Every year The Commercial Appeal and Memphis Flyer conduct this huge marketing and advertising campaign under the guise of a reader poll, in which folks vote on their favorite consumer services in the Memphis area. From Best Fine Dining to Best Nail Salon, from Best Dog Park to Best Radio Personality, the categories expand year after year to give just about anybody and everybody a chance at the title, the crown, the whatever… Then, the debates begin.

Folks see the winners and inevitably one or more of those on the list will elicit a  “No way (Insert Name Here) is the best (Insert Business/Personality Here)!” Does (Insert Name Here) really, reallyhave the Best Chocolate Chicken Pot Pie a la Mode in the city? It’s pretty subjective. It’s certainly not scientific. The results may be suspect BUT what is real and what is true is that the results of voting speaks more to the winners’ brand and theirbrand promisethan their actual deliverables.

The conversations swirling about the results may allege nefarious means for achieving the top honors. Every year the conversations increasingly become focused on the possibility of erroneous results, that the methods for the rankings are unfair or faulty somehow.  (Insert Name Here) has multiple locations with eleventyseventhousand employees who all have been threatened with a reprimand in their personnel file if they don’t go online and vote and tell everyone they know to vote for their employer. The presumption is that the results are somehow manipulated, that this winner or that finalist was obviously undeserving and how on earth did that happen?

Well, (Insert Name Here) may not be the best, but they sure enough have built a brand and a loyal customer/client base. They have brand recognition and that goes a long way. And if you are a new business looking to enter the market and leapfrog over these stalwart brands, you must create a BETTER BRAND. That’s why you hire a team of professionals whose passion it is to launch new businesses armed with an identity, a story and the means for executing a top notch strategy for success.

The moral of the story is this: If you are a business entering the fray, you need to stand apart from the competition, especially those that have been around forever. You need a creative agency staffed by folks whose mission is to help you achieve this. That’s what we do each day for businesses just like yours. So give us a shout and start telling your consumers the story you want them to hear.