Your Brand and
Leveraging 10 Million
Years of Human Evolution
Second
in a 4 part series on "Getting Creative with Your Marketing to Drive
Sales"
No Matter How Good Our Products and Services Are
Today We Live
and Die By Our Marketing and Sales
A good "brand" design can make every dollar you spend on
marketing much more effective. This is all about human
psychology and understanding how the human brain works. Our
DNA has programmed us to react in certain ways instinctively and
emotionally. These are powerful motivators, as we know most people
buy on emotion.
Every company needs a brand but few companies can
afford to spend money only to build that brand. In fact venture
capitalists do not want to spend money on brand building because
they know how expensive it can be. Defining your brand is not that
difficult a process and must be done to have a cumulative impact
from your marketing efforts.
First it is important to understand that the days of "image" advertising where building
brand "awareness" was the goal are long over. Spending money just to
"build a brand" is effectively a suicide strategy for most
companies today.
You must build your brand on the back of effective and profitable
direct marketing that also drives real sales. Today brand advertising can only be done by
large
companies, generally with very broad customer bases. These are most
often maintenance campaigns for commodity products (i.e. Coke).
As an early-stage company you need
real sales and ROI from each and every marketing campaign you invest
in. You also need to learn from measuring the results and interpolate and extrapolate
from these to constantly improve your marketing.
Twenty-five years ago you
could build a national brand for $10 million by doing "block
advertising" on TV across CBS, NBC and ABC at the same time.
This would reach most households watching TV in a 15 minute period.
Run this over a 13 week TV flight and most people would recognize
your product name. Today due to media
fragmentation this same level of reach (touching such a broad
audience) would cost hundreds of millions of dollars.
Although this example is for consumer advertising this same
phenomenon applies to the B2B market as well. We are drowning in
advertising messages which are more expensive than ever. Rarely are
our products so unique that potential customers do not have
alternatives - even if the alternative is doing nothing.
A good brand takes advantage of the human
"primitive", or "reptilian brain". This part of the brain reacts but
does not think logically. Everyone knows most buying decisions are
emotional, not logical. This is the biology behind this truth.
Colors and visual images are a big part of this because we absorb
pictures instantly and remember faces, people, colors and emotions
naturally. Humans evolved to remember images and people to
survive in a dangerous world - not text. A brand 'personality'
is just that, elements of a person's personality applied to your
brand. The personality and the look and feel of your
marketing should be very similar in all your marketing, even
across different media. Some people call this your company's
identity but brand is more all encompassing.
A brand should have a Visual Selling Proposition
(VSP). This is a visual cue that bypasses the logical brain to
go directly to lower levels. Think about the close up of a Coke
bottle popping with bubbles and the cold spray on hot summer day at
the beach. Does this start your mouth watering? This creates a
visceral reaction. It is possible, but hard for a logo alone to do
this. So a logo is not usually a VSP but it is a visual memory cue.
A brand should also ideally have an Emotional
Selling Proposition (ESP). Think about the old AT & T
commercials about calling mom or your children on a holiday. Or
Kodak's picture moments. ESPs pull the heart strings in some way.
One of my favorite and most memorable TV ads
combines both these techniques of VSP and ESP. Remember
the Michelin ad with the baby sitting on the tire and the tag line
"Because So Much Is Riding On Your Tires". I'll bet you can
picture that TV ad or image? Then this emotion can be
rekindled (like at the tire store) with a simple picture.
Genius! Are their tires better? Who knows but my kids are
worth the premium right!
So how do you leverage these human emotions and the
brain's wiring in your marketing campaigns? Here are the simple
steps to creating your brand to leverage how we are all wired:
-
1.Define
Core Brand Values (positioning in the market and
target audience)
-
2.Select Your
Core Message To Customers (tag line with a unique
selling proposition)
-
3.Create Your
Brand’s personality (human characteristics affiliated
with your company)
-
4.Create Your
Brand Icons (visual queues to remember)
These will not change and now you can build
marketing campaigns around these basics that are consistent
and build long-term brand value.
These four things can often be agreed upon
in a couple of senior staff meetings with the right people.
You need someone to facilitate this process that is not
totally immersed your company and its history. Someone that
can think like an uneducated prospect. Otherwise you
will often not see the forest for the trees. Doing
your own branding alone can be like a dentist trying to
drill his own teeth. It might be cheap but the results are
not worth it. Besides this need not be a $50,000 project,
though many marketing consulting firms will be happy to
charge you this. It can be done well and quickly.
C-Level can help you with this for a
flat rate fee.
Done right you will find that with repeated hits
of the right "brand package" your prospects will start remembering your company name
and/or brand far better. Your conversion rates will rise over
time instead of being steady. You can build your brand as long as the
marketing
impressions to your targets are linked and have commonality in the
target's mind. Just remember this needs to be done on an emotional and/or visual level to take
advantage of how the human brain works.
If you do direct sales a good brand program will also "soften the beach" for
these salespeople and enhance their closing rate. With this
kind of cost of sales you must have a good brand developed to
compete effectively. Your brand done right will have a
cumulative impact which differentiate the winners from the losers.
If you develop your brand correctly you will see a significant
cumulative effect over time and have a real advantage over
competitors. Your brand will become a barrier to entry. This adds no
cost to your direct marketing really, it just becomes the philosophy
or foundation of the other marketing you develop. Good
thinking here that goes into your brand early will generate huge
cumulative returns over time! It can double, triple or
quadruple the results of your marketing over time because people
remember your company and so you have an edge over competitors. This is why everyone needs a branding
strategy and a clear corporate identity.
One problem is that "graphic design" people often do
not understand this branding process well. And they are rarely
marketing people who understand your market, positioning and the
other strategic issues. They are tactical people who are
artists. Or they might want to change your brand and throw out
whatever brand equity you have built already for a better looking
graphic they found for a single piece of collateral. This is,
of course, the tail wagging the dog and must be avoided at all
costs. Brands must be changed very slowly over time.
This is strategic marketing and you need very experienced strategic
level people and thinking to do it right.
This branding work is
easy and cheap to do and pays big dividends for a long time. However, you need to
use an outsider who is not too immersed in your company. You need an
unbiased perspective more like your prospect than
your employees. With a good brand and identify each successive
marketing "touch" can become more effective so this investment will
pay big dividends for many years.
