We’ve all been told what we can or can’t do; what’s possible and what’s impossible.
Yesterday I was editing the interview I did with Ben Mack for Rick Raddatz‘s Entrepreneur’s Vacation Club, and in it he quoted P.T. Barnum:
More people are humbugged by believing in too little than by believing in too much.
Ben says that when he’s told, “It can’t be done,” his response is always, “Maybe it can.”
“Coincidentally” (and if you know me, you’ll know I don’t believe in coincidences and I use that word facetiously) last week was full of examples for me that supported these concepts, and proved to me that we all humbug ourselves by believing in too little… especially when that comes to what we can achieve.
I just wrote an article over on the LWL Worldwide blog, called Taking the “Im” Off “Impossible”.
I start off by saying:
How many times has someone said to you, “That’s not possible,” or “You can’t do that,” or “It will never happen”?
Well, what if you ignored the naysayers and just did what you wanted to do anyhow?
This past week I had numerous personal experiences that reminded me, once and for all, that there’s no such thing as impossible… and we can accomplish a lot more than we think.
And I go on to give those personal stories, as well as an example from Joe Vitale; and I tie it all up with my favorite formula from Jack Canfield, E+R=O (Event + Reaction = Outcome).
But rather than try to sum it up here, why not slide on over to LWL and take a look? I know you’ll enjoy it… you can read my article by clicking here.
Keep Unwrapping the Mysteries of Life!
Heather,
I’ve followed you and MOS for a while now. Thanks for all you do.
Carl.
Heather,
I trust you won’t mind my calling you the genius that you are to my list…
“A crime against theatre is a crime against humanity.”
— Constantine Stanislavski
First of all, thank you for demonstrating and communicating and your willingness to be Genius. Yes, there are multiple intelligences. IQ = BS. IQ was created to sort men drafted into World War I and this sorting instrument is BS, favoring men over women, favoring richly educated over others and favoring whites over any other ethnicity. …but i digress…
Heather, i’m about to send my 23k list a link to this post of yours.
I promised my readers more on branding… he’s the completion of my promise…
(excerpt from ThinkTwoProductsAhead.com BOOK)
Chapter 2 Brand Misinformation & Reorientation
“Advertising is a seduction, not a debate.”
–David Ogilvy
“Branding is an extended seduction, not a color palette.”
–Ben Mack
Branding is often discussed as irrelevant to small business marketing. That’s bunk! If you are running a con-game, then branding is irrelevant. However, every form of legitimate business will benefit from branding. Branding is often described in absurd and outlandish ways. For the record, branding is:
– NOT an exact discipline
– NOT about always using the same logo or colors
– NOT about limiting yourself
Don’t use the dictionary for industry terminology.
brand (brnd)
1. n. a.A trademark or distinctive name identifying a product or a manufacturer.
b. A product line so identified: a popular brand of soap.
-The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Please abandon this common definition of a brand. A doctor needs a medical definition of manic, or he would be prescribing everybody lithium. Marketers need a business definition of brand…
MY DEFINITION =>brand (brnd)
1. n. a. The positive or negative inclination to purchase, either in an individual or among a target audience.
b. The aggregation of stories and associations around a trademark, distinctive name or a product line.
2. vt. a. To increase a target audience’s likelihood to purchase now and in the future.
b. To imbue positive characteristics into a marketed proposition.
3. n. a. Slang. A colloquial word for a logo, product name or product line.
-Ben Mack Dictionary of My Language, First Edition
A brand is not a physical thing, but the relationship between consumers and a product or service.
In this book, product names, product logos, and the products themselves ARE NOT BRANDS. They are accessories to your relationship with a customer.
Few products really make a statement about its user. HUGE budget products can become a flag. Flag? What do I mean by a flag…well, carrying a Heineken at a party is a flag that says you’re sophisticated, or in dating terms MATURE. Holding a Corona says relaxation, that you don’t have an attitude…you’re chillin’. The beer you drink says something about you: at minimum it says you aren’t an active member of Alcoholics Anonymous.
[kewl visual in book available at:
http://ThinkTwoProductsAhead.com
]
You’re probably not playing this kind of FLAG branding game.
Often I see the word brand bandied about as synonymous with logo. Some brand managers treat their logo like a sacred flag. I saw an off-colored logo on a weekend sales brochure and the brand manager said they didn’t want to use the brochures…they told me I would NEVER hang an American flag with pink stripes instead of red and they were right. I wouldn’t hang a pink American flag. I wouldn’t buy a pink American flag. But, we were selling fertilizer, not flags. I would have preferred the color was perfect, but I would rather have the collateral SELLING my product than not having SALES material.
