FAQ – Are you confident in your brand?

Do you even know what your brand is?
I don’t mean your logo, if you have one.
Nor do I mean what your business is called,
or how whizzy your website looks.
Your brand is what people say about you
when you’re not in the room.
And ultimately, it’s about how people feel about you. 

This is so important in the construction industry because it’s an industry that people have very mixed perceptions about. It’s not just about the quality of the work to be done, it’s about trust in fair pricing and whether tradespeople will send a quote or turn up when they say they will. It’s more than that, it goes deeper. 

I’ve been thinking about this recently, about why some people are busy with work (and the kind of work they like doing), and why some are not. Yes, it’s got something to do with how well you market what you do, but it’s more about how people feel about you. I think it comes down to three key words: trust, confidence and affection. 

Trust

When someone gets you in to do a job, they need to trust you.
Trust is an emotional thing that depends on several factors.

• Have you been recommended?
• Do they like you as a person when you turn up to quote?
• Were you friendly or grumpy?
• Did you seem as though you knew what you were talking about?
• Did you give a rough estimate and promise to give a quote in 24 hours?
• Did your van look roadworthy?
• How did you smell?

No, really, people make decisions on all of these things and more.

But trust is a feeling. It may be based on bits of evidence, but whether we trust someone or not is, at the end of it, a gut feeling. 

Confidence

Now, confidence is a different thing altogether, although linked to trust. Confidence is based on evidence. If you’ve turned up at 8am on the dot for three days, your client will be confident that you’ll be there at 8am on the fourth day. 

I went to see an old client last week whose house I painted about ten years ago, and nearly all of what I did still looks fresh. She’d asked me to paint her house after watching me paint another house halfway down her road. She’d walked past many times, lingered, and watched me work. She then came to the decision, based on evidence, that she was confident I’d do a good job repairing and repainting her home. It wasn’t just subjective trust, it was objective confidence. 

When you’re confident that a paint, a filler, or a particular tool will do the job, you keep going back to that product. The same is true of your clients. They’ll keep coming back to you if they’re confident you’ll do a great job. It also really helps if they have affection for you! 

Affection

Let’s deal with the elephant in the room, when I’m talking about affection here I’m not talking about the romantic kind. We’re not looking for your clients to fancy you! What I’m talking about is that they’ve gone beyond trusting you and being confident that you’ll do a good job, they’ve moved onto really liking you, how you do things and, this is the clincher, how you make them feel. 

As a decorator, you have a choice of suppliers you can go to, whether it’s in person or online. You’ll make decisions on who to use depending on availability, price, quality, speed, but also on how that supplier makes you feel. That’s even more important when a client asks you into their premises, especially if it’s their home. 

Now I’m not saying you should cosy up to clients in a smarmy kind of way. What I am saying is to be aware of how you might be making a client feel. You’ll have to read them of course, as some people are chatty and others aren’t. Some like progress and speed, others like involvement in the process and explanation. Are you making sure that your client feels that they, and the work you’re doing for them, are important to you?

If you can get to a point where your clients not only trust you, and they’re totally confident in your abilities, but they also have affection towards you because of how you make them feel, then not only will they keep asking you back, they will be delighted to recommend you to everyone. They’ll give you a testimonial, a rating, maybe even record a little video for you.

Your brand is about how you make people feel

Are you confident you’re making people feel good about you and the work you do? Are you making them feel good about choosing you to do the work? If so, you can be confident in your brand and that your brand has strength and integrity.