Sales | Small Business Branding

November 11, 2008 By Ed Roach

Who You Are, How You’re Saying It and Do They Care?

Your corporate brand essentially involves two parties – you and them. It is the key in marketing yourself to be sure that you are resonating with your target audience. It’s time that you did some key research from three strategic perspectives:

ONE: Tell us – who are you?

It’s important to know who you are. In the past companies developed mission statements to define who they are. Many times it was wishful thinking. I’ve helped companies determine their brand values and personalities to help them understand who they are. One good way is to ask employees and principals for their understanding of who they think you are. Be honest with this evaluation because you want a clear statement.

TWO: What are you saying you are?

Do a communications audit of your company? In your marketing materials, what is the message you are sending? Does it differ from the “who you are statement” in step ONE? Is your corporate brand image in line with who you say you are? Is your materials consistent in their delivery of the “who you are statement”? Consistency of message is paramount.

THREE: What are they saying about you?

What your marketplace thinks of you is your brand. What they understand about your products and services may be completely out of your hands. If you’ve neglected your brand, chances are your competition have defined you, and this is what your marketplace believes to be the truth. Doing a competitive analysis will also assist you in discovering your short comings and establish a position of message.

Taking these three perspectives together using triangulation, you can now determine where you are RIGHT NOW. Digging deeper, you can also discover situations, language and expectations your target audience desire from you. The answers to each of the three perspectives will clearly show if your brand is in trouble and they also provide a strong direction for marketing effectively.

File under: Featured

October 7, 2008 By Ed Roach

How To Resist The Dark-Side Of The Economy.

It is exactly these economic times that branding importance comes into play. When I sit down with corporate branding teams, the very first component of my Brand Navigator Process, is to establish the firm’s Corporate Brand Values. The exercise consists of the entire team’s input outlining potential values that exemplify the company’s culture. This brain-storming typically results in dozens and dozens of potential values. From here we whittle it down to a hand-full which are the foundation of the company’s brand.

Feeling quite proud of themselves, the next step is validation. One of the questions is: Can these values remain true in good times and bad. In explaining that, we mean if times are desperate, would they as a company be willing to compromise any of the values to bring money in the door? Now, when times are good, this is a no-brainer question. I rarely get any deep soul-searching delays to this question. Everyone on the team takes the high road and declares their belief, that yes, they would definitely adhere to the values stated under ANY conditions.

If you are watching the financial markets (and we all are), the challenges to our brands are maximizing. Temptation to bring in the dollars at any cost is incredibly tempting. If there was ever a time to capitalize on your brand this is it. Unscrupulous competitors will stoop to any length to get the sale. They will stiff their suppliers, lie to the customers and short change their stake holders. In the short term, they may even look like they are winning. But as your market adapts to the conditions – once the initial shock has passed, it is those among us who stayed true to their Brand values who will ultimately benefit.

The dismal economic climate is actually a fertile ground for opportunity. Feeling your customer’s pain and addressing it quickly are fine brand practices. Take for example WalMart and Toys R Us. Recognizing that a very tight Christmas season is no doubt around the corner, both of these mega-chains know that their traditional customers will be financially stressed. To address this they have immediately announced price roll-backs and have highlighted name-brand toys that they will have available for under $10., (some cut by half). This is the ‘opportunity’ swiftly embraced by a smart brand.

If you are in the service industry, investigate payment plans for your customers. Recognize their need to grow with you by giving their cash flow a break. One big fee may be a barrier to them at this time, but broken down over six months, it may get you the business, PLUS you will benefit with an enormous amount of good-will.

Hard times, can either turn your brand into a wolf in sheep’s clothing or it can be just the opportunity you need to really show your value. The free advice we dish out in these blogging circles becomes invaluable to companies looking to advance with dwindling resources. Your strength as an entrepreneur will truly be tested in the months ahead of us. The minute you entertain the quick buck is the moment in time that your brand morphs to the dark side. Rise above the temptation. As the economy glows brighter (and it will), how your brand performed amid the darkness will be a testiment to it’s resiliance. Success will be sweeter. Your customers will remember how you were on their team.

How can you use your Brand values to address your barriers to growth in this marketplace? There is no better time to differentiate. Leave the herd mentality to everyone else. To extend the analogy, it is better to be the sheep dog. LEAD instead of follow!

File under: Featured

September 25, 2008 By Ed Roach

Branding Your Kids – the next BIG thing?