This flag notion of branding works for HUGE budget advertising, but it doesn’t scale down to small businesses. For a “flag” to have meaning folks must recognize and agree on what a Corona means, which requires a ton of advertising. Big budget advertising can create meaning that is virtually impossible for small budget marketers to garner outside of a very small niche audience. Corona becomes a flag that says, “I’m cool” but without using the word “cool” and seen as cool to a wide variety of people.
Flag branding, being able to turn your product or logo into a meaningful flag, is not a viable strategy for most advertisers. If you have that kind of budget, the rest of this book is important. But, if you don’t have anywhere near that kind of budget then what follows is even more important, because every single touch you have with your dear customer is meaningful and can substantively affect your relationship and their likelihood to buy again.
If a customer or prospect interacts with your product or your communication and is more likely to buy your product or buy your product again you are building brand equity. This is often mistaken as likeability. I have nothing against likeability. I just don’t think likeability should be an overriding business objective. Remember that nice guy in your high school that all the girls liked but none of them slept with? He may have been liked but his brand equity was squat because he could never close the deal. When Ogilvy said that advertising is a seduction he is talking about getting laid, not endless flirting. If you aren’t getting laid you aren’t seducing your prospect. If you aren’t getting sales you aren’t building your brand you’re merely buying media.
I suggest you think of the word “brand” as the likelihood for a customer to do business with you, again. In the next two chapters I’ll discuss nurturing a relationship with somebody you’ll never know personally. Then, in chapter five I show you how all branding schemes are basically the same and how to use these constructs to increase retention for big and small businesses. But, I’m not finished discussing misinformation about branding.
Branding is big business. Millions of dollars of custom and syndicated research is sold in the name of brand planning. If somebody sold you research or a branding process that didn’t generate more profit than it cost…I’m sorry. But, don’t throw the baby out with the bath water. There is value in branding, there’s also a ton of money wasted in the name of branding.
Before a client spends money on research I like to agree on what actions we will be taken based on the possible findings. I trust sales data more than I trust most tracking studies that report awareness levels.
Thanke
Dear Heather: I thought you’d appreeciate this quote:
ancient Chinese proverb:
The people who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it.
It’s from my most book published in 2002 entitled, From a World of Madness to a World of Sanity: Guides for Action.
Is it possible for us to establish a Sane Society? Is each of the following a realistic goal or an oxymoron: Inspiring Education, Honest Communication, Compassionate Community, Humanistic Economics, Moral Politics, Ethical Business, and Enlightened Military.
Is it possible for us to establish a sane world? This book says emphatically YES! And to quote an ancient Chinese proverb:
The people who say it cannot be done should not interrupt the people doing it.
http://www.trafford.com/4dcgi/view-item?item=1517
Heather and Ben…
It seems I always see the two of you together when your names
pop up! I had a blast learning from the two of you in Atlanta last May, and many of the things you taught me I am working hard to implement.
Branding is definitely critical to any business success, because once you begin to associate a brand name to an item or even a class of items (Kleenex comes to mind for tissues in general), you have victory. When you send someone out for Q-tips, you aren’t sending them out on a quest for cotton swabs…
The trick is to make the name easier to say than the competitor. Coke is easier than Pepsi or Soda for that matter. Yet I always here people say they are getting a coke, even though they pick up a root beer.
It is fascinating to say the least that people can associate a brand over a specific term. The companies who came up with these terms and the brands to replace them in some cases were just lucky, but when you look at the possibilities for branding, the mind gets a little boggled to say the least. First, you have to make sure the name is one that fits the description or becomes the description for the product you want to brand. Then you want to make the name as descriptive and short as possible (although Stanley Steemer is still one of the top brands for steam cleaning your carpet) although Googling information is not necessarily shorter than searching, but for some reason it now defines what we do when we search.
I think, the main thing that helps you brand is having as much attention drawn to it by as many people as possible. Press releases are good, but you really need to have as many people buzzing about you for the branding to stick. You want people to repeat that name as many times as possible in association with the product or service you are branding.
Keep up the great work, Ben and Heather. I am still a big fan of both of you!
Have an amazing day!
Micheal Savoie
extremeproductexplosion.com
Hi Micheal (see, I spelled it right!) 😉
Great to hear from you!
I spent many years bartending, and this conversation happened more times than I can count (usually with Americans visiting my bar in Canada, because the generic term for carbonated soft drink to us was “pop”)
Customer: Could I have a soda please?
