I was at a networking event last night and was talking with two business owners when one asked the other, “So what’s different about your business.” The questionee seemed like a sentient, well-spoken man prior to this question, but as he began to respond he started to go off on a canned sales pitch that had nothing to do with why his business was different.
Chances are that there is something about this gentleman’s business that actually is differnent from his competitors, but he just had never given it much thought and found it easier to fall back on the familiar. And I completely understand that it’s difficult to pinpoint those one or two things that set you apart, so if you have problems identifying these attributes, start simple and ask yourself this question: What isn’t screwed up about my company that is screwed up with my competitors?
We can call the answer to this question your company’s Unique Blissfunction (as opposed to dysfunction), and often it’s relatively easy to answer and gives you the basis of differentiating yourself. Maybe you don’t charge for initial consultations and everybody else does. Maybe you provide a free extended warranty that nobody else can touch. Maybe you have a new way of processing documents that reduces how many times each document is handled and therefore reduces errors (which increases value). Whatever the attribute, find it and start using it in your sales pitch.
And what if you don’t have a Unique Blissfunction? Then figure out what’s screwed up with some major aspect of how your industry does business and fix it so that you can create a Unique Blissfunction.
Back when my business was new and I was trying to figure out how the hell to sell my services, I was intrigued by David Sandler’s sales approach, mainly because it offered a way to sell without coming off as slimy. One of Sandler’s many principles was to make your prospect feel more at ease than you seem, and he offered several ways to acocomplish this, one of which was to accidentally/on-purpose get lost leaving the propsect’s office.
Despite the disingenuious nature of the enterprise, I always liked this tactic and have used it many times. Although I’m not sure it has ever worked or helped me land any business, it serves as a fantastic reminder of what branding (and marketing, for that matter) should do, and that is make people feel so comfortable about your product or service that the decision to purchase your stuff is an easy one.
This is why I have never understood clever advertising, even though at one point in my early career I was dreadfully guilty of practicing it (mea culpa, mea culpa, a thousand mea culpas). Clever advertising says “look at me” and “see how much money we spend to make ourselves seem smarter than you.” Whether it’s high school or high-tech marketing, nobody likes a show-off, and any marketing that places cleverness and coyness above all else is missing the point.
Your prospects don’t want to hear how clever and adroit you are. They want to hear how you can help them solve their problem or make their life easier, and they want to know how you can do it differently, more efficiently and less expensive than other companies. Most of the time, you can give them what they want to hear with candor and sincerity. Sometimes a little humor can give you a more friendly vibe, but just don’t make the humor about how funny you are. Because it’s not about you … it’s about them.
It seems like practically every branding book I have ever read is consistent in saying that only one or two brands can dominate a category. This is then buttressed by a deluge of big brand examples – Coke, P&G, Ford, Microsoft, Oracle, UPS, blah, blah, blah.
You would think with such a coronation that no company other than these giants would be able to compete in any category. But really the opposite is true.
According to the NFIB, small businesses in the U.S. produce around 50% of our GDP, making American small business the world’s third largest economy behind the overall U.S. economy and Japan. In fact, if it weren’t for small business, all these large companies would be closing their doors pronto because small business is both their customer as well as their supplier, subcontractor, etc.
Small brands can do what large ones can’t. They can find the niche that the big guys won’t – or can’t – fit into. They are nimble enough to make more out of every resource. Their lack of capital actually makes them priortize and make better decisions. They can change their offerings – heck, their entire business focus – much more quickly to adjust to market fluctuations (and there are always fluctuations). They can be more personal. More flexible. More local. So if you feel you’re fighting an uphill battle all the time, remember that you have key advantages over the big guys. You just need to determine what those specific advantages are for your small business or startup and make sure your customers know what they are.
We just adopted an 8-year-old dog who is sweet and smart, albeit with a few bad habits. Seeing as how we have allowed our 6-year-old lab to lapse into some bad habits also, we have decided to retrain them at their ripe ages. This has led to quite a bit of resistance and confusion on the dogs’ part, and frustration and impatience on their caretakers’ part.