I’ve got these good friends of mine who live in Kentucky. It has been a pretty traumatic summer waiting for college season to arrive. You see, they just sent their only child off to his first year of University. They are so very proud of him. He didn’t have any scholarships, well-placed contacts, or remarkable grades – he achieved his first real goal in life thanks in some part to branding.

His folks are colleagues of mine in the branding world. When the family gathered around the supper table, and prepared themselves to go through the groups of university brochures and browse the impressive websites, it wasn’t lost on them that they would also have to pitch their son to the universities. He would have to be branded. It would be an enlightening experience for him, and an assurance to them (the parents) that he put his best effort into getting accepted into his school of choice.

His resume wasn’t your typical binder containing exactly what would be requested but a more visual and intuitive presentation. His brand was polished, and it showed. Here are some of their branding highlights:

• His brand values were defined much like any great brand.They explained his commitment to these values and how they compliment the school and their value systems.

• His brand personality was visually presented using a “vision board.” This board contained words, pictures, colors, anything that portrayed his ‘personality’. His colors were used consistently through the presentation.

• His differentiator was his passion for the school. He chose them. His life goals matched their scholastic mandate.

• His visual image (or logo if you will) was designed to strike an emotion with the reader, who would no doubt judge their son on first impressions, not unlike the business world. Photos were designed to display his pleasant disposition and vigor of youth. He was a classic example of “their ideal student.”

• To further cement a favorable impression his personal interests and social skills were detailed to help establish a good profile.

• Aligning all his best attributes, their son refined his brand and enjoyed a boost in confidence. He realized a positive benefit with the genuine opportunities in defining his brand, aligning all his best attributes.

• He gathered favorable testimonials to his good character and included them to attest to his brand.

These were the main ingredients in their recipe to brand their offspring. Essentially branding your college student is another form of personal branding. The visual topper to this was a large branding board that visually showed everything about “his brand.” One glance at this board and you see his brand instantly. Since a picture is more powerful than the written word, this huge effort made it’s desired impression … he was accepted into his first school of choice. His confidence in himself helped him land on the student paper the first day on campus with a photo assignment. His passion you see is photo journalism.

His brand succeeded and gave him a powerful advantage. It’s his job now to make it better every day to help in his quest for glory.

File under: Archives, Beginners, Blogs & Blogging, Branding, Business, Employer Branding, Featured, Marketing, Media, News, Personal Branding

September 7, 2008 By Ed Roach

Pimp Your Brand!

Day in and day out we run our businesses the best we can. Like anything else in flux the edges get worn, some things just start to get old. The culture around us is in flux also. Things change and so we must adapt. Summer has come and gone for another year – so it’s time to give the brand an over-haul. Get it ready to take on a fresh new year only a few short months away.

Here’s a 10 point check-list to use to give new life by PIMPING YOUR BRAND:

• Pimp your brand personality. Taking an objective view of the company, has anything changed that defines you differently than when you first started. Maybe you have become more socially minded. Perhaps you find that you have been more generous in donating time to non-profits in your community. If this bears some truth, you can Pimp your brand here by officially embracing philanthropy as a corporate policy. Embrace pet charities and let the world know who you are passionate for.

• Does your brand logo reflect your existing market? Has the demographic aged? If so, perhaps it is time to update it a little. Pimping your Brand logo could mean a complete revise or just a tweak here and there. Smooth out a few wrinkles, refresh its colors and attitude. Your brand image should reflect who your brand is.

• Survey your stake holders to look for any opportunities to embrace and any short-comings to fix. Pimp Your Brand with real world intelligence to make your product or service address true needs. Just asking, strengthens the relationships with each of your shareholder groups.

• Pimp your overall brand image. Do an image audit of the entire company. Make sure that the logo is used consistently every where in the operation. Are the corporate colors also consistent? Do your marketing materials reflect the image correctly? Pimp your brand image to define it.

• Pimp the sales staff. In the course of selling your products or services, does the sales staff reflect the brand correctly. Sit down with the sales team and pimp the deliverable. Raise the bar and win the hearts and minds of the sales staff and their customers.

• As the company leader (the visionary) pimp your attitude. Your employees are inspired or dragged down depending on your attitude. By pimping your attitude, you bring nothing but positive vibes to the company. Even when the economy appears to spiraling down around you, look for the opportunities and display this to the stake holders. A leader who fails to pimp their attitude stands a great chance of losing real talent to the competition.

