How to Make Brand Champions.
How many times has an existing customers asked you if you also do this or that? Your employees – how many of them understand your brand? Take a good look at all of your stake holders, do they have a good understanding of what your brand stands for? Chances are there is a mixed bag of understanding about your brand from your stake holders.
Brand Champions are advocates who promote and or refer your business to others. They are passionate about your brand and are active in your promotion. Many times even brand champions don’t have a clear understanding of what you do. So – here’s your chance to strengthen existing brand champions and empower others who could potentially become Brand Champions for your company. Lets tackle each of the stakeholder groups to shore up support for the team:
Employees:
• develop brand training that exposes the employee to the brand’s core capabilities
• give the employee a brand statement that they can use to properly explain the brand promise or key positioning strategy
• provide employees with apparel festooned with the brand logo and/or positioning statement
• be sure that they are aware of the company’s proud history
• develop a model where an employee has input on possible opportunities
• make available educational opportunities that can help employees make your product offering or service better
• make it possible for employees to belong to influential community groups
• for employees that have direct customer contact, be sure that they exhibit traits complementary to the brand personality and values
• help employees understand that a properly managed brand will benefit their incomes into the future
Suppliers:
• make sure suppliers know where they stand in the food chain of your brand
• let them know what is expected of them and how that impacts the growth of your brand
• be sure that they understand the culture of your company
• provide suppliers with apparel festooned with the brand logo and/or positioning statement
• be sure that policies regarding gifts or favors compliment brand values
Customers:
• provide them the opportunity to tell your story
• referral programs to reward their enthusiasm for your brand
• regularly survey them to be sure that you are exceeding their expectations
• make it a brand policy to go above and beyond what is expected
• get bodies in front of customers, don’t reply to heavily on email
• look for ways of enhancing the relationship with customers ( track their personal and professional motivations )
• provide customers with apparel festooned with the brand logo and/or positioning statement
• record testimonials from customer advocates, (don’t pay for these statements)
• quickly address problems and issues with professionalism
• nurture loyalty among customers by building relationships from sales transactions
• keep customers on top of changes and improvements to the brand
Management/Share Holders:
• be sure that everyone is singing from the same song sheet
• provide Management/Share Holders with apparel festooned with the brand logo and/or positioning statement
• be sure that this group understands and are loyal to the brand values and personality
• with every decision that effects the brand, be sure that the information flows down efficiently to the other stake holders
• be aware of executive decisions that could conflict with the brand
• audit your brand from time to time to be sure that the brand is not wavering in its focus
• be aware that the leaders of the brand impact it directly – implementing change should always compliment brand legacy
At the end of the day, Brand Champions will deliver a winning game plan. Branding is a team sport in the strictest sense of the word. If you have a tendency to go it alone,
you might find that your brand is stagnant. Your best chance at winning is when you allow stake holders to become part of the branding team. TOGETHER, YOU COULD BE A LEADER IN YOUR CATEGORY!
People – ya gotta love ‘em!
If your brand is your reputation (and it is), then it’s important to keep it on track. Everything that you do and say will reflect on that brand. How you say it is one of the toughest tasks when trying to keep your brand image compelling over all media.
I regularly drop into blogs and business consultant’s websites to check out some tip or suggestion that I may find of use. I can’t tell you how many times, I’m confronted with a brand image that absolutely contradicts the message they’re sending. As consultants, they are by nature a people business. Their job is to help people with problems and situations in their area of expertise. What sort of message are they sending if their sites and blogs are totally void of humanity. Not a single shot of a person. I want any consultant I hire to like people.
Businesses in the manufacturing sector are also guilty of this error. Lots of shots of real estate but nothing of people actually working the shop floor. One , that made me chuckle said that it was “their people that made the difference”. Guess what was missing in their literature?
