Tag : brand-dissonance

It’s Not Who You Know

Mafia MenWe’ve all heard, “It’s not what you know but who you know.” In my life and career that has proven true time and again, and I’ve been on the fortunate end of that equation. But recently, that idiom has grown nuanced for me in—of all places—a movie theater.

Thanks to our town having a second-run (“dollar”) theater, I got to watch this summer’s A-Team movie four times before it left the big screen. I’m not normally an action movie guy, but I’m hoping whichever sibling drew my name for Christmas this year gets me the ensuing DVD. There are too many quotable lines to count, but one of the most practical lines came from “Face.” In military prison, living large with luxury amenities, he reveals the secret of his success.

“It’s now who you know. It’s how you know them.”

This is the premise of black mail and organized crime, extramarital affairs and Free Masonry, BALCO employees and undercover police officers. On a warm, fuzzy note, it’s also true of romantic relationships—unless you just heard the death knell of, “I’d like to be [just] friends.”

What does this have to do with marketing?

Consumers are more comfortable transacting with vendors who’ve gained their confidence—local or otherwise. You gain part of that confidence through consistent branding, the sum of advertising and customer interactions that continually reinforce the culture and quality of your services and/or products. Some of the biggest disappointments that we as consumers face is discovering a disconnect with the expectations companies have created in us, like Apple has recently experienced with their iPhone 4 foibles.

Western culture celebrates the brands we love, even wearing or displaying the logos of our favorite companies on our clothes, shopping bags, and Facebook “like” lists. We recommend the products and services we buy and talk around the water cooler about those with creative marketing or cool stories like TOMS Shoes and Zappos.

So, how do you initiate those relationships? And how do you move from initiating those relationships to brand trust or—even better—customer evangelism?

Evaluate and extrapolate from your current client base.
If all you want is more customers in the store, you’ll waste your advertising budgets. So, research the common denominators of who already likes you and recommends you. Discover the kind of people or businesses that best match your culture and proficiencies; then research prospects that are as identical as possible to them.

Codify and celebrate your company culture.
Chick-fil-A and GoDaddy.com have very different brand images; and both have experienced wide-spread success. You get specific mental images when you think “Geico” or “Yankees” or “VH1.” Determine the mood and message of your brand; then build your advertising and transaction environments around them.

Hire some brand police.
Don’t just spend money to fill a media quota; and don’t let advertising leave your office, unless it meticulously matches the rest of your materials and media. The public’s retention of your brand runs parallel to your advertising’s consistency both (1) from one advertising medium to another and (2) between your advertising and your company’s underlying culture.

Keep the hits coming.
Most guys don’t propose on first dates, yet entrepreneurs do it all the time. One of my clients recently lamented that their first mail piece to a certain demographic didn’t generate any significant business. They wanted to get to at least second base on their first date. While that may be possible with some creative marketing or serendipitous matching of their need—at their time of need—and your solutions, you’re probably going to have to take the prospects on multiple visual dates. People may not need your services right away or may need multiple impressions to recognize and remember your message apart from the din of the marketplace.

Get conversational.
Go to the trade and home shows where your clients mingle. Host free seminars or cocktail receptions; take people to lunch or a sporting event. Personalize invoices and/or receipts. Write hand-written notes. Sponsor local fundraiser events or maybe create a float for a parade. Better yet, get behind a non-profit as a corporate partner or spokesperson. Even if you have to hire someone to do it for you, use social media presence to post helpful links and interact with people as humans. Don’t interrupt their Facebook and Twitter streams only for broadcasted announcements; no, jump into show-and-tell like Local Motors does. The more patient and engaged you are, the more interest and/or trust you can capture.

For a lot of this, the payoff seems abstract, if not distant. But I’ve read or witnessed too many success stories to dismiss the value of a brand that’s unique and authentic, creative and engaged. So, discover who you are, and spend your time with folks who like people like you.
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Charles Jones said, “You will be the same person in five years as you are today, except for the people you meet and the books you read.” It’s interesting for me to compare where I was spiritually, relationally, emotionally, and experientially five years ago to today’s vistas in those same categories. I’ve met a God I hadn’t known, despite life in a minister’s home. I have more and deeper friendships than I anticipated having at this stage in life. Five years ago this month, Crystal and I were planning our first post-honeymoon vacation to somewhere other than a family gathering. Since then, we’ve traveled to multiple countries and found interests we didn’t know we had. My magazine subscriptions and other non-fiction inhalation has sling-shot me into valuable positions with influence.

As a Christian, how I relate to God and his book definitely determines the rate of change in my life. Right now, we’re going through a challenging series at church, called “All In.” The basic premise is that we have as much of God and his supernatural impact on our life journeys as we want. That’s heavy. That means we change only as much as we release to sovereign access.

We can do the ritual gig, punching our spiritual time cards each weekend (or even more often) and living mostly-tidy lives. Or we can fall in love with our eternal groom and watch what that intimacy does to us. It’s scary. I struggle regularly with surrender—in multiple areas and on various levels—to the unseen omni-everything. Thankfully, heaven rewards me with an unexplainable pleasure and presence, when I do surrender. And he’s got a bunch of that for you, too—if you want it.

