Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about branding. What exactly does “branding” mean? Sounds like something that only relates to huge companies with big-time advertising agencies and humungous ad budgets.
But how the heck does that relate to you, the direct-selling professional? Is there a lesson in there for you and your business? It might just relate to you in a much bigger way than you might imagine. Let’s do a little investigation…
What is branding? For a company, it starts with a cool logo, graphic look and advertising campaign. But it’s much more than that. A brand is actually the differentiator of what they offer over their competition.
So, is branding linked to the products you sell? Is it that you offer the lowest price? Or the tremendous business opportunity you can provide? Sure, you need to sell products. You need to offer value. And to grow your business, you need to recruit others. Those are the ultimate goals.
But it’s HOW you go about it that makes the difference. And that’s where personal branding comes into play. Personal branding is best described as your promise to deliver quality, performance and consistency to your customers. You provide something that they can count on. As a business person, that’s worth all the tea in China.
Corporate Branding vs. Personal Branding
We can all learn from the marketplace. Successfully companies work very hard to establish themselves in their spheres of influence. Bizillions of dollars are expended every year to promote products and services. At the end of the day, they want you to walk away with a good feeling about them and what they have to offer. Simply put, they desperately crave your brand loyalty.
Certain organizations stand out as true branding winners. Apple, BMW and Nike come to mind. So what is it that they’ve done that differentiates them from their competition? Sure, they make terrific products that answer a market need. But they also do something else that’s relatively unique in the world of commerce: They establish relationships with their customers.
That can be your greatest asset. Think of yourself as a brand. What do people think of you and what you offer them. It’s not just the products you represent, it’s what YOU bring to the table. If folks believe in you and trust in what you signify, you’ve established a powerful personal brand.
So every business effort you pursue should enforce and embrace that goal. There are some basic fundamentals that you should consider when going about your business:
Personality
YOU are your brand. Make your personality something that your customers want to migrate to. If they’re comfortable with you, they’re more likely to stay with you and trust your input. Nurture and build relationships. Sales will follow.
Culture
Immerse yourself in the lifestyle and culture of your target audience. For example, if you’re representing wellness products, establish yourself as an expert. That doesn’t mean you become a know-it-all—that annoying guy at the cocktail party. Expert status is akin to respect. It comes slowly and develops through consistent action.
Be part of the conversation. Offer helpful tips and advice that leave people with the idea that you might have solutions for them. Don’t force products down their throats. Once they have confidence in your contribution to the discussion, they’ll be more open to what you have to offer them.
Stay in touch
There’s a huge difference between staying in touch and being a nuisance. Only you can determine that fine balance. You want to let prospects know that you’re there, but you don’t want to bug the heck out of them. Use subtle ways of staying in touch. Remember their birthday or anniversary. Or just say hello. Done appropriately, those little things can really make an impression.
Keep prospects and customers informed… casually!
When you do have a special offer or event, let them know. Just don’t overdo it. They’re very sensitive to a sales pitch. There’s a big difference between providing information and being that annoying mosquito that people just want to bat away. If you’ve established yourself as an expert in a particular field, they will want to hear from you.
If you make an effort to position yourself properly with your prospects and customers, you’ll find that they’ll be much more receptive. And that means more business for you in the long run.
Relax. Nobody died—except for traditional demographics. Categories such as Baby Boomer, Gen-X, Gen-Y or Gen-Whatever are definitely on life support. For decades, companies, marketers and advertisers have targeted age, gender, education, race and income as a means of identifying a market. They essentially assume that all people within those categories all think alike and are motivated by the same things. I guess that kind of groupthink makes marketers’ jobs easier when pitching products or services on a mass scale. But its accuracy may be suspect.
I certainly don’t think like, act like or are interested in the same things as everybody else in my so-called demographic category. Let’s say I’m 34 (which I wish I was!). That puts me in the ubiquitous 18-34 age group. Does that mean that I have the exact same interests as an 18-year-old? I sincerely doubt it. And what happens when I turn 35? Hmmm.
The social media blender
Online Meccas like Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and YouTube are totally blurring the rigid lines that old-school demographics have drawn. People are interacting, connecting and sharing based on their interests, values and beliefs. Smart marketers are picking up on this and are adjusting their advertising and marketing efforts accordingly. Done properly, they can potentially target consumers more precisely, efficiently and effectively. And that means their outreach dollars go a lot further.
