Category: a slice of STRATEGY

Pure, unadulterated strategy: marketing, brand positioning, & entrepreneurial wisdom. New trends with staying power. Old standbys with inarguable value.
What to embrace, what to avoid, and what to attempt — with steady discernment.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

How to interview…and be interviewed: Advice from Katie Couric

Posted on by Red Slice

Many of you out there promoting your businesses or serving as spokespeople will hopefully be doing more and more press and informational interviews. PR is a core tactic in your brand building strategy and you want to ensure you are further conveying your brand messages when you are on camera, on the radio or in print.

The best advice I can share is whether you are a beginner or have been at this a while is to get media trained. We featured top tips in our Ask the Expert interview with Bronwyn Saglimbeni a while back from her work in media and presence coaching. Even if you just do a refresher every year, this is a great idea to ensure your messages are coming across in the media exactly as you desire. Interviewers can be wily and time is short so you need to know about presence, polish and soundbites – and how to avoid getting dragged down a rathole – in order to get the most bang for your PR buck. You may never get that kind of audience again, so leverage it well.

Many of you reading this also have blogs or radio shows that you use to promote your business, so you need to be wise to the ways of effective interviewing. It may not be your core business or competency, but if you have a listening or viewing audience, you need to serve them to the best of your ability or risk tarnishing your own brand in the process.

Katie Couric gave some great advice applicable to both interviewer and interviewee in this video. Check it out and ensure you are on point no matter which side of the mic you are on.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Apple under fire: When designers get big egos

Posted on by Red Slice

Oh dear. Branding great Apple majorly screwed up. If you’ve been under a rock, here’s the deal: they are under fire for releasing the brand new iPhone (which has sold really, really well) with reception issues. It seems to drop calls when the phone is touched by a person’s hand in a certain spot. The problem is they tried to blame the carrier at first; then they said it was a software glitch; and now it comes to light that the issue is that the antenna is on the outside of the phone (rather than encased as it is on other phones) so when people hold it in the wrong spot, it drops the calls.

I read that they were initially asking customers to shell out another $29 bucks for a rubber casing that seemed to fix the issue. What?!  You screw up and you make customers pay for the fix? Bad branding, bad!  The big bomb came this past week when Consumer Reports refused to recommend the iPhone as they had in the past. That seemed to be the straw that broke the brand back.

The WSJ today talked about some rumors they heard that engineers actually brought the issue to light, but that Steve Jobs wanted the design he wanted and went ahead with it anyway. And in Apple’s (seemingly more and more smug) approach to product rollouts and secrecy, they don’t give carriers the normal “testing” window that is standard in the industry because they were paranoid about keeping the design under wraps. How full of hubris is that?!

I admire Apple so much for their brand efforts and amazing designs and technology over the years. But as I mentioned in a previous post, these behaviors are tarnishing their brand because they are now acting like “the man” who can do whatever they want and doesn’t care about customer ease or usefulness.

If you watch the video here, I love the comment that the woman makes about people forgetting that the iPhone is less a phone and more of a computer. Phones are not necessarily Apple’s core competency and so they very well should have given carriers time to test the phone as they normally do and not worried so much about launch secrecy – it would be better for their brand if they put customer satisfaction ahead of their marketing blitz.

PS: Friday’s Press release notes can be found here. Highlights include not reimbursing customers for having to buy the case, and “When someone or some organization gets really successful, people want to tear it down” which I find particularly amusing since Apple did a lot of that “tearing down” when they were the little guy!

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Why saving money on branding can cost you

Posted on by Red Slice

We’ve all seen it – and maybe done it. We spend money on lawyers or accountants to build our business the right way, but when it comes to something like a logo or a website, we think, “Why, my neighbor’s teenage niece knows how to use Illustrator! Maybe she can do my logo for free.” Or, “I just need to get a simple website up. Let me just slap together a DIY template and get the page up and running.”

While these are steps you may need to take initially to get your business off the ground and money coming in the door, skimping on a well-thought-out and intentional brand strategy long-term can cost you way more in sales later on. This fundamental mistake is what inspired me to write my book.

