Building a Credible Brand for Your Small Business

Kim Wimpseff reports in All Business that three-time startup veteran and software developer Thomas E. Burns could spend his days writing code. Or he could write a book on branding. Burns founded his first company when he was just 22 years old. He then joined another company as its first employee. Then the entrepreneurial spirit came calling again. This next move came about the same time that Sun Microsystems introduced Java, the programming language. As a software developer at the time, Burns knew that Java was the technology for which he had been waiting. So in 1995, Burns, together with Mel Berman and Terence Parr, founded the MageLang Institute to provide customized training courses on Java. The company did well but wasn't the $3 million company that it is today. “The first year we only made about $600,000 in revenues,” Burns says. “But what we were really successful at was building a strong brand.” Burns discovered that, when building a brand, credibility counts. And when establishing credibility, there’s nothing like being a part of your own core audience to understand what is important. Quickly the MageLang Institute discontinued its training business and morphed into jGuru, a Web portal for Java software developers. Now as a media company, the business relies more than ever on its brand to drive traffic to the Web site. Building a credible brand required knowing thoroughly jGuru's audience "The best thing we did is that we know what our audience values and what they care about. And so we associate ourselves with those things," Burns says. "In essence, it's more about emotional values than practicality.” Software developers -- jGuru's audience -- care about technology first and foremost. "It's almost like a religion for many," Burns says, "in the sense that technological advancement is a good thing. They get very annoyed with those who want to hold back technology." Developers are also very individualistic and tend to have a "libertarian streak," he adds. The purpose of jGuru, as stated on its site, is to "advance and improve software technology and development." But Burns takes his company’s philosophy much deeper. JGuru’s mission statement is only the first step in aligning itself with its audience. "At first we associated with other people who could lend us credibility," Burns says. JGuru partnered with well-respected companies like Sun, IBM, and Hewlett-Packard in order to raise its profile and reputation. The next step was to employ credible software developers. Burns refers to these credibility-boosting characters as "celebrity developers" -- in other words, the gurus that make up jGuru. To attract top developers, jGuru encourages its employees to maintain their individuality. The company gives them free reign over their opinions posted on the site and in the software community. In fact, the company has no official opinion on anything -- only that the gurus who work there can express their own opinions freely. "The highest collection of famous developers work for us,” says Burns. “And this lack of control over them -- developers hate control -- and their knowledge came across from the beginning."