Brand Aid - An All-Time Best-Selling Brand Book

First published by AMACOM in 2003, the hardcover English version of Brand Aid has sold more than twenty thousand copies in the USA, making it a best-selling business book. The book has been translated into Japanese, Korean and Russian. Other versions of the book have been published under the titles The Brand Management Checklist in the UK and Branding in India. Paperback, digital and audio versions of the book are also available. Brand Aid is currently distributed by Harper-Collins. The book is used to teach brand management and marketing at many business schools throughout the world.

The book is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble.

Startup Insights

Many of you may know that in addition to my brand strategy consulting I am a new venture coach. I have been coaching pre-seed to series A startups for over three years now, during which I have coached two dozen companies with a very high success rate. Many of these companies have reached the commercialization stage in which they have achieved rapidly growing profitable sales. Here are some of my thoughts from working with startups. 

Entrepreneurship adds value to the world in these ways:

• Introduces new products and services

• Creates jobs and economic growth

• Empowers entrepreneurs to pursue their passions

• Creates wealth for the entrepreneur and his or her investors and employees

• Can address social issues

• Can advance technology, which can be used in other ways

These are the most common problems entrepreneurs encounter:

•  Not offering the right “unique value proposition,” that is, something that people really want that is different in meaningful ways from what is already available

•  Not doing enough “customer discovery,” that is, understanding customer needs and desires

•  Founder is too focused on product development vs. business development, especially when it is time to switch from one to the other

•  Lots of uncertainty and risk and need to change course or “pivot”

•  Access to funding/$

•  Hiring the right employees and not being afraid of firing those who don’t work out

•  “Scaling”/growing the business, especially anticipating increased cash flow and customer service demands

•  Knowing when to hire a professional CEO who can take the company to the next level – knowing when the leadership role has exceeded the founder's talents and abilities and being willing to give up personal control

Power Tool Branding and Color

Back in May of 2018, I wrote a post entitled "Identifying Riding Lawn Mower Brands by Color." It has become one of this blog's most popular posts. Today, I am following up on that post with a short post on power tool branding. Even more so than riding lawn mowers, power tool brands can be easily identified by color. Anyone who works in the construction industry can immediately tell which brand of power tool someone is using by the color alone. 

Below are pictures I took of power tool brands as they are displayed in a Home Depot store. 

In some product categories, color plays a dominant role in brand identification. Notice how the retail signage reinforces each brand's principal color.

Marketing Courses for Christmas!

Give the gift of marketing expertise this Christmas! 

Based on thirty years of experience crafting strategy for more than 200 brands, these are links to seven online marketing courses that I am offering through learnformula's The Marketplace. They are extremely reasonably priced from $10 to $15 each (US). They include videos, exercises, templates, worksheets, links to relevant online blog posts and articles and quizzes to test your knowledge. These courses are guaranteed to increase anyone's understanding of brand management and marketing.

Give the gift of marketing expertise this Christmas!

• Positioning Your Brand to Win
• Tapping into Human Needs
• Brand Research
• Developing the Brand Plan
• Brand Identity & Architecture
• Out-of-the-Box Marketing Techniques
• The Importance of Color in Brand Identity

Marketing Today

This is based purely on my observations and personal experiences. I believe the way marketing works today is different from the past, and not just in strategies and tactics, but fundamentally. Yes, one must still start with an understanding of the customer and one must still deliver a unique value proposition to that customer. But the advent of the Internet, social media, AI and data analytics has changed everything. 

Here are the two approaches to marketing that I believe work today. The first is not that different from what worked in the past but I believe it is even more necessary now when many more traditional approaches are far less effective or have ceased working altogether - word-of-mouth, referrals, peer-to-peer marketing and returning satisfied customers. This is all about human-to-human interaction. No wonder the very popular Net Promoter Score (NPS) measures the extent to which one would recommend a particular product or brand to a friend or colleague. It is a measure of attitudinal loyalty but it also gets to the core of what works today, person-to-person influencing. 

The second approach relies on an active online presence, AI and data analytics. I can personally vouch for the fact that if you allow your online "likes," "clicks," and purchases to be monitored, you begin to receive offers of products that are increasingly tailored to your particular needs and desires. This pin-point accuracy in individual targeting was not possible even a decade ago. The purchase rate is much higher when every online ad features something that you highly desire. 

What has gone by the wayside? Cold calls. Unsolicited mail. Unsolicited email messages. Unsolicited text messages. Dialing for dollars. People you don't know asking for "just a minute of your time." We are receiving too many of each of these types of communication every day to consider any one of them for more than a fraction of a second. My routine is to delete as many email messages as possible as quickly as possible and if I recall that I deleted something that I was expecting or could be interested in, I have to go back to the deleted folder to move it back to the inbox. And, as a business owner, I get no less than five solicitations a day from lead-generation companies that want to make cold calls on my company's behalf. I can't imagine being a chief marketing officer today. That person's administrative assistant must spend most of the day running interference with all of the cold callers out there. 

So my advice for the future is to focus on peer-to-peer marketing and using data analytics and AI to get to your potential customers. Yes, there still is room for television, radio, outdoor and other traditional advertising approaches and I am always a fan of publicity and guerrilla marketing, and if you are a food product, free product trial still works, but try focusing on peer-to-peer and data analytics. I believe those are the future of marketing. 

Business Hours & Convenience

 

One of the drivers of customer brand insistence is accessibility. I recently encountered a local bookstore with these hours. It is a new store and I love books so I wanted to explore it. Despite driving by the store a few days each week, I have not yet gone by at a time when it was open. I have now given up on the store. Unless the brand offers a highly demanded item or items not available anywhere else, inconvenient store hours will completely take it out of the consideration set. People do not have a high tolerance for inaccessibility, especial in the era of Amazon.com and a myriad of other 24/7 online stores that can ship overnight. 

Clearly, this is an extreme example of ridiculous hours of operation, but I have encountered many other places with similarly strange hours. If you don't uniquely offer the next big thing, don't handicap your business with limited or strange hours. And even if you are uniquely offering the next big thing, you would do much better to offer as much accessibility and convenience as possible. 

I suspect the bookstore I am citing will be out of business within six months, if not sooner. 

Pricing Research

If you are trying to get a sense of what price to set for a product or service, there are three questions that will help you make a more informed decision:

• How much do you think this product or service costs?
• What would you being willing to pay for this product or service?
• What is the most you would be willing to pay for this product or service?

Different customers will answer this differently. In fact, there may be customer segments that value the product or service differently or who have the ability to pay more or less for the product or service than other customers.

In pricing a product or service, you must always consider your costs and the value of the product or service to the customer. Generally, unless you are pursuing a "loss leader" or a razor-razorblade pricing strategy, you must price your product or service somewhere between the cost and value assuming the cost is less than the value. 

You could explore and influence reference prices, that is, other prices that inform perceptions of your product's or service's price. You could create a price segmentation scheme, that is charging different prices for different customer segments, to maximize revenues and profits. And, if you are just entering a market with your product or service, you could pursue a penetration or skimming pricing strategy depending on what you are trying to accomplish. 

There are many other considerations when pricing a product including price elasticity/sensitivity, price thresholds, bundling/unbundling, sales terms, payment methods, subscription model versus outright purchase, etc. 

Having considered some of the other components of pricing strategy, these are still the most important customer questions to inform your pricing strategy:

• How much do you think this product or service costs?
• What would you being willing to pay for this product or service?
• What is the most you would be willing to pay for this product or service?

Make sure to ask these questions before you set your price.