The restaurant and hotel industry are great for this – lots of shots of expansive dining rooms, luxurious guest rooms and health clubs with no “body” in any one of them. As people, we all love to look at other people. We are a social species by nature. How you position people emotes a certain attitude. Diversity among the people we use, sends a powerful message. We go where the people are. Have you ever noticed that people are more apt to check out a new restaurant or store if there are people there when they get there. Nothing is more alluring than a parking lot full of cars at a store opening. There is nothing inspiring about a health club with no sweating bodies in sight. Humanity inspires us.
In the use of people shots, one simple tip in setting up the shot is an old design rule. Never have the model looking outside of your frame. It sends the eye away from your message. They should be looking in – our eyes follow their eyes. One that I employ is cropping. In a head and shoulders shot, cropping off the top of the head sends the readers eyes downward into the eyes of the model. When ever I use pictures of people I am always careful when choosing their use. I want the message to be consistent across the board and their use must compliment my brand. Even my own picture sends messages. One shot I particularly like is to a peer of mine – not friendly enough. “You are much friendlier than that picture suggests”‘ she often tells me. When we got together, she shot one that was more appropriate in her mind. It is the one most often seen of me out there.
Use people (images) to your advantage. Have them in your corporate colors. Be sure that they are of the correct demographic. Don’t have a genX ‘er in your materials if they are not your target audience. The wrong shot can alienate as powerfully as the perfect shot. Overall, remember that when choosing people shots for your brand, they must conform to your brand message. Don’t sacrifice this important point on the alter of creativity. Your brand communicates a specific message to its audience who are willing receptacles.
Say Cheese!
Put Your Wrench On The Branding Team
So you’ve decided to to start taking a serious look at your corporate brand and you are left with the task of assembling your branding team. Your branding team is a group of individuals pulled from your brand’s stakeholders. They would be gleamed from the three essential groups: employees, suppliers and customers.
One of the issues you will have at the end of your branding process is buy-in among employees. Stand back and take a visual on your employee group. Most are your garden-variety employee, but a few, while good workers are out-spoken and quick to judge. Other employees look to them for direction. They typically see initiatives coming down from the corner office as “just more work”. They do their best to put a negative spin on the initiatives and are a drag to getting things done. We call these folks, “wrenches” because they throw a monkey wrench into everything you do.
The trick is to include the Wrenches in the branding process. The theory is simple and basic – you want the wrenches to become advocates for the brand initiatives. If they are part of the solution, then they will use their energies to push it through to the employees stakeholders. Just imagine how empowered they will feel being included in the high-level branding sessions with the leaders of the company in attendance – actually wanting their valuable input.
Now, when the brand process is complete and ready to roll roll out to the employees, you have their key mouthpiece on your team. That monkey wrench is now a brand hero – everybody wins.
5 Tips To Branding A Powerful Presence
If there is one thing that many small businesses love to mess with, it is their brand image. Perhaps it is their chance to get creative, in an otherwise numbers oriented existence. It is also the one area that gets the greatest abuse in regard to the “holy Grail” of brand – CONSISTENCY. One area I’d like to address is your web presence.
Does your website reflect your brand accurately? Let’s take a look at 5 cyber-consistency challenges:
ONE: Over-all brand image of your website.
If I met you at a networking event and you passed your card on to me – when I got back to my office and went directly to your website – would I see something familiar when the opening page appears?
Your business card is my initial exposure to your brand image. I begins my journey down Brand You. If upon opening your web page, I am faced with an entirely different esthetic, then you are doing your company/brand a HUGE disservice. Your visitor now has to adjust their interpretation of your brand from another perspective. Ideally, you want their brand experience to reinforced from their initial exposure to Brand You. Don’t get tempted with the urge to get overly creative if it means moving away from what was already established on your business cards.
TWO: If your brand is information oriented, your website should reflect this.
Let’s say Brand You, has established itself as an expert, then your site should be focused on delivering information on your category. It should give the visitor the distinct impression that Brand You is indeed that expert. It should show that you are there to help them. Outside of the web, your collateral material should also portray this.
THREE: Your promise should be the same on AND off-line.