• Pimp your workplace. Find ways to make the working environment more pleasant. This doesn’t mean more money, but how can you take some of the grey areas out of the work-a-day mix. Look for the little things that make doing the job better.

• Pimp your personal brand. When was the last time you met with your top customers? Call them out of the blue, and ask them for a meeting or lunch to ask them how they are being serviced. Give them a reason to remember you. If you have a retail store, introduce yourself to customers, give them a free coffee coupon at a near by coffee shop. Don’t advertise this – just do it and pimp your brand.

• Pimp your brand product or service. Can anything be made better? Can the delivery of your product or service be improved? For myself, I try to not rely on the impersonal email for ALL my client contact. Where the client is at a great distance I call on the telephone and if they are within an hour or so, I drop in on them. This alone has increased business opportunities. Email has its advantages, but I believe if you rely on it 100% of the time, you are doing it more for YOUR convenience and not for enriching your relationships.

• Pimp your public relations. There is a lot of companies who take public relations as an effort that is only used once or twice in the lifetime of the company. By pimping your PR you can increase your “public” awareness. Utilizing social networking websites can be a fabulous ingredient of your PR mix.

What ever you can do to pimp your brand, can only make you better. The smallest initiatives can have the biggest impact on your brand effectiveness. An eleventh pimp might also be corporate blogging. I’ll shut-up now, as there is so much we all can do to keep the wheels in motion as we pimp our own brands.

File under: Featured

August 25, 2008 By Ed Roach

How To Power Position Your Brand!

Positioning your brand is probably one of the most important aspects of branding. It is the unique strategy that will introduce your target audience to exactly what it is that differentiates your product or service from your competitors. I am working with a number of companies right now developing exactly this.

It is absolutely fascinating what gems come out of discussions on positioning. At the outset, many companies are hard pressed to recognize a difference. All they see is the obvious. My strength is that I want to understand how the product or service is delivered, how is it made, what is the experience that surrounds the product or service? Several times the difference is not in the actual product but the delivery of the product or the follow-up. You have to look at the entire product cycle from conception to happy customer and beyond. There is an opportunity in there. You can count on it.

Compliances offer up positioning opportunities. Training offers up positioning opportunities. Frankly there is much to learn from every angle and nuance. For example, I worked with a consumer food product customer. They felt that their fruit product was much like all their competitors across the world. All were grown exactly the same way, with the same ingredients, under similar conditions using the same technologies and marketing and shipping conditions. I refused to believe that there was no opportunity and so I dug deeper into the industry standards. I wanted to know how one product is rated over another. What was intriguing was that the very standards for grading our produce was the opportunity for a very BIG aha moment. Here is the skinny on fruit standards. They are judged on 3 criteria – size, appearance and firmness.

Consider these criteria again: size – appearance – firmness. Is anything missing? I suggested there was and it was huge.

Taste.

You see, taste isn’t a criteria. That is left up to the individual. I suggested that there must be at least a minimum standard that a good sample must taste like. With watermelon, it’s the sweetness – a lemon, its tarty characteristic. Everyone agreed that we were on to something.

Once this particular fruit standard for taste was established, we then contracted the two leading agricultural universities in Canada and the United States to independently develop processes that tested for taste based on the bar we set. While other competing fruit have may won taste competitions judged by consumers, we now have established a definitive test for taste not unlike the the test for size, appearance and firmness. The processes were legally protected and are now proprietary to us.

We were now the ONLY fruit tested for taste!

Our fruit’s taste was now a guaranteed standard of quality NOT based on differing opinions, but on quantitative data. The bar had been raised.

A very compelling difference. This my friends is positioning. In this case the customer had to change how it did business and in doing so, introduced a new standard to their industry. This is not the work of a follower, but a leader.

Positioning can be very powerful if you are savvy enough to recognize the opportunity and bold enough to implement it. The real gems are far beyond the obvious. Look all around the edges of your product or service.

One other small example I will tantilize you with involves a current customer who has a software product. He is in a saturated market where all developers (including them) use one simple digital tool as the basis for determining solutions inherent to the software. If they carry out one small alteration I am suggesting to this simple tool they will instantly make that common tool the achiles heel for every competitor they have – over night.

This is no small boast. When I suggested it, the customer saw the potential immediately. So simple.

Currently the tool has no real value to the software only to say that it has to be there. Much like a car has to have tires to move smoothly over a road – they are important, but they are a given in every model and simply not seen as important or influential enough to warrant a mention in the marketing of a car. This simple tool is such a animal. We are not complete on this yet, so I can’t mention specifics.