I think that this information is equally applicable to those in network marketing. After all, you spend a great deal of time reaching out to prospects and nurturing relationships with existing customers. If you are better able to focus your efforts on developing networks of like-minded people who share specific interests, you’ll have much more success than if you just targeted “young people,” “upper-income people” or “boomers.”
Here are a few articles I found that signal where the future of marketing and advertising is headed:
Think in terms of action and interest, not artificially created age groups
Rohit states that media is purchased “based on presumed age ranges of audiences in the hopes that this bit of demographic information would help us reach the right people. In fact, this is one of the most time-honored traditions of marketing planning. It is also one of the dumbest.”
He lists 5 reasons why old-school thinking is a waste of time:
People are age shifting and not living lives based on traditional stereotypes for their ages
The top end of a demographic (34) usually has almost nothing in common with the low end (18)
Age demos leave out influencers, gift buyers, and others for whom a message may be relevant, but don’t fit the age requirements because they aren’t the ultimate recipient of the product
Focusing on age can take you away from emotional or relevant benefits
People lie about their age all the time
Marketers are literally guessing at relevance within a demographic category. However in today’s social media world, consumers as individuals can be plucked out of the crowd and identified for their uniqueness. Via social media, they are literally broadcasting on a daily basis what interests them.
Rohit Bhargava is SVP of Digital Strategy at Ogilvy PR and author of the award-winning book Personality Not Included, a guide for brands to be more authentic.
The Canadian Marketing Association posted a great article on their blog page by Dawn Marchand that posits that Gen-X, Gen-Y and Baby Boomers should be redistributed and categorized as Generation-E. The “E” stands for “Everyone.” By doing that, the restrictive “Gen” categories makes the effort moot. She says:
Brands that speak to and, more importantly, connect with people who share a common interest—regardless of their demographic or generation—will be the most successful. Sustaining a brand is much more about engaging consumers and connecting emotionally and less about straight-up advertising.
Jamie makes a great point about how poorly demographics have defined generations for more than half a century. Online social networks have turned the marketing world on its ear. “To convince consumers that an advertising message was relevant to them, consumers had to buy the idea that they were just like everyone else.”
Traditional thinking tosses 78 million people into a single bucket and labels it “Baby Boomers.” But it just ain’t so. I’m a Boomer and my interests vary greatly.
Social data can be used to fine-tune a target audience. Jamie offers a few examples:
Are customers who kayak more likely to buy water shoes than those who canoe?
Who is more likely to spend over $100 on an order: Seattle Seahawks fans or Seattle Mariners fans?
Are your customers more likely to purchase when they move across the state or across the country?
He makes a powerful point at the close of his article:
Build a deep understanding of your customer, or risk irrelevance.
I believe he’s right on target.
Jamie Beckland is a Digital and Social Media Strategist at Janrain where he helps Fortune 1000 companies integrate social media technologies into their websites to improve user acquisition and engagement. He has built online communities since 2004. He tweets as @Beckland.
Am I really that predictable?
Social Media and the End of Gender
By Johanna Blakey
This is a terrific video by Johanna Blakey. She gives a very informative talk about how social media is turning the tables on how target markets are identified. She makes the case that marketers claim that if you fall within a certain demographic category, you are predictable. It supposedly defines your tastes, identifies the things you like and clarifies what interests you. The result? Our culture has been delineated and cultivated via advertising, entertainment and the media by these generalities and gross presumptions.
Blakey states that people “don’t aggregate around age, gender and income. They aggregate around the things they love, the things that they like. And if you think about it, shared interests and values are a far more powerful aggregator of human beings than demographic categories.”
So social media has changed all that. It is effectively revealing those things that drive people’s interests and shape their values. She cautions those who market to consumers:
If you want to understand the global village, it’s probably a good idea that you figure out what they’re passionate about, what amuses them, what they choose to do with their free time.
Spend a few minutes and watch this video. It’s worth every second.
Johanna Blakey is the Deputy Director of the Normal Lear Center, a media-focused think tank at the University of Southern California. She spends much of her time exploring how our entertainment interacts with our political, commercial and social habits.
It’s our future. Make it happen!
How we are defined as individuals is a very important subject. I actually resent the fact that the powers that be plop us into random categories for the sake of selling their goods. I think those who ignore the social media trends do so at their peril.
I welcome your comments and insight. Let me know what’s on your mind.
It’s sort of like the old party game, “Telephone.” You whisper something to the person next you, who in turn whispers it to their neighbor, who whispers it to theirs, and so on. By the time it gets to the end of the line, the message sounds nothing like what you originally whispered.