So it also goes with changing a longstanding marketing approach or brand position. You will get resistance from co-workers, senior staff, owners, board members, practically anyone who had a part in formulation the approach or position in the first place. And although this resistance is to be expected and can be a healthy reign to keep the process from going unchecked, it can also keep a company from evolving and growing, and evolution is what keeps a company relevant and in business.
If you are trying to make a change in your company’s marketing or branding direction, the first thing you need to remove is the fear of change, so grand gestures and big announcements aren’t where you should start. Instead, do your research first, quietly and discreetly. Then meet one-on-one with stakeholders, ask for their advice and input individually, slowly open up the discussion of shifting course. As my dogs are already proving, an old dog can learn new tricks, but only over time and with patience.
The size of a company always plays a part – sometimes large, sometimes small – in brand makeup and messaging. Small businesses know this well, because often you must address a prospect’s concern of hiring or buying from a smaller concern (pardon the pun). There’s the old adage that nobody ever got fired by hiring IBM, and in the past this was often a tacit reason why small businesses and startups lost pitches, proposals and sales.
But over the last year or two, this has dramatically changed. No longer can a decision maker automatically assume the corporate giant they are about to hire will be in business a year from now, let alone a month or a week from now. In fact, most of the smaller branding agencies and ad firms I know are much more stable than larger ones because they don’t have to cover the big monthly nut of an ostentatious office or large staff.
And the one thing that big firms are doing to their detriment right now is dropping their prices to cover their big nut (or nuts … again, pardon the pun). This may keep them alive in the short term, but they are also training their clients to pay less, which means when we pull out of this downturn those clients will be trained to pay less and may migrate to a smaller company that always has lower prices and/or better value.
Both these factors play to the advantage of small businesses and startups, including how you can position yourself against your bigger competitors. Just hang in there, as the real payoff may not happen for several more months. But hopefully being small will shed some of its negative connotation and become perceived as a valuable brand attribute.
I remember back in the day when I was working as a staff copywriter at Agency X (the name has been changed to protect the innocent) on a car account, and our client was providing feedback to one of the newspaper ads we had just created.
“No, no, this is all wrong,” he told me. “We need more of those explosion callouts around the prices. And where are the exclamation points. I gotta have more of those.”
I started laughing out loud, thinking he was making fun of how many explosions and bangers were already in the ad, but on the other end all I heard was silence. Me being a lowly copy grunt and he being our biggest paying client, I quickly apologized and obliged. At the time I thought I was the naive one. Come to find out it was my client.
All the screaming and ranting and loud tactics and garish graphics in the world – what I like to call shock marketing – aren’t going to differentiate your brand in the marketplace. This for the most part includes those goofy, edgy YouTube ads companies are wont to release these days; if you are the fortunate few to actually get traction from one of these ads, your agency will probably get more work from the ad than you will.
Aesop has already taught us that the screamers in life are usually ignored, so instead of relying on flamboyant tactics that only call attention to the fact that you weren’t inventive enough to do something original, it’s better to craft a concise message that is remarkable even when it is whispered.
I’m watching my favorite football team (as in soccer, for you Yanks) Aresnal take on Man U in the UEFA Champions League tonight, and at one point the camera focused in on the center of the jerseys of two opposing players. Most European club teams have a jersey sponsor, primarily for two reasons: 1) European soccer players are paid exorbitant salaries that are only rivaled by MLB baseball players, and 2) there are no commercial breaks in soccer games save halftime – another reason the sport is superior to most lethargic North American sports – so the teams need to find revenue elsewhere.
Emirates Airlines is Arsenal’s jersey sponsor, and AIG – yes, the much-maligned insurance company – is Manchester United’s sponsor. This makes sense, because no small business or startup could afford such premium space. Simply put, you can’t compete with on-jersey tactics. So what do you do when you can’t afford the jersey? Find something off-jersey, where nobody else is looking, and give them a reason to look. This could be the guys in the stands who are painted your corporate colors of orange, green and blue. Or the fellas with your logo shaved onto their scalps.
