Your Brand is Not Your Logo

Your brand is about making choices!

Your Brand is how you and/or your product or service are perceived by your existing and prospective employees, suppliers and customers.

Your brand should not be confused with your logo. A logo may identify you, whereas a brand defines you.

Your brand is one part what you tell people you are and nine parts what you show people you are. The saying is old but true “Actions Speak Louder Than Words”

How you dress, or how you dress your trucks, appoint your office or deliver your quotes, reports or proposals are all part of and establish your Brand. Tiger Woods’ Red shirt on Sunday, UPS’s big brown trucks, Jim Tressel’s red vest, all part of the overall brand. While dress may be integral to a particular brand it is only part of the brand.

The necessity to survive in the initial stages of a new enterprise often drives decision makers to dilute their brand by trying to be all things to all people. Not wanting to lose out on any potential business, their marketing messages attempt to encompass so much that they become overly general and uninformative. Their attempt not to leave anything out results in the failure to properly promote and develop their true core business.

The heart and soul of your brand is the value your product or service delivers to your customer, the integrity you demonstrate in relations with your customers, suppliers and employees and the qualities which make your product or service unique in relation to your competitor(s).

Identify, prioritize and focus.

Fear of Failure – Taking Risks

Our own self perpetuated fear can be our worst enemy and greatest impediment to thinking and acting with creative risk. Creative risk is the ingredient that results in ideas, inventions or solutions that represent a leap in end results. Creative risk is the courage to go where no man has gone before (why does that sound so familiar?). Creative risk is the courage to find new and different solutions to old challenges, rather than imitate existing solutions. Creative risk is “thinking different”.

Accidental Creative Podcast #211 (which is worth checking out for anyone who needs to maintain their creativity on an ongoing basis) refers to a practice of Neil Fiore covered in his book “The Now Habit”. Dr. Fiore presents a patient with a 6 inch wide by 10 foot long board, asking if they think they could walk across the plank. They answer in the affirmative until he changes up the challenge by asking what if he elevated it 100 feet in the air suspended between two buildings. The of course not response illustrates how the depth of our fear of failure is affected by the perceived consequences of the failure.

A fear of failure often times interferes with progress, success and growth. Taking calculated risks is no guarantee of success. Unwillingness to take take risks is a guarantee of failure.

So Wrong That It's Right? Seeing Out of the Box!

There are many ways to think out of the box but sometimes the box is actually inside another box. Sound confusing?

So I have this great client who knows the value of his employees being dressed like a polished team. He also knows that when his people like the apparel they are required to wear they feel better wearing it and they work better as well. Now I was initially surprised when he told me that while everyone loved all their shirts, the gray shirts (with black logo) where the logos weren’t as visible as the white shirts actually often got them more attention. How does that work? 

It seems that while waiting on line at various venues my client noticed people would make eye contact with his logo and particularly when he wore the gray shirt with the black logo (because it was harder to see)  people would squint and approach for a closer look. More often than not, being then within conversational range, they would then engage in conversation about the business behind the logo. The logo that was harder to see actually resulted in unexpected business generation. 

Often times, thinking things all the way thru to their conclusion, then stepping back and viewing from a different angle, results in a polar opposite conclusion. Things aren’t always what they first appear to be.

Rule of 3

The magic of three. No, I don’t mean the superstition that bad things come in threes, nor the “photographic rule of thirds”. 

The Rule of  3, subject of this blog, embraces the concept that things that are presented in threes enable us to more clearly make a point that is also more effective and more memorable. All know well the slogans “Just Say No”, or “Just Do It”, or “I’m lovin’ it”.

Throughout our culture from the Three Bears to the Three Little Pigs, to Bettlejuice, Beetlejuice, Beetlejuice, to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, there is a special power (perhaps even magical) to expressing ideas with the Rule of 3.

True, there are examples of famous two and four element components in speeches but none has the power of three.

JFK beckoned, “…ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”

Winston Churchill's reference to “blood, toil, tears and sweat" represents a formidable four element effort, although later shortened to ”blood, sweat and tears”.

Proper use of the Rule of 3 not only allows one to communicate a concept, but to emphasize it and then make it memorable. There are untold examples of the use of 3’s in every form in which we communicate.

Movie trilogies, 3 color flags of nations, mottos such as “location, location, location”, Blood, Sweat and Tears and the list goes on.

Appreciating and mastering the Rule of 3 will enhance your ability to communicate, educate and convince. The effective use of three in all forms of communication, including comedy, are endless. (Three guys walk into a bar…) Three is the smallest number of elements we need to form a pattern. Comedians have long utilized our expectation of a pattern to create their humor. 

Example: Laura Kightlinger: “I can’t think of anything worse after a night of drinking than waking up next to someone and not being able to remember their name, or how you met, or why they’re dead.”

 Master three and you will see how effective your communication will be.

And that’s “the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth…”

Better Late Than Never?

