Defining Your Brand and Services

When you’re setting up a new gardening business, it’s important to define your brand as early as possible and be clear in your mind about exactly what services you’re offering. Not only will this help you get your business focused, but it will also help your customers gain a better understanding about what you’re offering.

Your gardening business brand will help you stand out from the crowd and show customers and other businesses who you are and what your business is concerned with (in this case, either offering practical gardening services, landscape design or perhaps selling plants and other horticultural goods). Defining your brand and getting it clear in your mind is an essential step to take and will help you shape the rest of your business plans.

For branding to be successful and effective, it has to be right. Due to this, it’s a task that should be carried out carefully, with plenty of thought, so that your brand is well targeted, consistent and meaningful. If you’re not quite sure where to start with working out your brand, then it may help to brainstorm a few questions. For example:

• What makes your business special from other gardening businesses?
• What special points do you want to make to customers?
• What services is your business going to offer?
• What image do you want to portray?
• What personality do you want your business to have?
• What do you want your brand to stand for?

Hopefully answering questions such as these should provide you with a list of ideas, but it’s certainly not unusual to get help from other professionals in taking it further.

Designing Your Brand

Your branding will apply to all areas of your business, from your headed notepaper and business cards, to your shop, van design, advertising and packaging. It’s essentially going to invade every area of your business, so it needs to be right. If you’ve not already come up with a logo and strapline, now is the time to get working on it.

It’s a good idea to employ a design team or designer, as they’ll have experience in branding and can help design a logo that ties in with your ideas. Both your logo, strapline and branding as a whole will become part of your long-term business, so it has to be something you like and feel comfortable about.

Your designer will be able to produce various prototypes for you to see, using different designs, images and colours. If you’re unsure of which is best for your business, then you may want to conduct a bit of research with a core team of participants. This can be useful for testing the waters and seeing how they feel about certain branding designs and colours. For example, they may feel it doesn’t tie in properly with the message you want to convey or gives people the wrong impressions about your business.

Your branding may not have been something that was at the forefront of your mind when you gave birth to your gardening business idea, but for the business to be successful, it’s an important element to work on and get right.