Branding does not have to be some big expensive effort that only large companies can afford. If you run a small business, you need to spend time thinking about and conveying your brand as well – at whatever budget you have to spend.  Brand is more than just your logo or website – it’s your essence, your core. It’s the experience people have with you, the impression you leave in their minds. So you need to really think about what you want that impression to be and ensure that you communicate it consistently in three important ways: visually, verbally and experientially. Only with consistent exposure to your brand promise in every touchpoint will customers connect with you and become rabid fans, thus increasing your profits long-term.

And while brand is more than the visual identity, your design look is still a key part of it. Buyers make decisions subconsciously and need to be attracted to your look and feel first before they will learn enough to buy from you. Just like dating, your appearance does not define who you are but it does factor in to initial first impressions. So why do so many entrepreneurs try to cut corners on the very first thing that potential customers will see?

Hiring unqualified people or designers who don’t ask you anything about your value proposition, differentiators, or target audience is not the way to save money. I talk to many people that threw away money because their brand strategy was not baked yet. Good design is a skill: it’s a skill that involves taking a message and communicating it visually, not just creating a pretty picture. You will lose more in lost sales by getting this part wrong than you will save on cutting corners.

And guess what? That brand strategy will do more than just inform your visual identity. It will serve as a compass for other marketing investments: partners, advertising, events. Basically any decision your company makes will be a smarter one if you start with the brand strategy first and use it as a compass. This helps you avoid throwing away money on what I call “random acts of marketing” and ensures that you only invest in activities that move your business forward.

If you need to save money, the best thing entrepreneurs can do is to first sit down and create a clear, strong brand strategy before any marketing, design or development takes place. This entails defining who you are, what you represent, what feelings you want to evoke, what value you provide, how you price things, who your ideal audience is, and how to best reach them. This requires sitting down and answering some key questions. People that don’t do this first and launch into creating a website or investing in marketing programs are just throwing their money away. When you have no destination, every road looks like it leads somewhere.

Know thy audience and thy brand strategy and you will know the best design options, communication vehicles and marketing tactics in which to invest. Translation: only pay for things that will move you forward and give you a return on your investment. Saving $1000 and then ultimately losing $10,000 in sales opportunities because you didn’t connect with your target customer does not seem like a good investment strategy to me.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

More bang for the celebrity buck

Posted on by Red Slice

Authenticity is the word du jour when it comes to branding. Imagine that: Customers get mad when you say you are one thing but act like another. Shocking. While there may be some goods and services where we could give two figs about authenticity (did that kitchen gadget really do what it did on TV? Ah well, chalk it up to $19 and a lesson learned. I should really know better), customers are way more discerning these days. Trust is the watchword in this post-Enron/post-economic collapse/value for the money world we live in.

So why all the hating that companies are actually making their celebrity pitchmen (and women) get their hands dirty with the products they are endorsing? This recent WSJ article talks about how Popchips has leveraged social media-savvy stars like Ashton Kutcher and not only made them spokespeople, but have integrated them into the company, in his case as President of Pop (get it?) Culture. The comments on the article are hilarious. First of all, I’d venture to say that if this bugs you, you are not in the demographic anyway and you are not the people that Popchips cares about.  Secondly, I think it’s much more authentic to make a star that hawks a product have a say in how it’s developed (albeit a high-level say) and marketed. That feels much more real to me than a plastic “I use it, shouldn’t you?” cheesy billboard from the 1950’s.

Is it silliness and marketing hype? A bit, yes. But it’s savvy business sense for these companies to stretch their dollars farther by learning from and leveraging many celebs’ wide-reaching social media fan base than simply getting them to pose for a few pics and then being done with them. That seems like a way smarter use of the investment that could pay off longer term. The people the company wants to reach are indeed influenced by a product that Ashton not only endorses but plays a part in shaping. Don’t go hating on the idea just because you might be annoyed by him. It’s actually a brilliant branding move.

Who would you hire to represent your business if you could? Please share in the Comments.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Passion for your brand = passionate customers = more $$

Posted on by Red Slice

I know someone who absolutely loves her job. LOVES it. Even though she’d appear to be in one of the most boring industrues known to man, she talks about customer relationships, and solving problems, and being mentored by her boss. She’s like those ITT Tech commercials, where the graduate talks about how their new career has changed their life, given their family hope for a brighter future, enabled him or her to be the best he or she can be. I chuckle when I watch these commercials, because – on the outside – it looks like this person has just settled into another soul-sucking cubicle gig. But you can’t help but admire the pride in their work, the loyalty to their company and how they are truly the best brand ambasssador for which the firm could ever ask.

