Brand Building Blocks
The Making Business Fun Podcast, Episode #104
# Brand 104
We’re in an advanced age of branding. Most founders seem to know the importance. But, still business owners can fail to nail the brand exercise.
The most popular brands in the world.
Nike, Apple, Coca-Cola. McDonalds. Any disagreements?
No confusion about what these brands do or offer.
That’s a function of consistency and money. Effort. None of it is by accident.
Ever heard of Mint Mobile? Me neither, not really, until recently. What about T-Mobile? The difference between these two is one is $15/month and you’ve never heard of them (no marketing budget) and the other is $100/month and you can’t sit through 8 minutes of TV without watching 5 minutes of T-Mobile commercials. Now — Mint mobile happens to run on top of the T-Mobile network, the service is the same. The difference is the branding. Same network, same service, vastly different brands.
Mint is thrifty, has excellent customer service, great value, and no advertising. T-Mobile, on the other hand, is splashy and loud, promotes itself endlessly, has a poor reputation for customer service and is expensive.
Same service, different branding and brand experience.
Both spend money on branding, T-mobile spends a lot more, to be sure. T-Mobile does endless advertising, everywhere, all year long. Mint, not so much.
In fact, instead of TV commercials, Mint has run newspaper ads in 2020 and 2021 saying that they’re not going to spend on superbowl ads and were instead spending that money on, in 2020, free service, and in 2021, increased data limits on all their plans, free of charge.
My point? A lot of the reason that T-Mobile is $100 a month is that a good portion of that money goes to all that brand building — ad agencies, ad campaign production fees, tv and radio placement fees, publicity, etc. Because they spend a lot on branding efforts, they have to charge a lot. And Mint says, forget it, we’ll just be better and cheaper and that’s gonna be our brand. And they count on the customers to spread the word.
For a major national brand to become a major national brand, or a global brand, it requires a lot of good brand identity work and a lot of time, money and effort. But not all brands need to be this big.
A brand should accurately reflect the business (or the aspirational picture of the business). A brand should be true to the business’s values and size and attitude and product offering and ideal customer — etc. A small, home town brand can safely craft up a small town brand if that’s intentionally part of their appeal. Not every business needs to be a Nike or Taco Bell, Nor should it be.
So, key question: What kind of image do you want your brand to evoke? Start making some distinctions and see where it gets you. Maybe you feel like doing some brand development work isn’t for you, or isn’t for small businesses, or is only for the Pepsis and Taco Bells of the world. Not so.
Working from your heart and intuition, you can create just about everything your brand needs with resources that are easily at hand, with just a little bit of guidance and help along the way. Believe me, you have it in you. And that’s what we’re all up and into today: You and your business’s brand.
What is brand?
Brand, ins most simple form is a business choosing how it wants to express itself, and then doing so repeatedly.
A brand is the sum of all the attributes of what makes your brand special and unique. It brings your name, your logo and the purpose of your business into a tangible look and feel. It containerizes your brand attributes and ethos into something identifiable, transmissible, hopefully memorable and ultimately profitable. The brand is the summed up whole of your business identity, your value proposition, and your position in the marketplace.
Brands have logos and colors, but they also have a full suite of additional attributes and signals. We asked this question in episode 103 on Making Business Fun: What does your location say about your brand? Location, and all the other external-facing decisions, circumstances and actions concerning your business have an effect on your brand. Positively or negatively — keep that in mind.
So yes, a brand is a name and a logo and your colors. But it is also everything else — your location, your uniforms (or lack thereof), the bags you give to customers (again, or don’t), the boxes you ship in, the charities you give to, the attitude of your employees, your pricing and product strategy, even your hours. Do you do big promotional sales and a lot of discounts, or don’t you? For kids or for adults? Open early, open late or banker’s hours?
Your brand needs to present your business as, unique, memorable, and special.
Unique.
No small business should try to be all things to all people. A clear focus and intentional specialization is the key. Small businesses need to do what they do, do it well, and do nothing else. Even huge businesses try to be special. McDonalds. Say what you will, but it’s clear to me that they specialize in good burgers, made fast, on the cheap. And it’s notable that they don’t have their own brand of drinks (they could!), they don’t have gift shops, and they haven’t moved into the bar or nightclub business. These are all things that a misguided CEO and marketing team could have tried to do. But they don’t. Why? It dilutes the specialization, the focus, of the brand.
Some Brand Love
Brands start with names, develop into logos and color and shapes, evolve into websites and social media, become physical spaces, inside and outside, and eventually wind up in our customers’ stomachs, homes, garages, or remembered collection of experiences. Let’s take a look at a few small businesses expressions of their brand.
Red Bike Brand — evokes small town, slower pace of life, easy going vibes, laid back activity, the kind of time and place that come somewhere between brunch and dinner, in the ocean air. Perfect for a small-town apparel business capturing the Key West Vibe, appealing to locals who live the sunny beach paradise vibe, and those who visit it and want to take it home with them forever. The Red Bike is the mythical metaphorical container for all those beach vibes. It’s a brand that gets charged in the vacation-time sun, and then continues to hum with that vibe back home, thousands of miles away, melting the snow with thoughts of that red bike, baking in the Key West Sunshine.
