That depends: Do you know the difference between messaging and copy? Messaging and copy are two different things and knowing how and why can make your brand a hit or a flop.

So many entrepreneurs confuse "copy" with "messaging." You need messaging, and a firm messaging platform to base all of your "copy" on: website copy, brochures, ads, sales presentations, etc. But some people try to start with the copy first and don’t base it on anything, meaning all the different communication vehicles will be scattered and inconsistent. And that is not good for developing a strong brand. Clarity attracts and consistency makes things stick.

How do you ensure you have strong messaging for your business? You need to start by talking about benefits, not features as so many entrepreneurs and small businesses do. Tell me why your product or service makes my life better, solves a problem, fulfills a need. That is the key to creating a sticky brand and attracting rabid fans. it’s also the way to differentiate yourself in today’s crowded market.

If you’re interested in exploring the topic further and getting top tips on creating a great elevator pitch, I’m holding a "Crafting Killer Messaging" teleseminar on Thursday March 11 from 10-11 am pacific time. More info at http://red-slice.com/buzz-and-events . Sign up today as this will fill up and lines are limited.

This may sound like an odd title, but HOW you do business really is just as important to your brand as WHAT you do, or your logo, communications, etc. Take a lesson from a business owner who I am sadly watching destroy their brand through pushy, in-your-face promotional tactics.

This person is an expert in their field. They have years of experience and have gotten real results for people. But somewhere along the line, this person got some bad advice from a coach, or colleague or guru and has started to destroy their hard-earned brand image. Someone must have told this person that in order to make more money they needed to sell, sell, sell. Which, of course, one does need to do in order to make money and we talked about being an effective salesperson in a previous post. But you can’t be a robot about it if you want a brand that still needs to stand for excellence, expertise, and influence. You need to practice good judgment and tact as well.

This person is now in 100% sales mode at every waking moment – to the point that they are selling at inappropriate times and speaking engagements.  And when I say inappropriate, I really mean it: we’re not talking about the good sense to promote yourself when you are networking or speaking. We’re talking highly inappropriate as in, you have not respected your audience enough to know when to pull back. The well-respected brand is now eroding into an infomercial. Which is okay, if that is the business you are after, but given this person’s value and years of experience, I’m not sure that is what they want their brand positioning to be.

This truly makes me sad as I watch this happen and I hear the rumors and see people distancing themselves from this brand. Remember, how you behave and how you do business is probably more important to your brand promise than any graphic or website ever could be. Brand is visual, verbal AND experiential. And this person could be hurting themselves in the long haul. Sure, maybe they are making tons of money and then, what the heck do I know? There is certainly a market and a place for such a brand and maybe that is indeed what this person wants to go after.  But personally, I’m not sure I’d want to forsake my reputation for some short-term gains in a way that might cause me to miss the boat on being the kind of business I really want to be.

Here’s a peek at a case study that will be featured in my upcoming book, Branding Basics for Small Business, due out this Spring/Summer:

A strong brand strategy does not remain stagnant; it can evolve to adapt to changing demands and dynamics while still staying close to its roots. Sharelle Klaus, Founder and CEO of DRY Soda Company (www.drysoda.com), has evolved her strategy while still staying true to her mission of creating a new soda category. Sharelle saw a market need for a modern non-alcoholic beverage when she was pregnant and couldn’t drink alcohol. As a food and wine lover, she grew frustrated with the lack of options available to pair with fine meals. Sharelle hoped for a drink that was simple, all-natural, caffeine-free, low in sugar and made with the highest quality ingredients – a beverage that could complement great food or act as a light refreshment on its own. DRY Sodas come in seven flavors: cucumber, vanilla bean, juniper berry, lavender, lemongrass, kumquat and rhubarb. DRYs brand is modern, all-natural, well-designed and sophisticated and this is conveyed through their gorgeous bottles, their visual identity and the fact that DRY is found in high-end restaurants, stores and at food and wine events.

As the brand grew, they protected it by carefully choosing high-end distribution partners and initially did not want to mass market it in any way. However, consumers’ beverage choices are changing and wellness has become a bigger priority to everyone, not just the higher-end market. People are cutting down on sugar and First Lady Michelle Obama has unveiled an initiative to fight childhood obesity. The New England Journal of Medicine asked soda companies to lower their sweetness level and DRY Soda was the only one that met the requirement. In keeping with their brand as a “modern soda company” they had to evolve the strategy to meet consumers where they are today. So they increased their flavor choices to include more mainstream preferences, decreased their price point to stay competitive, and opened up distribution channels. They are looking to begin selling through Target in 2011, a mass market brand but one with cache and sophistication that aligns well with DRY.