We’ve all heard the saying “better late than never” but does that really apply to business meetings? The meeting is scheduled for 8 a.m. Six of the eight people arrive before 8 a.m., get settled and are ready to work at 8 sharp. The meeting leader waits respectfully for 5 minutes to allow the two stragglers time to show up but alas, they do not. That is, not until 10 minutes into the meeting.

OK, so there is always some variable to overcome, like parking, traffic or weather, but what about the late comers who are ALWAYS late no matter whether rain or shine, night or day, weekday or weekend. 

I can’t think of a single positive personal brand element to attribute to constant late arrival. Does the perennial late comer enter the room unnoticed and does their personal brand not suffer from being late? What thoughts cross your mind when the later comer(s) show up?

Does being habitually late reveal anything other than either disrespect for the others at the event or meeting or incompetence? Does lateness come without a price?

Has Snail Mail Regained its Impact?

It doesn’t seem like too long ago when the common wisdom was to send a hand written note to thank someone whom you had just interviewed with or visited in a sales call. When I say send, I mean via the United States Postal Service, in an envelope with a postage stamp stuck in its corner.
Likewise it seems like only yesterday that our mailbox (the one attached to the exterior of our home) was crammed full of offers of every kind and description. Now, it’s our email mailbox that is crammed full of pitches, promos and pleas at a seemingly faster rate and quantity than ever achieved by regular mail.
The daily routine of tearing envelopes in half and recycling their contents without even considering opening them is still very fresh in my mind but it has almost entirely been replaced by ridding myself of unwanted email promotions. Fortunately I don’t have to expend the energy of tearing anything in half before clicking the trash icon.
Email marketing is clearly the rule not the exception in today’s business climate but two factors in its implementation are rendering it less and less effective. First, the sheer numbers of vendors and would be vendors who are emailing is growing exponentially. Second, the frequency of each sender is also growing at an alarming rate. A complaint I hear time and again is that even when someone has signed up for a “vendors email alerts” the alerts come so frequently as to render them more nuisance than news. More intrusive than interesting.
We would never have dreamed of sending written notes to our customers every single week, week in and week out, but many businesses do not hesitate to send one or even two emails to customer each and every week. Unfortunately they are just as easy to trash without reading as they are to send without thinking.
Enter U.S. Mail. Handwritten on paper… Placed in an envelope with a stamp on it… The last time I got one of those was five months ago, and I remember what it was about, who sent it and particularly the positive impression that it made. The only thing I remember about the hundreds of emails I trashed in the last week is that I wish I hadn’t gotten them.
The next time you want to make both an old fashioned and a solid impression with a customer, try making it on paper and delivering it with a stamp.

Do You Hate Meetings?

Let’s have a meeting, review all the varied options and delay making any touch decisions by scheduling another meeting. There always seems to be someone at a meeting who can present an issue which retards the making of a decision, notwithstanding how critically  important the need for a decision might be. The highest purpose of a meeting is to make decisions on a course of conduct with everyone in attendance then being both on board and informed. If any meeting is to succeed in this purpose, its attendees need to know when to hold them and when to fold them. (Long term planning, brand definition, underlying business philosophy are all worthy of discussion among a group, but lets call that  brainstorming whose purpose is to get all the possible cards on the table. Then we can have the “meeting” to decide which cards we keep.) 

What percentage of your meetings end with the only real decision being an the need to appoint a sub committee to gather additional input to be presented at the next meeting?

At what percentage of the meetings you attend are decisions made regarding the announced purpose of the meeting? 

Your Customer's Worst Problem Can Be Your Best Opportunity

A customer related challenge can result in two extreme results. The customer relationship can be broken and lost – or the customer relationship can be enhanced and solidified. This is not another iteration of “the customer is always right” because no one is always right. Rather, this is an example of the “more bees with honey customer service initiative”.

What would you do?

Hypothetical: You’re a computer network service company dedicated to keeping customer computer systems purring like so many kittens, guarding against unwanted viruses and keeping spam from clogging their in-boxes. You offer two levels of service contracts. Service Package Gold guarantees an on-site technician within three hours. Service Package Silver (costing much less) guarantees an on-site technician within 24 hours. 

Fred Novice, a relatively new customer, has grown his company to the point where your services are needed. He is too small to hire full time in house tech support and too big to wing it. No sooner does the ink dry on Fred’s Service Package Silver than his entire system goes down without explanation. Fred calls you in a tizzy for the support he needs. You very properly inform him that he will get guaranteed service within 24 hours and you hear a simultaneous sigh and cry of pain on the other end of the phone. “But I am completely shut down, out of business, dead in the water until my system is up and running. 24 hours will cost me plenty.”

You dutifully inform him that this is the reason you offer the Service Package Gold and suggest he might consider the upgrade. (As an aside, you have two technicians within ten minutes of Fred’s office and a very light schedule.)

You can solve Fred’s problem by forcing him to upgrade to Gold Level. Will Fred thereafter appreciate your “flexibility”? Will that earn his loyalty? 

What solution would YOU offer to serve both the needs of your business and that of Fred’s? How do you turn Fred’s problem into your mutual benefit?