Debunking the ten most common myths SMEs have about branding: Why SMEs need real branding to succeed

Undervaluation of brand remains a potent mistake of many companies today, particularly small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs), whose founders are typically product driven and technical or engineering based. For these SMEs, branding is only for large consumer multinationals like Coke or Nike; or it is ‘fluff’, a luxury requiring enormous budgets for advertising; or it is a logo that, once completed, means branding is done. In fairness to non-specialists, the concept of brand (and by extension branding, meaning its creation and implementation) suffers from inadequate and insufficient explication. For the authors, a brand is the business itself, the whole enterprise: its culture, its strategies, the focus of its future and a major driver of its success. It takes the form of an Octagon, a robust, dynamic platform that captures the real branding the authors refer to in the title. In this paper, the authors identify and debunk the 10 most common myths that SMEs have about branding and that explain why SMEs do not value branding; provide a branding framework to show how branding is much more robust than anyone knew; and finish with three recent cases to demonstrate the transformative changes that branding can deliver to SMEs right from the start.