They are staying true to the brand by still choosing those distribution partners carefully. Partners that do not align with their carefully cultivated brand values will be turned down. As they open up distribution, DRY is finding which “brand levers” work in different markets. But they stay on course to the original brand values of all-natural, sophisticated, modern and well-designed so as not to alienate their early adopters.

“We still need to build the brand customer by customer even though we are expanding our reach,” says Sharelle. “We always want any new consumer’s first experience with DRY to be consistent with the brand and you tell your brand story by where people can find you. We build our brand region by region so people can develop strong emotional attachments– and that approach influences how we roll out the product in each new market.” DRY Soda can be found throughout the United States and Canada and in limited international distribution.

Many things in our lives have brands, other than businesses: Think Paris, Super Bowl or Valentine’s Day. Yes, I’m late to the party as it was yesterday, but the traditional brand of this festivus of love permeates our culture – and many have even backlashed against it. So how can a holiday have a “brand” you ask???

If brand (as Red Slice always believes) is the image or mindshare that something occupies in a person’s mind, then of course Valentines Day ranks right up there. Just hear the words and what is your reaction? Hearts, red, love, diamonds, flowers, chocolate? And true to form that brand lives in the mind of the consumer (no matter what Hallmark may try to tell us), people who have different experiences with the big V have different brands perceptions. Some people find it tacky, campy or fake. Others take issue with one day out of 365 being approved for “showing your love.” Still others that may not be romantically involved with anyone find it torturous, cruel and lonely.

Valentine’s Day in our house is good, simple, sweet fun but has also come to symbolize “crowded high-end restaurants with horrible service.” We spent a few years trying to dine out on the actual day, February 14, only to finally learn that prix fixe menus and restaurants that try to jam as many people in as possible make you feel like a heifer at the State Fair. We are willing to spend good bucks to dine out in style, but the food is always sub-par. There is absolutely nothing romantic about that – and to boot, many reputedly good restaurants have tarnished their own brand with us because of their chaotic atmosphere and mediocre mass-produced set menus -  to the point that we won’t go back on a regular night. We know this isn’t fair, but hey, once a brand impression forms (and it’s a negative one) it truly is hard to shake it.  These eateries may make a killing on one night of the year – but at what long-term brand price?

What are your brand perceptions of Valentine’s Day? Do you think the “brand promise” of romance, hearts and flowers is an accurate experience, or does Cupid suffer from a brand identity crisis by not walking the talk?

PS: We had our Valentines Dinner on Friday, February 12 this year. And mmmmmm….it was good and well worth the money this time around.  Lark Seattle, which we tried for the first time that night, lived up to its brand and so we will be back.

I had the pleasure to interview Josh Levine of Great Monday recently for my upcoming book, Branding Basics for Small Business (due out in late Spring/early Summer 2010). Josh will also be my co-panelist at Branding Inside Out on Feb 18 in San Francisco. We talked a lot about how to make branding real and relevant for business owners and execs.

His firm has the exact same philosophy as Red Slice in that brand is not just a logo; it’s everything. Josh’s approach is to talk about “culture-driven branding” meaning using brand across the organization to not only connect with customers on every level, but to build brand into the company’s DNA to inspire employees and energize partners as well. How do you embed brand into the fabric of the company, into its processes, policies and values? And HR and people are at the heart of that over any fancy logos. If brand is the total experience with the company, then that has to start with the people working within the organization and how they adopt a mission-driven approach to the work they do every day.

We both discussed that the “outputs” of brand strategy projects can often be the visual elements: the logo, the design, the website. But more importantly, how do we use language, the most common way for people to get their arms around a concept, to convey brand? For both of us, this work starts for clients with a strong messaging platform. What are the values, benefits and proof points or features you will prioritize in order to get your brand promise across? This makes sense for people more than any abstract concept. This messaging platform should then manifest itself through the logo, design, website, policies – and even tagline. It also gets conveyed via the messages from HR to the marketplace on what type of people they are looking to hire. And this messaging should be first on every employee’s lips when representing the organization, no matter whether their official role is internal or external.

By speaking the same language and starting from the same messaging platform, the brand can be communicated out a thousand different ways – but all conveying the same consistent promise. And then every employee, partner and yes, customer, will become a brand ambassador.