[footer]Image used by permission through purchase from iStockPhoto.com.[/footer]

57: Avoiding Brand Dissonance

Shoe ClosetFor years, I’ve told my clients and prospects that I’m not trying to get 100% of their design work. Multiple auction marketers have heard me say, “Just bring me in on your big or showcase auctions.” Sovereignty has more than taken care of my workflow, and I prefer customers to find my work a good value than to be sold into something they can’t afford.

So, while that’s still my official invitation to auctioneers, I’ve been experiencing some internal dissonance regarding that position. From time to time, I’ll see different clients’ lower-end work or see local vendor ads for a national product or franchise that do not match the national campaigns or branding. (Car dealers and closeout stores are notorious for this.) They just don’t match. The logos are off; the fonts are unprofessional; the margins or spacing is inconsistent; the images haven’t been edited or presented for best presentation; information flows in a strange order. It’s as if their brand is schizophrenic.

I get it. Sometimes, we have to take small jobs to keep the lights aglow and phones ringing in the office. But we have to be careful our work doesn’t look cheap, or we’ll be needing that cheap work more and more—in lieu of the bigger transactions. We can cheapen our established, progressive brands by slapping our name on shoddy advertising, our signs in front of entry-level work.

Do you remember the Cadillac Cimmaron? Coming off the 1970’s oil crises and reacting to CAFE standards, the GM luxury brand thought it could grab more buyers by slapping leather seats and a Cadillac emblem on a Chevy Cavalier. Economy buyers saw past the badges; luxury buyers left the brand for upstart Japanese lines and proven European rivals. Reviewed as one of the 50 worst cars ever manufactured††, “[t]he Cimarron’s failure was part of a series of events throughout the 1980s and 1990s which eroded the brand’s share of the US market from 3.8% in 1979 to 2.2% in 1997[.]”†

Cimarron Ad

Cadillac pretty much lost a generation of buyers by mixing its luxury brand image with cheap brand extension.

Cadillac’s hard lesson taught its competitors what not to do. Toyota has different locations and building designs for Lexus dealerships. BMW requires MINI franchisees to house both sales and service centers in separate buildings from its BMW models. Daimler sells it Smart Car units through Penske dealerships, not Mercedes ones.

So, it’s not so much about having an economy product or service. You just have to be careful about how those smaller sales reflect on the shiny deals you want people to assume are your standard.

You can create either separate divisions or companies, branding or color schemes—like corporate America does for different product lines. For about $2,000-$3,000, you should be able to obtain a professional logo, basic stationary, company brochures, and branded landing web page that can redirect after a short brand splash to an Auction Zip or Global Auction Guide auction calendar for your lower-end sales (instead of a whole new calendar site). Such brand differentiation has the potential to be as much of an investment in your priority brand as would be extra runs of your current high-end collateral.

If you can’t afford the time or resources to separate your markets or manage separate brands, you can raise the floor on the low-end look to make the differences in branding look less extreme. If some of your auction budgets require postcards, they should match your brochures. If your marketing plans can afford only black and white or two-ink brochures, they should be designed on the same templates as your color pieces.

If you have to go with smaller ads, create separate templates for those—not just shrunken or squished logos slammed in a corner below five-point text. Or use line ads (or small display ads without your logo), so that the graphical difference is less noticeable and associable. It’s pretty inexpensive to create different email templates, and changing a company or division name or a URL on a press release takes mere seconds. Your generic and directional signs should at least match your custom ones in color; font matching would be a professional, low-cost touch, too. Most web sites you use for marketing are universal in design; so, you’re okay there—especially since most don’t show your logo and branding, anyway.

Not every auction can be a a feather in your cap. But you have to be careful to limit the time your cap is collecting change on the sidewalk.
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Sometimes, my Mondays are crap. I mean, my Sundays and even some Friday nights are filled with spiritual highs and soul-level fulfillment, emotional connection and obedient surrender. Next to my valid resumé of Holy Spirit moments I drop a pile of self-worship, scorching unkindness, and primal depravity. It smells. It spoils and sours everything, even beautiful things. It can even ruin designated God environments. Stack enough of it, and it wafts doubt onto sure things.

From what I hear, this is common. Cultures around the world see it so much, they use it as evidence that all religions spring from the same contaminated fountain of human imagination, that the God deal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. I mean, nobody likes hypocrites. Nobody craves inconsistency. Nobody wants to waste time on something that doesn’t truly do what it’s supposed to do. (Well, except for infomercial and QVC buyers.)

The way I reconcile that is to seek forgiveness vertically and horizontally, to repent and make a U-turn at this green arrow left lane—even if I might only make it a mile or two until I take the wrong exit again. And while it’d be better not to need stop lights, I can at least be thankful for them and use them as God intended.

[footer]†Flammang, James M., and Ron Kowalke: Standard Catalog of American Cars 1976-1999, page 149-189. Krause Publications, 1999.††Peters, Eric: Automotive Atrocities! The Cars We Love to Hate, pp.94-95. Motorbooks International, 2004.

Cadillac ad used with permission from ProductionCars.com

Image(s) used by permission through purchase from iStockPhoto.com ©2010[/footer]

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