Why You Are the Brand

That's because VARs are realizing that the name on the printers they're selling is taking a back seat to the necessity of getting customers to associate solutions with their companies,not with the products. So when a success story is passed along, it's you who gets the coveted sale. To hear some VARs tell it, opting out is tantamount to a death wish.

"From our perspective, branding is of utmost importance. You leave yourself vulnerable if you don't," says Johnny Wilkinson, vice president of marketing at government VAR GTSI. "It's brand or be branded. If a customer wants to position us in a less-than-favorable light, they brand us."

To that end, some top VARs are going so far as to assemble sophisticated branding teams charged with distinguishing their companies from their competitors. Take AMS, for example. The solution provider has assembled a team of 11, led by senior vice president Charlene Wheeless, to execute a brand makeover. The company hired Interbrand, a major branding consultancy. It has also interviewed more than 100 customers, analysts, media people and employees to determine every element of its branding strategy, which includes the best names for new products, the right colors to use and even, Wheeless says, the creation earlier this year of the company's brand mantra: the fire to forge what's next.

How To Brand
So what, exactly, does branding your VAR business entail? Is it simply a name game? Or distributing some T-shirts with a logo at a trade show? Those are, in fact, only end-game manifestations of a thoroughly considered battle plan, the goal of which is to drive the company's growth plan. And that process, experts say, starts with defining the company's differentiator in the marketplace.

"We started by taking a step back, based on who we think we are and what our customers, partners and employees think we are. And we also chose to look externally to see how the marketplace viewed our strengths and weaknesses," Wheeless explains. "It kept us from drinking our own bathwater."

AMS learned some important facts from those research Q&As that are helping it reshape its branding strategies. Among those findings, the first, and least surprising, was that its perceived strengths were in the markets it served,telecommunications, public sector and financial services,and that it should emphasize its knowledge base in serving them. "Prior to last year, we relied on subbrands. If we had a customer in the public sector, to them AMS was a public-sector company," Wheeless says. "Now we rely on one unifying brand."

It also learned that the company was perceived as not moving as fast as it once had in aggressively pushing new offerings to the market. "Perception can be reality, and branding can help address that," Wheeless acknowledges. "We had to adjust our brand personality,we can whisper or we can shout. In practical terms, that means visual representations [of the company] in strong, bold colors. It means offering solutions [customers] will need six months down the road."

Most crucially, perhaps, AMS learned that its brand identity is linked inextricably to its employees and how they represent the company. That, in fact, is likely true for almost every VAR. "We found out that we are really a brand from the inside out, not the outside in," Wheeless says.

"When a company starts a new branding initiative, it'll spend millions to plaster its name everywhere, but it'll ignore internal [processes]," she says. "Every interaction a customer has is a branding process. You can have a great product, but if a customer receives rotten service, then suddenly those external messages don't mean so much."

What's In a Name?
Branding also involves product-naming, and VARs continuously face the tricky calculus of deciding whether it's ultimately more profitable to include or exclude the company name. Tracy Edwards, president of Bell Industries, uses what he terms a "productization process" to brand services. The company ends up selecting "what resonates with the customer and what our external experts believe," he says. "For some [products], we include our name,like our Tech.logix source tool, from our business group Tech.logix. We kept our name [because] we found it had the right resonation with the marketplace."

But another offering, a call-center support product simply called Subscriber Care, makes no mention of the company. "Subscriber Care seemed to be a more direct description of what the service does," Edwards says. "It has a quick kick to it. And it makes it easy for our salespeople to talk about it."

Be advised that not all VARs believe it's mandatory to go wide in a branding program. Sandy Potter, vice president of business development for Optimus Solutions, thinks it's best to brand with a specific message. "In the 1990s, lots of VARs were saying we can do everything end-to-end. Everybody tried to present themselves as a miniature Accenture," he recalls. "We try to focus on a specific solution for a specific clientele." It's a cost-efficient approach, he adds.

Whatever the program's depth, it's important to remember that your branding program will create momentum, not just in the customer space, but in the vendor community as well. Says GTSI's Wilkinson: "We have a very solid brand reputation. What you did last week%85is used quite a bit, and it relates to our vendor partners, who obviously want to associate themselves and partner with leading players."

At this point, smaller VARs might be asking themselves, "What the hell am I going to do? Sure, top-tier VARs can afford highly developed branding initiatives, but I don't have that luxury." Well, consider what Brian Oaken, director of Chips Computer Consulting, a Venture Tech member of wholesaler Ingram Micro, did: He aligned himself with a vendor, then let it do the heavy lifting.

"We like to take the responsibility [for branding] and share it with vendors or distributors," Oaken says. "We look for 'value-added vendors.' They add in negotiating power and create credibility in terms of consistency of service."