We’ve all experienced that horrible disconnect that happens when a shop or restaurant looks completely different on the inside than the image we got from their ads or messaging. Or what about when a business that you’ve built up in your mind as “sophisticated, classy and cutting-edge” is actually in a sad office park with what looks like Goodwill furniture and bad paneling on the walls?

Your office, store or place of business should reflect your brand promise and the traits you “sell” in your marketing. If you portray your business as playful, innovative and bold, then your offices where you greet clients better portray that. Whether it be through the furniture style, paint colors, artwork or even location, you need to map your brand to the experience customers will have interacting with your space. Many good ad and branding agencies actually have architectural and space planning services to carry the brand through to your location.

This is where folks that think brand is just a logo fall down. If brand is the entire package of reputation, experience and imagery I have in my head, then my experience and perception of the physical space matters. The devil is in the details, as they say.

Bare Escentuals, the mineral makeup company based in San Francisco, was just purchased by Japan’s Shiseido, a high-end makeup line sold in department stores. The brands actually have common core values focused on natural beauty – but with slight variations. I read that if you visit Shiseido’s offices in Japan, you are “greeted by  3 receptionists in matching pink suits who stand up and bow ceremoniously whenever a guest appears. A small Zen garden with spherical plants sits on the executive floor.” They have a very strong image they want to convey that is consistent with the natural beauty and polished sophistication of their brand. Bare Escentuals’ offices in San Franc are more or an organic “mess” according the founder, in line with their natural, carefree beauty brand – people running around in jeans, that sort of thing.

Botom line, if your space welcomes the public (I”m not talking about home offices here, although you can make an argument that you might want to inject some brand elements into that if you can) is should remain consistent with your brand promise and image. Every customer touchpoint matters, especially interacting with your physical surroundings.

What do you think of web radio as an advertising vehicle? I’m not necessarily talking just the streaming music sites like Pandora or the like, but I’m talking content shows available on networks such as BlogTalkRadio and Contact Talk Radio. There are a slew of experts of every ilk who can now be their own Oprah or Good Morning America, usually by paying for the privilege. As one who has secret dreams of this someday (coming soon?) this is especially enticing.

Stats on web radio listenership are very hopeful for prime buying demographics. And these stats are from 2006 – I bet they are much higher now. With the super easy ability to download archived shows as podcasts and take them with you, you have infinite possibilities for getting your message in front of people.

Many folks are using these shows as marketing vehicles of their own, to highlight their expertise or business. And I think that’s a good call if it makes sense for your field.

So are you advertising on niche web radio shows? If so, what has been your experience – did you have success? What web radio shows do you listen to?

Why do businesses spend tons of money, time and effort on compiling market data, analyzing trends, conducting expensive focus groups with people who have never bought from them, or spend hours combing through research data, when they ignore a prime source right in front of them: their own customers?

Your customers, especially repeat ones, like you. They want you to succeed. They have found that your product or service fills a need for them, or your message has resonated with them. So when it comes to figuring out what will work for 2010 , just ASK them.

This can be as easy as sending an inexpensive (or sometimes free) online survey via Surveymonkey or Emma. If you have a store, offer an incentive to all customers who come in to fill out a quick questionnaire. Invite your customers to an informal focus group with some drinks and snacks and offer them a coupon as an incentive. If you’re an online or service business, offer a discount code, or 50% off their next service, or heck, even a drawing for a Starbucks card (worked for me). Always offer some type of incentive for their valuable time and participation.

Stop guessing about what you are doing right or wrong and ask them. People love to give their opinion, especially if you can incent them a little bit. Keep your questions unbiased, don’t ask leading questions. Try to keep any surveys to less than 5 min for a small incentive or 10 minutes if you’re offering a larger incentive. Even 5-8 questions can do the trick sometimes.

One client even just sent old fashioned emails direct to a select group of customers with an incentive to respond. Or you can use social media as a great way to get feedback. But you have to ask.

Focus groups or surveys with your customers (past or present) can be super easy to implement. Working with one client on her brand strategy, she was not sure of the primary reasons people came to her (of the many reasons she promotes in her marketing), so I had her send a survey and ask, “What caused you to seek out my services?” and offer 5 possible answers. She found some pretty surprising results that caused her to rethink her marketing messaging.