Whether your customer meets you at an event or on-line they should hear only ONE brand promise. The power of consistency goes a long way to getting the trust of a potential customer when the promise they hear is repeated at every point of contact. Also be sure that the promise is acted on, not just a hollow statement.
FOUR: There is more to a domain name than you think.
Your URL. Is it specific to your brand. Ideally it is the same name as your brand name. So if your company is called – The Acme Company then ideally the URL would be The AcmeCompany.com. If that isn’t available don’t be tempted with acronyms like TAC.com, while representational, it does nothing to make them think of Acme. If I called your office, you now answer the telephone with. “good morning Acme”, not good morning TAC. A good alternative would be something descriptive of Acme. Maybe something like, “TheAcmeAdvantage.com”. Now we’re thinking something positive about Acme.
FIVE: Is your website presence passive or pro-active?
Determine how your website can be an asset to your brand. If it is strictly informational, then it is a passive tool. Get the information out and make it easy for the customer to contact you. If it is to be pro-active, then you want your customer to stay around your site longer. Give them tools and information that they can use. Become a valuable resource for them. Which ever of the two strategies you follow, be sure that it is in sync with your brand.
CONSISTENCY – there is no more powerful word regarding your brand experience. With it, each element builds on the next. It leaves confusion in the dust. Without it, it is a harder, more expensive route to take. Never compromise. Take a hard look at your brand as it exists right now. Are there any loose ends that could use a tweak or two to assure that everything you do is consistent?
ECO-SAFE Blogging
Have you ever come across a website or business blog and have wanted to print out an article or blog post but find that there is no print icon on the web page or blog site?
I always think that we need to make it as easy as possible for people to access our content from our websites so one of the things I did some time ago on my main blog was to add some plugins so that people could then print a blog article or email articles to others.
However I recently came across a service that enables us to guide people to alternatives to print pages but still makes your content accessible to readers and enables you to virally market your blog to others with a tell a friend functon – and it’s free!
The ECO-SAFE Merit Badge can be added to your website and offers the opportunity to website and blog visitors to:
-
send themselves or other an email of the article or page
-
send themselves or others a PDF of the article or page
-
download a PDF of the article or page.
Why not add the ECO-SAFE Merit Badge to your blog, website or ecommerce site.
Oh I almost forgot to let you know, you can also register for free iTunes music of your choice when you add the ECO-SAFE Merit Badge to you blog or website.
Hey pal, can ya gimmie a boost up?
When were kids every day was an adventure. The neighbourhood was filled with other kids our age and we played different games all the time. We climbed trees, ran short-cuts through other properties, raided fruit trees – all kinds of kid things. One thing that was consistent was our reliance on one another. There was a kid’s code on everything. How we shared and how we helped one another. One area that strikes me as a great lesson that I took into adulthood was boosting. When ever us kids found it hard to shimmy up a tree, or found the fence just a little too tall, we’d look back over our shoulder and ask our closest buddy, “hey, can ya gimmie a boost?” At the time it was a simple forgetable request. But looking back now, I realize that it was a great lesson in trust, humility and charity.
In the business world, there are networking groups built on the concept of boosting. When you give someone a boost, you are helping yourself as well. When you give a boost, you are giving of yourself for the betterment of someone else. You are not expecting an immediate reward but you will definitely feel good inside from your effort to help someone else. Mentoring programs give a boost to young professionals. For every person that you give a boost up, you build a strong bond. They don’t forget your selflessness in helping them to succeed. They in turn become powerful advocates for you.
I know myself, when someone I see impresses me with their professionalism and honest business ethics, I am more apt to help them out. I work with them and help them to achieve their goals. Sometimes this is at the expense of regular rates, standard time-lines or background reconnaissance. Sometimes you just instantly respect this person, and wish to give them “a boost up”. What ever your motivation for giving a boost, don’t you find you’re all the better for doing it? There are just some individuals who cross your path who deserve a break, a boost. In the scheme of things the boost will mean more to them and frankly that is the way it should be.
