FEATURE | Building a Brand
BUILDING a
BRAND
How seemingly minor details cost companies time, money and reputation By Elizabeth Zipf, Dorothy J. Verndon, Amanda Gibney Weko
A
brand represents the emotional and psychological relationship a company has with its customers. Traditionally a brand has been called a “promise.” What is certain is that a brand is the blueprint for your customer experience; it flavors all conversation from you and about you. It is crucial you recognize that everything you do – from proposal writing to public relations, and even simple punctuation, impacts the brand you work so had to preserve. EFFECTIVE PROPOSAL WRITING Elizabeth J. Zipf The following paragraph was taken, with only minor changes, from an actual proposal: Firm X is experienced with your culture/ values, standards, regulations and processes and clearly understand the needs of the Army, particularly with the congressionally mandated BRAC program as well as daily challenges faced by installation commanders and Corps staff responsible for the execution and delivery of needed services to supported commanders. We led the Federal Engineer response in the state in the aftermath of Katrina and provided needed oversight and direction to the year-long mission which included over forty complex missions and involved over 5,500 responders from every CONUS based Corps District as well as numerous other federal agencies. Would you hire this firm to manage your project? They are probably qualified and capable, but from reading the above, it’s impossible to tell.
14 ConstructionTODAY
All too often, written materials in our industry are too dense and disorganized for clients to read or skim effectively. Rather than crafting and planning our writing, we cobble together a mix of boilerplate, marketing pitches and technical material and try to not embarrass ourselves with any careless errors. For our potential clients, however, the end result is a confusing mish-mash that makes it hard for them to understand what we are trying to say. The first portion of this article outlines tips to make your proposals easier for your clients to read and present your team in the best possible way. Write Clearly Expository writing should be clear and concise. This is especially true of the necessarily technical content of proposals, where a non-technical person often has to choose which complicated process or system is best for their project. Choose a structure that best suits the piece of text you are working on, and stick to it. For example, in a project approach, the structure might be the client’s scope of ser-