B2B companies especially really can suck the creative life out of you. Especially since many of them don’t give a lick about branding or connecting with customers. “We sell a product with more widgets than our competitors at the best price,” they boast. And the conversation and connection stops there.

But this recent post talks about this sad truth and how it can bite a company in the end. If the human beings making the purchase decision don’t understand what the brands of their suppliers really stand for, they might be in for a world of pain. It’s all fun and games to save as much money as possible or make the lowest-common denominator decisions until someone loses an eye – or a lawsuit.

What does your brand stand for? Why does your company exist? Do you go around talking about how your company saves lives, makes the air cleaner, supports sending employees to school, gives money to worthy causes or contributes to the local community?  No?  Maybe you need to rethink your mission and find your brand’s passion – or more importantly, rethink what ensures that your employees, partners and customers will jump up out of bed every morning and sing your praises.

It’s not enough for people to recommend your business or services when they are asked. You need to ensure they can’t wait to practively share – at their next cocktail party or in their next Tweet – something you do that utterly delights them and makes them proud to be part of your tribe.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

What you can learn from Virgin America

Posted on by Red Slice

OK, I have a major brand crush on Virgin America. Huge. I swoon when I see their logo at the airport, thrill when I’m able to fly them on quick trips down to San Francisco, and dream about hanging with Richard Branson over cocktails sometime. I talk about them a lot in my new book, Branding Basics for Small Business: How to Create an Irresistible Brand on Any Budget.

There’s a lot you can learn about branding effectively from Virgin America (and Virgin in general for that matter.) And these are lessons you can apply to your own business, regardless of your size or budget. You may not be as big as they are, but you sure as heck can practice these principles to better connect with customers and stand out from the competition.

1) Keep your mission simple, concise and relevant: “Make flying fun again.” Boom. That says it all. And every decisions they make, big or small, is tested against this simple mantra. How inspiring is this for employees? How deliciously irresistible is this to frustrated and road-weary travelers? How different from the other airlines who tout generic, irrelevant platitudes like “best customer service” or “biggest value”? This mission has meaning and even just the wording tells you a little bit about their personality and the type of customer they want to attract. They are not just after those who can afford first-class or private jets who may not share the same flying frustrations as the rest of us. They are FOR the rest of us! Their mission is crisp, clean but still specific enough to their actual products and services. Is your mission something you can actually act on that will guide all of your decisions, or is it some lofty, esoteric statement that is not relevant to customers or employees?

2) Little things mean a lot: They extend their brand into everything from their color scheme that extends to the ticket counters and the airplane cabin to the cheeky wording of their standard airport signs (“While impressive, if your bag is bigger than 24” X 16” X 10”, it must be checked”) to their clever in-flight safety video. Rather than a stiff actor giving me the same instructions we’ve started to tune out on every other flight, Virgin America shows a stylized animated video with all sorts of crazy characters – even a bull calmly reading a magazine next to an anxious bullfighter. The company’s sassy, humorous tone carries over to the script as well: “For the 0.0001% of you who’ve never operated a seat belt before, here’s how it works.” These are simple things (and stuff they need to spend money on to produce anyway), but Virgin makes the most of every single solitary customer touchpoint in order to convey their brand and make their target customers fall in love with them. What opportunities are you wasting to really surprise and delight your target audience? Perhaps well-worded email opt-out policies (If you’d like to unsubscribe, we’d really miss you!) or a memorable voicemail message (We’re out helping our clients be superheroes today) or even a branded email signature can really make a difference. Such hidden delights will surprise and enchant and get people telling others about you, like I’m doing here. Just ensure that these flourishes match who you really are in your DNA and what your brand is all about. If your brand audience is more conservative and formal than playful and snarky, then don’t try to go there.