Up In a Day, this is a company that makes websites for small businesses. The team at Up in a Day thinks that small business owners often have to go through unnecessarily long processes and workflows just to launch their website. What does this brand’s name, Up in a Day, tell you about the way they work? What’s the promise they are making to their customers? What does the name Up in a Day communicate about the product benefit?
Schoppee Farm — Schoppee Farm is an organic family farm in Maine that grows hemp and derives and makes CBD products from their crop. So, this brand is in a product category where the origin and quality of the product is of keen interest to the consumer. The importance of the the farm is essential to the promise of the brand, which is: we control the product from seed to sale — from the time it goes into the earth to the time it goes into a jar and into the mail. This brand is using the very real attributes of their farm to make the case for quality control, and chain of custody of the product as a testament to product efficacy and safety.
Flowers and Candy — a main street boutique in Portland, Maine. What does their name tell you about what they sell? Based on that name, what do you think you’ll find in this store? Probably a frothy combination of a florist and a high end candy shop. Well, you’d be surprised to find that when you walk in, there’s not a flower to be found. This brand sells women’s hats, clothing, apparel, accessories and yes, a good bit of candy, although the candy it is really known for is medicinal in the sense that it’s all gourmet candy with CBD infusions. Surprise! And in this case, the apparent mismatch between the name and the preconceived brand expectations and what the brand actually offers send some very memorable brand signals: surprising, interesting, curious, unique, different. Somewhat edgy. Pretty cool. And definitely oh so memorable and it creates a big guess what, or get this, moment. Where 4 hour later, out to dinner with friends, you talk about the big pleasant surprise you got today when you discovered that Flowers & Candy sells hats and CBD. Also, in this example, the words Flowers & Candy are not a literal descriptive of whats in the store, but more metaphorical as to what kind of vibes the brand promises to bring to its customers. Flowers & Candy is the vibe, not the product offering. And that makes the brand bold and memorable, and goes to show that breaking the rules in a creative way can be very effective of not downright genius.
Here in Miami, a very popular pizza shop is named Mister 01. Go figure. And, popular Asian food hall in Wynwood is named 1-800-Lucky. Know what their phone number is: 305-768-9826. The point? Getting clever and going against expectations can be very memorable and effective.
The Mechanics of Brand
**You Brand Promise**
Make a brand promise and keep it. If you’re the low cost copy center, then be that. Don’t also be a Main Street Gift Shop. Or get expensive. You’re the low cost copy center! BMW promises the ultimate driving experience. QuickBooks promises fast book keeping. And TurboTax promises fast tax prep. What’s your brand promise?
Red Bike Brand: Beachy living, sunny and sandy.
Up in a Day: Always fast.
**Do What You Do Best, Relentlessly**
Think consistency. Doing what you do well, each and every time a customer comes to see you. Let the reputation for the consistent brand experience build your brand, stronger and stronger, over time. Eventually, your reputation will become the gold standard of your brand, backing your promise with a reputation of delivering. This works particularly well for hotels and airlines, where the experience is easy to see, hard to miss and something that surrounds you while you’re using the product. You’d think this would be key for a restaurant, yet restaurants are notoriously inconsistent. So, be consistently, stubbornly, relentlessly, your brand. Time after time.
Schoppee Farm: Always organic & eco friendly, seed to sale (including eco friendly packaging)
Flowers & Candy: Always a memorable surprise, a reason to come back and be blown away.
**Be Great at Customer Satisfaction**
And of course, this starts with customer service. All the hard brand development work in the world won’t help your business if customers are continuously being disappointed. And being disappointed typically begins when a brand fails to live up to its brand promise, fails to live up to customer expectations. Remember, these expectations stem from what your business has told your customers to expect. Seems logical, yeah?
This applies to all brands, everywhere. Customers who are satisfied with their brand experience will come back. And tell people. And be great customers for years to come. Think now of Schoppee Farm, where kinda of like vitamins, their customers take their products daily or weekly or whatever. Keeping these customers satisfied is the key to them coming back, and long term profitability and brand success.
**Let’s Wrap it All Up**
Everything your brand says and does, day in and day out, reinforces a brand message, positively or negatively. Or confusingly. The trick is to make sure your business is constantly transmitting brand messages that are seen as net positives in your customers’ eyes. I say “net positive” because sometime a customer has to go through a little negative to get to a lot of good with a brand experience — think of the long lines at Disneyland.
Branding is a simple two-step process, to recap from the beginning. Choose a brand message and transmit it relentlessly. Say what you want to say, say it with names and logos, colors and taglines, advertising and marketing, interior and exterior, on your employees and on your paperwork. Whhenever you have a choice for your business to say something, transmit an idea, an essence, to a customer, do it in a way that’s consistent with your brand.
Pick your message, and transmit it from everywhere, forever and ever. That’s it.