Business
Brand Building for SMBs Goes Far Beyond Advertising
In a conversation on Marketing - The Podcast, Rafael Somera details the pillars of clarity, delivery, and retention for small businesses.
Rafael Somera discusses how small and medium-sized businesses should build their brand around the clarity of the problem they solve. The executive highlights the importance of delivery quality and prioritizing customer relationships.
Rafael Somera, CEO of Solutudo Brasil, spoke in a conversation with Bruno Gimenes on Marketing - The Podcast about the role of marketing and brand building for small and medium-sized businesses. The segment addresses the difference between practical branding and merely running ads, highlighting the challenges local businesses face when structuring their operations.
In the video above, Somera elaborates on how customer service and keeping promises define customer perception before any investment in large-scale advertising campaigns.
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Building Brands Across Every Touchpoint
When analyzing the root of the word marketing, Somera deconstructs the concept to separate it from mere advertising, defining it as the continuous act of leaving marks on consumers in every interaction. "Over time, we’ve associated marketing with advertising, but it's really the act of creating marks, right? And you make an impression in everything. You create it when you provide customer service, you create it when you exchange a product," he states.
According to Somera, advertising becomes fragile when it attempts to amplify a message that does not match the company's actual delivery. "Advertising is when I want to push forward a message that must exist. It has to exist. And if it's not true, I'm going to have problems, right?" he explains.
Problem Clarity and Commitment to Delivery
For Somera, about 50% of small businesses in Brazil emerge out of necessity and 50% out of opportunity. Regardless of their origin, he points to a precise definition of the solution and target audience as the first indispensable pillar for commercial success.
"The clearer the problem—I have a friend who opened a pizzeria in a specific neighborhood. And he keeps saying: 'My focus is right in that neighborhood.' So clarity about whose problem I solve is, in my view, perhaps the most important point," Somera emphasizes.
The second point raised is ensuring service quality that goes beyond empty talk. "You discover a phrase I heard from a friend: it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of alignment. You can have a company that lasts 40 years and fails to get anywhere great, and you can have a much newer one that, because of clarity and quality—and it doesn't matter if you sell snacks or software—has a genuine commitment to delivery," Somera reinforces.
Relationships and a Practical View of LTV
The third central element for an SMB's sustainability is cultivating lasting relationships. Somera warns against focusing excessively on closing one-off sales at the expense of losing customers. "Lose a sale—losing a sale is part of the game—but don't lose the customer, brother," he notes.
Recalling his childhood in his family's retail store, Somera connects the day-to-day operations of a neighborhood grocery store to the concept of lifetime value (LTV). "If the guy who lives across the street from the grocery store and buys everything from us is lost, I go broke," he says. For him, keeping an active customer base over the years is the true test of a business: "Selling once isn't hard—I've made plenty of mistakes, you tell a nice little story—now, making mistakes for 21 straight years, that's impossible. There has to be some truth in what you're doing, otherwise it doesn't last."
Somera concludes by defining the essence of brand building for small operations: "For me, branding is that: creating an impression through clarity of what I want, quality, commitment to what I'm delivering, and the willingness to build a relationship with whoever chose me."
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