3) Deliver on your promise: Virgin America directs all its brand efforts on convincing me they will make flying fun again. But if I didn’t experience their confident and polished employees, rapid check-in kiosk process, glorious discount prices, or the private TV’s at every seat that also allow me to order food at any time with my credit card – not just when they decide I should eat – then we’d have a problem. They would not be delivering on their mission and would then suffer from a brand identity crisis. Are you living up to what you are promising to customers? If you say customer care is your number one priority, do I get rapid response to my support issues and easy access to a live person? If your colors and website are all slick, modern and progressive but you only offer the same-old, same-old, what am I to think? It’s worse to go out there and talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk – worse than not promising it in the first place. Don’t just slap a coat of brand paint on your business. Make a promise and ensure your operations, employees, and customer experiences are set up to deliver on it.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Does anyone really care about “brand?”

Posted on by Red Slice

No matter how many heads I get nodding about the importance of brand or how many people “get it,” I still feel like brand strategy is the “nice-to-have” while people get on with the business of selling products and services. And really, how can I fault a company that is successful in spite of itself? Many companies know they need to sit down and map out their brand strategy, but few make it a priority. Donald Trump knows he has a bad haircut but he could care less – he’s still a bazillionaire.

When I wrote Branding Basics for Small Business, I tried to put in all my stories and experiences over the years of many of those battles and successes.  But at the end of the day, if a company blows out it’s sales number each and every quarter, does anyone really care if the company stands for something, has a clear message or a differentiated personality? Do the shareholders really mind that one person thinks the company does this, but another person thinks the company does something completely different? Do they care that the firm is touting one message, look and feel on their website but look like a completely different company when you see their ads? Do they mind that the firm touts customer service above all else, but the infrastructure and processes are not set up to deliver?

Do they care as long as the company keeps making money?

The analytical part of me says, “You can’t argue with success, so they must be doing something right. Their customers obviously want the product.” The brand strategist in me, though, says, “That has to be short-lived. Something outside of their control is causing the success and whenever it stops, they will not know what to do as they will not have a strong brand to fall back on.” I also think to myself that this is the reason there is such commercial clutter out there in the marketplace: companies that don’t care enough about their brand or messages are just throwing things out into the world to see what sticks. They figure, “As long as we hit the mark 10 times out of 100, that is okay with us because those 10 times will make our numbers for the year.”

That is the difference between quantity and quality. And I for one would rather live in a world full of quality. One where 2 messages are enough to get a target customer to act versus 5-7.  Think about that. If every company knew their brand and their target audience so well and could laser-focus their marketing efforts, what a more streamlined, quieter world this would be. How much more relevant to their particular target audience would they be? And how much less noise would the rest of us have to hear?

Enjoy the silence for a moment. At least in your own imagination.

Seth Godin wrote a post today about structuring your day around 5 hours of work instead of 8 or 10 and seeing how much more effective you could be. I love that idea. Sometimes more is just…well, more. Not better, not more relevant, not more productive. Just more.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

How to make your brand shine: This Sunday in Seattle.

Posted on by Red Slice

Want more brand “oomph” on your website but don’t have lots of time or money to create elaborate videos or podcasts? The unstoppable forces known as the Sisters of Sizzle, Elise and Jill, will be hosting a Create Your Sizzling Spotlight Event coming up this Sunday from 10-4pm in Seattle called "Be the Star of your Own Interview" 

At this special event, you’ll spend a half hour in the Contact Talk Radio professional recording studios, where Elise and Jill will help you create your custom
audio interviews to add some pizzazz to your website and enhance your brand. There are 3 packages available.

All Packages Include:
• A half hour in studio, professional produced and recorded with equipment providing outstanding sound quality.
• Professionally recorded interview wrapped with personal introduction and Sisters Of Sizzle bumper music.
• 3-minute and 10-minute interview on topics/services of your choice.
• Free tele-class and handouts outlining Elise and Jill’s signature exercises to help prepare your questions and answers.

If you’ve been looking for a cost-effective, easy way to connect with customers and grow your brand, don’t miss this. These gals are even featured as a case study in my branding book, which by the way, launched yesterday!

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

It sucks when you ruin your brand, doesn’t it?

Posted on by Red Slice

As with all branding, personal branding – formerly known as “your reputation” – relies on clarity and consistency across what you say, how you look and what you do. We all work very hard to build up and safeguard our personal brands. Often, as we go through life, we don’t even know what our personal brand should be until we really get clear on who we are and what we are all about. You then find that your natural actions – your attention to detail, your creativity, your positive energy – created that personal brand long before you even thought about it.