My tease is to inspire you look deep into the soul of your product or service and develop a positioning strategy that goes way beyond fancy advertising slogans and resonates with target audiences, by eliminating pain points (defined in a previous article) and making customers want to work with you. A great positioning strategy will excite you, your company and ultimately lead customers to love you.

Are you up to the challenge?

File under: Featured

August 10, 2008 By Ed Roach

Are You Gettin’ Any? I Can Help.

The above headline is a hook based on sexual innuendo coupled with no intention to deliver. It is also something that I find despicable on the web and that is the classic practice of “Bait and Switch”. In its classic scenario, you picked up your weekend edition of the newspaper, went through the advertising flyers and low and behold you locked on to some incredible offer with a time limitation such as, limited quantities – sale ends 5:00 sharp!

- you don’t have to tell me twice, I’m there when the store has shortly opened. Ad in hand you approach the salesperson, inform them of your mission only to be told -”I’m sorry we are sold out of that item, but perhaps you’d be interested in this other offer on something similar?”

BAIT AND SWITCH.

Today, bait and switch is all over the web. The inspiration for this article was at a business blog the other night – the writer’s headline- “How to differentiate your company in lean times”. Fair enough I figured – its right up the ole’ branding alley, let’s give it a read.

The article told us all about the the ‘importance’ of differentiating but nothing about the ‘how to’ they promised in the headline.

BAIT AND SWITCH.

To give the author of that post the benefit of a doubt, when I fist started blogging, a seasoned blogger told me that most articles that start with a “how to” or other solution based phrases get better readership. Sage words but the advice should have also carried with it the concept that you must follow through on the promise and deliver. I was miffed and then irritated when there was no comment opportunity.

The web being such a relatively new sales medium is riddled with bait and switch, which has all the honesty of a used car classified ad.

Your integrity is a major part of your brand. Why do people feel they have to trick their audience into buying their products? Perhaps they know their products are not of the high quality they brag about. Myself, I like to think that it is naiveté, in that they have discovered the techniques of the old snake oil salesmen and don’t mind employing them on a buying public. They are not in many cases considering long-term sales relationships but are only concentrating on the one purchase mentality. Given the breadth of the web – one purchase each doesn’t sound so bad, so I guess the temptation is there, so no harm done. They would be wrong of course. They harm their brand . Your brand values have trump temptation if you are to truly be successful.

I wonder if these people understand the sales wisdom that a happy customer is your best and cheapest opportunity for future sales – directly and indirectly, by becoming an advocate for you. You are your brand and your corporate brand is you. Remember we are all only stupid once, as they say “Burn me once, stupid you – burn me twice, stupid me”. I abide by the ethical value system. I work very hard to offer straight forward information that any serious entrepreneur will find useful in their quest to grow their business. Myself and my peers agonize over our products and opinion to be sure we are not delivering less that what is expected.

All I suggest is that we all refrain from unethical marketing just to make a dollar. Money’s nice but it’s not worth tarnishing your brand over.

File under: Featured

July 23, 2008 By Ed Roach

THE introvert’s guide to selling

Not everyone throws on their spidey outfit and relishes leaping into the fray of the business sales arena. As a matter of fact a great deal of people sell because it is just part of what they do. If they could get the sales some other way, they’d probably jump at it. In the mean time all of the reluctant sales people out there, have to do they best they can with the few sale skills they have.

For the past few months I’ve been in touch with several reluctant sales people from around the world, and we’ve been sharing tips and techniques that has made selling a little bit easier. None of these contacts are Anthony Robbins clones or Dale Carnegie wannabe’s, BUT the one thing they did have in common was that they are introverts in an extroverts world. They’re tired of the books on sales that assume you love to put yourself out there.

So guess what? I’ve taken this valuable conversation and put them together in a little eBook that I am giving away for the asking. It was a pleasure putting together this information because of the insight it gave me. This is my first offering in the eBook realm. I call the effort, “The Reluctant Salesperson: An Introvert’s Guide to Selling.”

If you see fit to add this eBook to your reading, I’d love it, if you’d drop back here and let me know what you think. One thing about blogging that I find immensely gratifying is the breadth of opinion – all of it with the goal of helping all of us improve how we do business.

…for all the reluctant sales people who may be too shy to drop by my site and pick up a copy, I don’t mind if you get a friend to do it for you.

All the best.