Me: (Hands over a glass of soda with a lime garnish and completes the payment transaction)
Customer: (Taking a sip) This is soda water.
Me: Yes.
Customer: But that’s not what I wanted.
Me: You ordered a soda, and I gave you soda.
Customer: But I wanted a Coke or a 7-Up.
Me: Then why didn’t you order a Coke or a 7-Up?
This is more an indication of regional slang and poor communication than good or bad branding per se; but it does overlap into your point about “Coke”.
I think I had 100,000 requests for “Rum and Coke” for every one request for “Rum and Pepsi”. Coke has always been the acceptable generic term for “cola”, even though it’s a proper brand name. My theory is that it’s because 1. Coke came out first and established their turf and 2. Coke sounds very much like Cola, whereas Pepsi sounds like an antacid.
But your “easier” theory might be true too.
I do have to say though, if anyone ever ordered a “Coke” and expected a root beer from me (if any bar I ever worked at even had root beer, which they didn’t) I would have had to launch into some kind of lecture about it.
Luckily, that never happened! 😉
cheers
Heather
Heather, 100,000 Rum & Cokes? girl your arms must be built like steel. 🙂
Micheal Savoie… i dig what you wrote:
“I think, the main thing that helps you brand is having as much attention drawn to it by as many people as possible. Press releases are good, but you really need to have as many people buzzing about you for the branding to stick. You want people to repeat that name as many times as possible in association with the product or service you are branding.”
Agreed.
That’s why The Legend Platform structures communications so my clients say the same basic stories with the same end-points to the point they sometimes complain about getting bored with their own material.
Micheal Savoie, you have additional tips for attracting?
With gratitude,
~Ben
Ben,
“When Ogilvy said that advertising is a seduction he is talking about getting laid, not endless flirting. If you aren’t getting laid you aren’t seducing your prospect. If you aren’t getting sales you aren’t building your brand you’re merely buying media.”
Ha, that’s priceless…
You also said-
“Branding is often discussed as irrelevant to small business marketing. That’s bunk! If you are running a con-game, then branding is irrelevant. However, every form of legitimate business will benefit from branding.”
I agree wholeheartedly. Branding should start from day one, IMHO. To my logic, you should have a clear vision of what you want to be when you grow up…
What a ‘hot’ topic…lol
Everything you do for your business should be done with your own style and in a certain way that conveys a special feeling that the customer can’t get anywhere else. A feeling that builds to a climax. Once they climax, those feelings will be ingrained, laeving them wanting to come back for more…
I had a trainer once who told me I’d “better pay attention to what she was teaching as if it was a sex novel.” Well, I think you should look at your customers as a potential lover!
And what wouldn’t you do for your lover?
“When driven by this desire, men develop keenness of imagination, courage, will-power, persistence, and creative ability unknown to them at other times.” -Napoleon Hill in his classic book, Think and Grow Rich.
The desire for sex is the most powerful of human desires. But to have a heightened sexual desire, you’ve got to have passion.
No passion, no action.
From where I sit, if you aren’t passionate about what you do, you’ll never build a monumental brand.
Here’s a new formula-
Passion + Action = Brand Satisfaction
How’s that for seductive talk?
Carl
P.S.- See, it really is all about the hokey-pokey, after all!
Ben… 100,000 rum and cokes over 15 years of bartending is just the beginning. In those days, I branded myself as the best and fastest bartender in Toronto (who also happened to host a TV show).
Not everyone knew who I was, but those who did were easily persuaded to believe that. Was it the truth? In some ways, yes… but it’s like polls, the results are different when you slice them different ways.
But yes, I do have arms of steel. 😉
Carl… I love the new formula. People always tell us to do what we’re passionate about, but you’ve taken that to a whole new level.
Thank you!
Heather
Heather,
Your passion shows in what you do and that’s why I’m here and also a loyal follower. I had the good fortune to discover MOS when I first started learning about the LOA, through your ebay ad.
You took the ‘LAW’ to a new level for me…
Many thanks.
Carl
Ms. Vale:
Let me just say this. .you look fabulous!
(and you have RED hair. . oooooh)
Robert Cohn
CEO Quantum E3 Corporation
Intelligent Subterranean Green Building
T E C H N O L O G Y
Earth-ship Housing for the New Global Green
1301 E Ave I suite 223
Lancaster, Ca 93535-2127
(661) 946-6581 M-Sat 9a ~ 4:30p
PST
Can I download these videos ??