I don’t recommend testing actual ad creative with focus groups or surveys, as people will be consuming them in an unnatural way and the results will be skewed. No one dissects an ad in real life they way they would in a focus group session. But you can test ideas, messages, what they think of your brand, ask why they bought from you, ask them what you could offer or do better, what incentives would they respond to, etc. They are a wealth of information for making brand improvements so don’t fear them – embrace them.

Many small biz owners and marketing pros use  HARO – Help A Reporter Out – for free media queries. It’s DIY PR, served up in 3 daily emails.  But listen up, people: as with everything DIY, you must “do it right” to get results. And many folks do not. Having seen the other side of HARO replies as a writer looking for sources, I can tell you the view is pretty darn ugly.

I highly recommend HARO to all of my clients as an easy way to get press. Peter Shankman’s brilliant idea delivers queries right to your inbox from journalists, authors, and even talk show producers on topics ranging from business to lifestyle to health to finance.It takes about 5 seconds to scan the query summaries and see if a topic fits your expertise. There are over 100,000 folks signed up and his email open rates are ridiculous (over 90%) for advertisers (he includes 1 small ad per email).

I took out a HARO ad once to sell my eBook and my shopping cart lit up like Christmas over the following week.

But sometimes people are their own worst enemies, especially with anything DIY. I use HARO for me and my clients to promote our businesses. But as a writer on the side, I also get to use HARO on the other side: as a journalist and author.

I recently posted a query for a new book I’m publishing, due out Spring/Summer 2010 (more on that later) looking for innovative brand examples from small or large businesses. I want to profile, in small sidebars, different Brands at Work, where businesses use unique and innovative ways to express their brands both experientially and visually.

I asked for answers to 7 specific questions in my query.  With the amount of responses you get from HARO, you need some format for screening and for your own sanity. I explained very clearly in the query what I was looking for….assuming people would read it in its entirety before responding.

This proved to be an inaccurate assumption.

So many people sent me page-long emails extolling the virtues of their business’ brand. I had to politely tell them to answer the questions in the query in order to be considered. One person even admitted to not seeing the questions, as she didn’t read the rest of the message truncated from her Blackberry. Another send me 7 photo attachments after I specifically said “no attachments.” Um, hello?

The reason PR pros are so good at their jobs is that they know how to handle the press. They know reporters are on deadline, and often need something in near-complete form before they will use it in an article. They need crisp soundbites. They have no time to spend on reading 8 paragraph emails of the source’s life story. If they get a good taste, they will then follow up if need be.

Here, then, is a list of PR query do’s and don’t for your DIY’ers out there, from my perspective as a writer:

DO read the query in full and only send what is asked. It’s a courtesy to respect the person’s time.

DO keep it short and sweet and provide your name, title, website, and contact information for follow up.

DO include clever soundbites/hooks that could be easily quoted in the story.

DO use bullet points for your main points, as it’s easier to scan.

DO put “HARO” or other such source in the email response subject line for easy sorting

DON’T send 8 paragraphs about you or your business that have little to do with what is asked for in the query. Sending more info is a bad thing, not a good thing. I won’t even spend the time to wade through the response to find a good nugget, as I’ll be so peeved.

DON’T respond to queries that do not apply to you. Period.

DON’T send attachments. EVER.  Unless asked. If the reporter needs something for follow-up, they will ask for it.

DON’T rush it (assuming the article is not due by end of day). If you wait an extra day to reply back with the exact info requested (or wait until you can read the whole query on your computer back at the office) this is much better than sending a response that is not what I wanted. Most reporters won’t be as nice as me and ask you to resubmit, they will just delete your email.

If you are an agency responding on behalf of a source, please follow all the do’s and don’ts above.

Part 2 with Scott Montgomery, (see Part 1 here) this time about social media mayhem and his new firm that tracks and analyzes entertainment buzz, Fizziolo.gy. 

RS: Tell me about social media’s place in the branding equation? Who’s using it right? Do you think it works better for smaller or larger companies?

SM: Well I know how companies are doing it wrong. There is nothing more obvious than planted comments to a planted glowing review of a product in a planted blog. I don’t know, maybe that fools somebody, but I think it’s pretty transparent to all but the newest of newbies who would still use the word “newbie” in conversation.

It’s not surprising that, right now, most of the branding successes in social media are directly related to enthusiast brands, those that can offer value through social engagement, and those that are creating a bit of controversy. Google, for example, wins in social media not just because they engage in it, but by the fact that their innovations are worth tweeting about. I can’t tell you how often we’ve seen Google Wave as a trending topic on Twitter, not because of active seeding, but because their tactics have got people talking – releasing controversial videos of Wave in action, beta-testing by invitation – that sort of thing. I’m certainly not ruling out some kinds of seeding, but it’s all more powerful if you devise your product’s strategy to be inherently “political”. By that I mean, create things where the audience has a reason to take your side (or at least a side). Let your product efforts, promotions and events be retweetable.

