Billion-Dollar Branding

Brand Your Small Business Like a Big Business and Make Great Things Happen

Honey Parker, Blaine Parker

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781614482727
• eBook ISBN: 9781614482734
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Advertising
• Index: Business

Two advertising veterans explain the myths about branding—and how even the smallest businesses can benefit by defining themselves to their customers.
 
Branding may be the single most misunderstood concept in marketing. It's not only for big businesses with big bucks. It's not about a logo, a color, a font, or a type of advertising. Branding is defining a company's image in such a way that the customer is left with a single feeling about that business and what they do. Branding is about finding a business's juicy center.
 
Even small businesses on shoestring budgets and sole practitioners can learn the principles of good branding—an effort that encompasses not just messaging, but multiple day-to-day decisions that shape and build your customers' perceptions and emotions. With numerous real-life examples and the expertise that comes only from experience, this book guides you to a new way of thinking about your business, and the kind of wisdom that no amount of money can buy.

Chapter 1

THE PROBLEM WITH BRAND

What the hell IS brand, anyway?

Few know.

But everyone thinks they know.

What does everyone think they know?

Just ask around.

“Brand is a logo.”

“I’ve branded my business with this color.”

“In order to make sure my advertising is always branded, we use these five fonts and we say, “Bob’s Miniature Widgets—for all your Miniature Widget needs.”

“I’ve branded myself with this jingle. It’s the music from ‘Happy Birthday,’ but the words are about linoleum.”

“We branded this TV commercial harder by making the logo an inch and a half bigger than before.”

Seriously. This is what many people think brand is all about.

And it’s not like small business advertisers have a corner on this market.

Yes, the “Bob’s Miniature Widget” example actually comes from things Blaine has heard small business advertisers say repeatedly.

But the notion of branding “harder” by making the logo bigger is the kind of thing Honey has heard marketing executives say when working on huge national advertising campaigns. Even when told that’s not “branding harder,” they say, “No, no, I know, but can you do it anyway?”

No matter the size of the business or the experience of the people involved, the definition of brand remains elusive.

It’s like the blind men who are explaining what an elephant looks like—yet each of them is doing so by feeling only one part of the elephant. Everyone has some vague idea about a tiny piece of the branding puzzle, but they don’t understand its integration into the whole. And brand is a whole. It’s the sum of much smaller, well thought-out parts with a very specific goal.

As everyone knows, “If it’s on Wikipedia, it must be true.” Accordingly, Wikipedia comes a bit closer to getting the definition of brand right by saying that branding is “the identity of a specific product, service, or business.”

And while that definition is a major step in the right direction, that’s still not quite correct.

Clinically, it’s accurate.

But customers aren’t clinicians.

And your brand is aimed at your customers.

Which means that, like everything else about your marketing, a brand should be about your customers.

And if you know your Sales Philosophy 101, you know that customers do not make buying decisions intellectually. They make their buying decisions emotionally.

Once their emotions are triggered, they will use their intellect to justify the purchase. Human beings can justify almost anything if they want to. You just need to make them want to. (Within reason, of course. We’re talking about keeping it all legal and ethical here.)

So, your customers need to be engaged emotionally.

Your customers need to feel something.

Therefore, if we follow the notion of brand to its logical conclusion, a brand is one thing and one thing only.

Your brand is the one way you want customers to feel about your business.

That’s so significant, it bears repeating.

Your brand is the one way you want customers to feel about your business.

What do you think?

All the jingles, logos, taglines, colors, fonts, slow-motion kids with puppies playing in sprinklers, high-energy montages of tight-bodied athletes crossing the finish line, double-entendre headlines that are just a bit naughty—they all need to feed into the one way you want customers to feel about your business.

Is that tickling something back there in your marketing nether regions?

Does it make any sense to your gray matter?

Do we need to pull you out of the deep end of the pool and start again back at the splash pad?

Let’s take a visit through the Land O’ Brand.

Let’s look at what makes a brand work, some stellar examples of brand, break down why they’ve been so successful, and figure out how to apply the concept of brand to your own business.

Then, at some point in our journey we’ll discuss how you get to your logo, color, font, jingle, tagline, t-shirt, mug, bobble-head dolls, etcetera. Until then…

Get ready.

Tuck away any loose clothing and long hair, strap in and hang on. It’s going to be a wild ride like Mr. Toad never imagined…

IGNITION POINTS

 Brand is not a color, a logo, a font or any other technical detail about a company’s image.

Branding “harder” is not about making a logo bigger, saying the name more often, or repeating some lame, meaningless phrase.

 Branding is defining your company’s personality in a way that makes the customer feel something significant about the business.

 Emotions are key. People might justify a purchase intellectually—but they first decide to buy emotionally. So it is with your brand.

FIRESTARTER

It’s possible you already consider your business to be branded. How do you define your business’s brand? Does it hold water relative to the points mentioned above?

Chapter 2

WHAT IS BRAND REALLY?

Brand is the single most misunderstood concept in marketing.

It doesn’t matter who you are or what you do, chances are pretty good that you have some opinion of what brand is—and it’s probably wrong.

Even Blaine’s mother, a retired successful business woman with an entrepreneurial streak, challenges our definition of brand because she believes her answer is right.

She believes a brand is the physical act of stamping a logo on something.

Sorry, Mom.

Now, if she meant that your brand is the act of stamping the feeling of your business into someone’s psyche, she’s not that far off. But you and I both know that’s not what she meant.

She is also typical.

Folks, this is non-negotiable.

Brand is one thing and one thing only.

Brand is the one way you want customers to feel about your business.

And we can prove it.

How can we be so certain?

For one, we can document our assertions, which we are about to do.

For another, all kinds of people, from sole proprietors to actual, experienced marketing executives, have approached us after seeing our assertions and the supporting evidence, and said:

“I’ve never heard it put tha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Really Important Note
• Foreword
• Preface
• Chapter 1 The Problem With Brand
• Chapter 2 What Is Brand Really?
• Chapter 3 The Shining Brand On The Hill
• Chapter 4 The Sound Of A One-Man Brand Laughing All The Way To The Bank
• Chapter 5 The Power Of One
• Chapter 6 Brand, Rinse, Repeat
• Chapter 7 Putting A Fire In The Small Business Brand
• Chapter 8 Brand: Hard Work, Fear & Loathing
• Chapter 9 Brand: To Thine Own Self Be True
• Chapter 10 Who’s Buying You?
• Chapter 11 Fear And Joy At The Intersection Of Your Brand
• Chapter 12 Once Upon A Brand
• Chapter 13 From Defining To Refining
• Afterword
• Free Stuff