Yesterday, my personal brand took a hit. And it wasn’t even intentional.

I won’t bore you with the details but suffice it to say I did something – in all innocence, I swear – that I wasn’t supposed to do. I broke the rules without meaning to. Now a person who I truly admire but who I have never met thinks I’m horrible. Of course they would: they don’t know me personally and my brand has not had a chance to prove itself over and over again. They have not seen me stop for a stop sign when no one else is around, or inform the restaurant hostess that the ladies room is out of TP, or give back the extra change I received in error from a distracted barista or use a corporate credit card with full responsibility. Their interaction with my personal brand was limited and so I didn’t have that “cred” built up. Now this person either thinks I’m stupid or a scammer. And they told me blatantly that “I was smarter than that” so I can only assume they think the latter.

As someone who detests breaking the rules (and detests it even more when others do) this was a hard pill to swallow, needless to say. I realized all the explanations in the world won’t change this person’s mind. I was upset all day yesterday and into today, much like the horrible feeling I had as a child of doing something wrong and knowing mom and dad were disappointed in me.

That’s the thing with brand: You’ve got to be vigilant. You need to remember that every new customer does not have history or know the story of how special you or your business really is. You have to prove it every time. And when things go wrong…and they will (hello BP, Tiger Woods, and now Maria Ross) I guess the most important aspect of your brand is how fast you recover, how sorry you are, and how you try to make amends.

Have you or your business ever suffered a brand hit? Please share the story and the lessons you learned in the Comments.

Cash flow, creativity, and compassion are not mutually exclusive™

Why I’m starting to hate Apple

Posted on by Red Slice

I’ve long admired Apple for its branding prowess, it’s ability to connect with customers, to innovate, to “think different.” But the recent fight they are having with Adobe over Flash on the iPhone and iPod has got me seeing their brand in a whole new light – and not a very flattering one.

Today’s WSJ had an article about Apple winning new ground in their very public war with Adobe about the decision Apple made to not accept Adobe’s Flash programming – the programming many websites already use for video and animation – on its devices.  Apple has shut out Adobe from its own devices to promote its own tools and its “under development” HTML 5. Steve Jobs has lashed out with technical reasons why Flash isn’t good for its own devices, and Adobe retaliated with full page ads trying to get Apple on its side and garner public support.

I admit to not even knowing these technical reasons. I’m more interested in the perception and brand impact. I’ve never seen such brand hypocrisy in blatant black and white in the same article. Out of one side of their mouth, Apple claims it believes in open standards “like HTML 5” (hmmm….interesting, their own product)  and says Flash is proprietary to Adobe. It may well be, but from a customer point of view (and developers are their customers too) Flash is what most folks out there are already using and what most websites and apps already use. Now, Apple is forcing customers back to the drawing board, or worse, forcing them to maintain separate apps and websites for different devices.  The whole point of “open standards” is that apps can be used on any device and if many companies have already invested in using Flash to date, why not just also allow Flash on the Apple devices as people move over to using HTML 5, if it truly is an open standard?

Out of the other side, the article states that Apple wants to protect its competitive advantage (which I totally get and respect) by preventing developers from creating apps for the iPhone or iPad that could be used on other devices. If memory serves, when Microsoft got slammed for bundling their Internet Explorer browser with their operating system, wasn’t this action labeled “monopoly activity” and an anti-competitive practice? One customer in the WSJ article, Venveo, a web-design firm, says it has to build apps and websites for Apple devices separately because it has little choice due to iPhone’s popularity. Sounds like a monopolistic chokehold to me.

When did Apple turn into “the man”? I guess it was inevitable. Smart, friendly and fighting the “big dogs” can only work as a brand as long as you’re the small dog. Then when you get to the other side, you start to act just like the companies you used to condemn because you can see the upside. And other companies are taking their cue: I read yesterday that the new UrbanSpoon dining reservation system that is rolling out into full launch can only work for restaurants on an IPad, not on the restaurant’s existing reservations system.

Again, I don’t claim to understand the technical reasons for these decisions- but I wasn’t born yesterday: I doubt it has nothing to do with market dominance and freezing out the competition just because you can. My main issue is that Apple is doing something that forces customers to react a certain way, gives them more work, more expense and less options – and tarnishes their well-established brand promise in the process.