Off-jersey tactics work because they are the unexpected. Everyone expects to see a logo on a jersey, but not a guy with a logo on his head. The catch is that money buys big brands the easy way out. Off-jersey tactics are anything but easy, but when they work, they work better than anything else.
A cardinal rule of branding (heck, of just running a business) is to NEVER make promises you can’t keep. But many companies are in such a hurry to grow and promote themselves that their lips get ahead of their ops and support.
For example, my business partner and I have an e-commerce site for which we’re starting to get lots of traffic. Our hosting company couldn’t seem to fix a problem with the speed with which users could access our site, so we decided to move our site to another hosting provider. In our discussions with the second provider, Gate.com, they reassured us that, on the rare chance that our site went down, their tech support would be on the case ASAP. In fact, they post the following language on their Web site: We’re here to help with 24/7/365 support.
So we moved the site, and two weeks later, late on a Friday night, our site went down. We were the ones that noticed it, so we called customer support and started getting messages and voicemail. After finally finding a customer service rep, he told us that their support people don’t work on the weekends. So much for 24/7/365 support.
After forwarding us to a tech support person, the individual couldn’t tell us what the problem was or when we could expect to have or site back online; all he provided were hazy, cryptic answers to our questions. Back to another promise on their Web site: Our extreme support team is staffed around the clock to quickly and efficiently solve your problems. We have developed a thorough selection, training and continual real-time monitoring process to ensure your issues are solved in a timely manner. Again, a line of marketing BS based on their response. (Note: this is why most people hate marketers and ad agencies … because desperate marketers and agencies are willing to say anything for a buck without verifying if their claims can be backed up. If you are looking to hire a marketer or ad agency for your company or business, call their clients – better yet, call their clients’ customers – and make sure their ethics match their mouths). 24 hours after our site went down, the people at Gate.com still couldn’t tell us what the problem was or when they would have it fixed. And so on…
What can you learn from this little experience of mine. First, never use Gate.com, a company that breaks their promises by providing awful customer service and horrible tech support. Second, never, ever make a promise you can’t keep. Eventually you will disappoint the wrong person, and negative word-of-mouth has a penchant to spread much faster than the positive variety.
There’s a piece in the New York Times today about TiVo creating a new technology that flashes a piece of text when a viewer pauses a show that “suggests” to them to view an ad; this technology also can place a static image on the screen when a viewer tries to fast-forward through a commercial, an image which “suggests” ad content to the viewer.
Wow, talk about not getting it.
When will ad agencies and media outlets learn that the horse has left the barn on this one. Sure, thrusting new platforms and technologies and “branded suggestions” in front of audiences may result in a few more sold units, but what are you willing to sacrifice for them? And how many other people will you piss off doing it?
In acts like this, I can feel the desperation of agencies and marketers as they try to squeeze the last drop out of aging platforms. First newspapers went south. Next TV. Soon radio. Eventually, ad agencies themselves will go the way of the do-do. Before you thrust your marketing message onto audiences, think first of the damage you may cause to your brand in doing so and how you might create something that draws customers to you. Sure, it’s much harder, but it’s better than eventually being out of business.
Stumped on how your small business or startup brand should be perceived? Here’s a quick exercise to get you thinking.
Take a minute and reflect on the more endearing personality traits of your best friend. Sure, the fact that he can fart the Star-Spangled Banner or that she can apply lipstick doing a downward-dog pose is quite amusing, but your relationship with this person is certainly based on more than just party stunts (and if it isn’t, then you may want to start searching for a new best friend).
Your best friend is probably honest (sometimes brutally), reliable (unless you want to get picked up at the airport, of course) and loyal. They may have a wry sense of humor, a pleasant lilt in their voice, a direct but genuine way of conversing. They may even have some quirks that, although at first irritating, eventually become endearing traits that are so, so, so them.
So think about these traits and why you find them valuable in your best friend, because they may be just as valuable in your business.
