something genuinely useful to contribute has a much stronger starting point. And usefulness doesn't have to mean something grand or expensive. It might mean sharing knowledge, helping people make better decisions, creating opportunities for introductions or simply being a reliable part of someone's professional or local network.

The contribution needs to be relevant to the business and valuable to the people receiving it. Otherwise, it's just another marketing activity dressed up as community engagement.

Why this gets harder as businesses grow

Smaller businesses often have an advantage because the people making decisions are also the people dealing with customers. They can see what's happening, recognise opportunities and respond without having to involve three departments and a steering committee.

Larger organisations have more resources, but their structures can make these interactions surprisingly difficult.

A branch manager might have a good idea for helping a local organisation but lack the time or authority to do anything about it. Customer-facing staff might repeatedly hear about an issue that the business could solve, but have no effective way of passing that insight on. A marketing team might be working hard to communicate a commitment to personal service while the systems behind the scenes make delivering that service unnecessarily difficult.

None of these problems necessarily comes from a lack of care or commitment. They can be the unintended consequence of perfectly reasonable decisions about efficiency, consistency, reporting and control.

It's something I've encountered repeatedly when looking at customer experience and the systems businesses use to manage relationships. A business can have a perfectly good CRM, well-planned communications and detailed customer journeys, yet still struggle to make customers feel recognised or understood.

The technology might record that someone attended an event, made an enquiry or had a conversation, but unless the right people know what happened and what matters to that individual, the opportunity to develop the relationship can easily disappear.

And when customers have to explain themselves again, chase for a response or receive communications that bear little relationship to their circumstances, it undermines whatever impression the marketing was designed to create.

This is why I think brand building deserves attention beyond the marketing department. The most credible promises are the ones that people across the business have the ability, and the encouragement, to deliver.

Where could your business be more valuable?

There is a practical question I'd encourage businesses to spend more time discussing: where could we become more valuable to the people we want to do business with?

It's a useful starting point because it shifts the conversation away from what we want people to think and towards what might make a genuine difference to them.

For a local business, that might mean understanding how it could make a more meaningful contribution to the community it serves. For a professional services firm, it might be about sharing knowledge that helps people navigate decisions they find confusing or intimidating.

For a larger organisation, the opportunity may lie much closer to home: giving customer-facing teams more discretion, improving the way information moves between departments or making it easier to maintain relationships over time.

I'd start with a few conversations rather than a major new strategy. Speak to existing customers about what they particularly value and what they tell other people about you. Ask colleagues who spend the most time with customers where they see opportunities to help. Look at the organisations, groups and communities your business already has a genuine connection with, rather than searching for an entirely new audience to impress.

Then pick something useful that you can realistically do well. That could be contributing expertise to an existing event, helping solve a recurring customer problem or improving the way your business follows through after an initial conversation.

Give it enough time to learn something, and pay attention to what happens afterwards. Have you strengthened a relationship? Learned something useful? Made a customer's life easier? Created an introduction or opportunity that might not otherwise have existed?

Some of those things will produce commercial results relatively quickly. Others will take time, and not every worthwhile contribution needs to be justified by a direct sale.

That doesn't mean ignoring the commercial return. It means recognising that relationships develop over time, and that measuring the value of an interaction isn't always as straightforward as tracking the response to an advert.

Marketing still matters

None of this is an argument for spending less on marketing simply for the sake of it. I've worked on enough successful campaigns to know the value of reaching people who might otherwise never hear about a business. Good marketing can explain a complicated proposition, make a business more memorable and help people understand why it might be right for them.

But its effectiveness depends, at least in part, on what happens when people look beyond the message.

If you're telling people that you care about your community, it helps if you're actively involved in it. If you promise personal service, your customers should encounter people and systems that make the experience feel personal. If you claim to understand your customers, there should be evidence of that understanding in the way you deal with them.

And if those things are already happening, marketing has something much more compelling to work with. There's a great deal of good work going on inside businesses that never makes its way into the marketing. People helping customers, solving problems, sharing knowledge and building relationships because they take pride in what they do.

Perhaps the opportunity isn't always to come up with something new to say. It might be to make more of what's already good about the business, remove the things that get in its way and give people more opportunities to experience it.

That's a more interesting challenge than simply finding another place to put the logo.

At Break.Beat, I work with property, proptech and service-led businesses to understand where their customer experience, processes and commercial systems support good relationships, and where they get in the way.

If there's a gap between the experience your business wants to deliver and what actually happens, that's a useful place to start looking.