Guys like me sometimes get a bit of stick because we sing the praises of social media to a background chorale of “where’s the ROI?” I believe we do create mass movement in behaviors. But as in any medium, it pays to harness the energy where the mass is, and not necessarily via a custom community. You don’t have to be a huge company to do it. A few weeks back, a motivated Facebook group succeeded in making an old Rage Against the Machine single 2009’s Christmas Number One. Now, Christmas Number One is a big deal in Britain (remember Love, Actually?) and Jon and Tracy Morter were disgusted that for the last few years, whatever won on Simon Cowell’s X Factor automatically went to number one at Christmas. Did they build a custom website to vent? Nope. They went to where the mass was – created a Facebook community and translated online behavior into real-world results – results that have a real economic impact on all the players in the controversy.

If Jon and Tracy from Essex can do that, shouldn’t a company with resources be able to move online behaviors to real-world action too? You just have to create something that makes people care.
Back here at my agency, we recently won an OMMA award for best standalone video for Microsoft – a review of the History of the Internet  by some of the odd characters who inhabit it – to promote the launch of Windows Internet Explorer 8. But it wasn’t the video itself that was unique (though it is kind of hilarious), it was the way we distributed it. IE8 was set to launch at MIX09 to a crowd of developers. The video preceded the launch, and we made sure the amused attendee had a url to share. As insiders, they were emotionally driven to distribute the link to everyone they knew. IE8 was a trending topic for a big part of the day, and chatter about the video was a big part of it. Getting the Windows community to download IE8 was a key effort for 2009 – motivating those downloads though harnessing social media was a big part of accelerating the effort.

RS:  Tell me about Fizziolo.gy and the new way companies are using social media in their marketing mix
RS: Fizziology  is a tracking company we started in mid-2009 to take advantage of information that can be gleaned from what people post on Twitter, Facebook, blogs and other social media tools. Right now, we’re providing insights to movie studios and production companies, tracking what people are saying about movies as they approach release and upon opening – we’re consistently performing better than traditional tracking companies do.

So far I think it’s pretty amazing.A lot of companies are springing up here and there, trying to make marketing sense of this mountain of data – it’s becoming known as the Real Time Search industry (which I think is a stupid term). But almost all of them use some form of automated keyword scoring methodologies, and they just aren’t real accurate. In our world, “dude, that movie is sick” could mean something bad or good, but you can’t know that from a prejudged keyword algorithm. We actually read and score a statistically significant number of the total volume of chatter relating to a person, entertainment property or brand, and treat it like the world’s fastest, most honest focus group. So we believe we know more about the tweeting public’s intent to take action than a lot of our competitors.

Just recently, and we reported this before anyone else, we saw that the movie The Blind Side was going to significantly overperform reported estimates. Turned out we were right. And we knew The box office for Saw VI was going to be a lot weaker than estimated – we saw very high negatives in the chatter and correlated it with a lower than expected “intention to see”. We could also see the way the interest shifted in Where The Wild Things Are after opening, as people realized that it wasn’t a kids’ movie.

As we move forward, we’re building a database in which we can compare the behaviors of these entertainment properties by genre and seasonality, and we’re building it so we can make comparisons as the public’s usage of social media evolves.

We’ve been asked to track individual actors for insights about how the public might respond to them if they’re cast in a certain kind of role or with other actors. That’s a valuable insight for studios, casting agents, even the actors themselves. We are also beginning to apply the same model to brands.

Every marketer who’s even paying a little attention knows all this sharing is a goldmine for understanding public sentiment about all kinds of things, but there’s no clear gold standard yet. We think our methods give us a good shot at being that.

About Scott Montgomery

One of my favorite people in the world, and the man who teaches me so much about branding and advertising, is Scott Montgomery. Scott is Principal and Executive Creative Director of Bradley and Montgomery,  which has made both traditional and very untraditional advertising, branding and communications for clients like JPMorgan Chase, VH1, MTV, Knoll, Microsoft and many others.

He is also founder of Fizziolo.gy, a firm that tracks and analyzes social media chatter for entertainment companies so they can tell if their movie or TV show will be a hit or a flop.