It’s no game
Direct-selling. Network marketing. MLM. However you say it, these companies can suffer from the same problem when it comes to their branding.
Network marketing companies invest heavily in their brand and messaging. They spend many thousands of dollars creating marketing materials such as video, audio, presentations and print pieces for their representatives to use. Ideally, the company’s efforts will remain intact all the way to the customer.
It’s important to realize, however, that distributors are actually expending their efforts building THEIR businesses. And not everybody is a network marketing expert. The company may not have much control over what happens to THEIR brand and messaging after it leaves the front door.
Consider the following scenarios:
Video
A marketing team just spent tens of thousands of dollars on a new product video. Now what do they do with it? They could post it somewhere on the website and hope distributors either stream or download it. But who’s to say what happens with the video from there? Maybe a consultant will place it in a PowerPoint presentation. If so, how sure can a company be that the presentation fully honors its branding and messaging?
Presentations
How about that 12-slide PowerPoint business opportunity presentation the marketing department just finished? You can post it on the company back office site where representatives can download it. Remember, the consultant is promoting his or her own business. So it’s highly likely that they might dig in and edit the PowerPoint to personalize and customize it for them. How much brand/messaging control might the company lose in that process?
eCards/Invitations
Consultants could also be subscribing to third-party eCard or online invitation providers to get their message out. While there are many quality online solutions, they are somewhat generic and don’t provide any kind of consistent corporate branding.
So what to do?
The $64,000 question:
How can a company provide quality materials that THEIR consultants can use to promote themselves and still maintain the integrity of THE CORPORATE BRAND and messaging?
This was the driving force behind the development of the ROQlogic Media Center. We realized that there was a real desire in the industry for a solution that not only made it extremely easy to distribute content—from video and audio, to print materials and online presentations—but also to provide corporate control over what a specific brand looks like all the way from the consultant to the prospect or customer.
Simply put, there’s nothing else like the Media Center in the industry. It provides a centralized, controlled environment for a company’s multimedia content where distributors can:
Send an online, multi-slide presentation—complete with audio and video
Post a video or presentation to their social media sites
Download a video or email it to a prospect or customer
Download a presentation for offline viewing on their computer
Downloaded a high-resolution, print-ready PDF file
Creating Brand Partners
The beauty of the Media Center is that it not only automatically personalizes everything for the consultant, it gives the corporation complete flexibility as to what can and can’t be changed, and therefore what is and isn’t communicated. That puts the company back in the driver’s seat and in control of their brand! Furthermore, it empowers consultants to become BRAND PARTNERS with the company.
I urge you to visit the rest of our website and find out more about what the ROQlogic Media Center can do for you. And I invite you to comment below. I look forward to your thoughts and ideas.
What? Can’t possibly be! But that concept is exactly what inspired Steve Jobs and Apple at their lowest ebb. In the mid 80s, Jobs lost a power struggle with the board of directors and left the company. He returned to skipper the firm in the mid-90s, but was strapped with a company that was only a tepid niche player in the market. Apple had but a tiny share of the competitive pie and was saddled with a hodgepodge product line.
So what to do? Well, Steve Jobs being Steve Jobs, he took the unbeaten path. In his genius, he realized it was futile to win by “out-claiming” the competition… touting faster processor speeds, more memory, etc. That would bring incremental gains at best. If Apple was to survive, he needed to outflank the competition.
Who are you? What are you about?
Anyone who sells needs to watch the video below. Jobs explains how he was going to accomplish Apple’s success. He believed that one of the best marketing efforts “the universe has ever seen” was Nike. He points out that in the most basic terms, Nike sells shoes. But they never really “sell” shoes. You don’t typically hear them comparing features or technologies with the competition. Their entire marketing push focuses on great athletes and accomplishments. Jobs says of Nike, “That’s who they are… that’s what they’re about.” Brilliant.
And so that inspiration was an epiphany for Jobs and triggered Apple’s mercurial rise and rightful place in history.
The moral of this story?
You do yourself more good by exhibiting a genuine passion for what you and your organization represent instead of trying to become a pitchman (or pitchwoman) for products. That’s true whether you sell nutritionals, real estate or cosmetics. Your products will get their moment in the sun once your prospects and customers believe in you and your company.
Recently I’ve been reading a lot of stuff about branding. What exactly does “branding” mean? Sounds like something that only relates to huge companies with big-time advertising agencies and humungous ad budgets.
