Building and protecting a brand for any startup is a keep-you-awake-at-night issue, regardless of your company’s industry. Why does it hold so much weight? A brand identifies a company as the source of goods and services, and it holds the goodwill created by a company with its customers.
The value of your brand, and hence your company, depends on the quality, value, and consistency of your goods and services. This is the magic formula for your customers. Consistently delivering goods and services with a quality and value that meets a demand in the marketplace means the company will generate goodwill amongst its consumers and build value in the brand and the company. If a company fails to deliver goods and services with consistent quality and value, then the value of the company’s brand and the company itself will suffer – destroying that goodwill.
In the agricultural industry, many products have mature supply chains that allow the producers to deliver goods with a high degree of consistency in quality and value. In turn, consumers get what they expect no matter where in the country they make a purchase. However, even with some well-established agricultural products, the end result cannot be fully controlled and may not always be consistent (think wine in the face of droughts or other weather impacts). That’s where producers must take additional steps to manage the brand by setting customer expectations.
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