BUT, more times than not a boost today will result in something positive coming your way as a result of this effort at some future point. As any strong networking group will tell you – it is best to give first if you wish to receive. Remember Wimpy from Popeye -”I will gladly pay you Tuesday, for a hamburger today?” Give ol’ Wimpy a boost and he will be your advocate forever. Remember your neighbourhood friends – when you gave them a boost over that fence – didn’t they cheerfully share that Coke with you in the shade later in the day?
Giving a boost to someone is good for one’s soul and great for your brand – IT’S WHO YOU ARE.
How to Crack the Opportunity Puzzle?
I’ve recently had the pleasure of helping a small business develop their positioning strategy and launch materials. The company, Paywiz, is a Toronto based firm specializing in Canadian payroll services. It is inspiring to meet entrepreneurs who see this economy as an opportunity rather than a hinderance. It is clear to me that Paywiz, in developing their brand strategy paid close attention to strong, positive brand values. They recognized the opportunity that the competition presented in the payroll category.
Namely complete service in everything related to payroll in Canada. Paywiz management, having many years of experience inside the payroll industry saw this opportunity and decided to claim it as their own.
Their brand positioning strategy- PAYWIZ: the ONLY payroll solution to deliver everything.
Clear and right to the point. Due to the fact that Paywiz is a young progressive company they have snatched up the determination to deliver services that the older players simply ignore in delivering traditional payroll services. Utilizing technology and good old fashion spunk, Payroll aims to quickly build a customer base by delivering everything – resulting in a confidence that allows small business owners the freedom to work more effectively at their core competencies rather than spending valuable time tying-up loose ends traditional payroll models leave wanting.
Paywiz’s positioning strategy has invigorated management. The logo is simple, but the message is clear – all encompassing – EVERYTHING. The overall image is clean, simple and accessible. The CEO of Paywiz, Peter Marossis, is authoring a corporate blog called,Everything Payroll Blog. Here visitors can have direct access to the leadership of the company and pick up valuable information that has an impact on “everything payroll”. ( The launch article will be up in a about a week.) As you may be able to determine at this point, ( if you checked out the links) Paywiz’s action word is “EVERYTHING”.
When the North American business community is cringing with each daily news report, there are those of us who see the opportunities a slowing economy presents. It represents the old – every dark cloud has a silver lining story. Myself, I have never been busier. This economy has presented opportunities for my services because companies who want a stronger positioning strategy that truly differentiates them, are turning to branding consultants to help them in finding a better strategy. Traditional marketing with catchy slogans and low pricing have gotten them flat results. More times than not, they are blending in with the regular deluge of desperate small businesses trying to pry dollars from an already thin customer wallet with a quick commodity fix.
Take one step back and look at how you are delivering your services – your silver lining exists. One more example emerged even last evening at a restaurant. I bumped into an acquaintance who is in retail and he lamented that his market has been pummeled by the economy and he didn’t believe he’d be here in another few years. I got the conversation going toward toward his expertise. He mentioned that many suppliers and industry people contact him regularly for his advice on topics.
Now a simple question emerged: “Couldn’t you start charging a consulting fee for that same advice, and aggressively go after it?” He just stopped – looked at me and calmly said – “man Ed, there’s an opportunity there.” – EXACTLY!. Don’t dwell on the negative.
If you refuse to look for the opportunities, you can join the thousands of businesses who moan on about the economy, or you can lead the way to your success. All of us – in the running of our businesses, give away services that we could be charging for. For all the doom and gloom, the vast majority among us are still employed and consuming. The simple truth is that they, like you, only want to deal with the smart companies. Surround yourself with smart thinking, positive influences. Negative thinking will only deliver a negative result.
Follow the example of companies like PAYWIZ who saw holes in the competitive strategy, and boldly filled it themselves.
AS ONE IDEA FLOUNDERS, ANOTHER IS BORN.
