Equally important to creating and adhering to a brand is assessing your brand in the marketplace. Assessing your brand enables you to understand how your customers currently see your company and what elements or perceptions compel them to choose you over a competitor. Conversely, it also allows you to identify misperceptions and obstacles to purchases, and how to overcome them.

If you do not assess, or proactively brand, your company, you allow the market and your competitors to define you, and your marketing dollars inadvertently support a de facto position.

A periodic assessment to measure how effective your efforts are, how you are being perceived, and how you might make changes to do better or reach more people, is also crucial to the life of a brand.

As a business owner, your brand is your public persona - and making a positive and lasting impression is the first step in creating the kinds of customer relationships that will keep you in business. Houses that skimp on the foundation usually end up sinking into the ground - and we know you don't want to do that.