Show Notes
- “Bringing your brand to life” simply means applying strategies and tactics so every touch point with your prospect or customer creates a strong emotional bond or affinity with your organization.
- Brand is important because it either pulls people in or pushes people away. For reference, check out episode 2, “Defining Your Brand” or episode 11, “Using Brand Vectors To Measure & Align Your Brand.”
- Strive to make every touchpoint supportive of your documented brand position.
- Living your brand exists based on what you say and do. What you “say” is the content of your advertising, dedicated media, or collateral. What you “do” is the customer experience that is influenced by your team.
- Customer Journey Maps are helpful tools to ensure each touchpoint across multiple departments is on brand. Reference episode 4 to learn more about “Mapping The Customer Journey.”
- Next week we will discuss persona research.
Charity of the Week:
We hope you want to join us on our journey. Find us on IterativeMarketing.net, the hub for the methodology and community. Email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net, follow us on twitter at @iter8ive or join The Iterative Marketing Community LinkedIn group.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste.
Producer: Heather Ohlman
Transcription: Emily Bechtel
Music: SeaStock Audio
Onward and upward!
►▼Transcription
Steve Robinson: Hello Iterative Marketers, welcome to the Iterative Marketing Podcast where each week we give marketers and entrepreneurs actionable ideas, techniques, and examples to improve your marketing results. If you want notes and links to the resources discussed on the show sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. Now let’s dive into the show.
Hello everyone and welcome to the Iterative Marketing podcast. I’m your host, Steve Robinson and with me as always is the delightfully entertaining, Elizabeth Earin.
Elizabeth Earin: Hi! How are you?
Steve Robinson: I am doing well. How are you today?
Elizabeth Earin: I am doing great.
Steve Robinson: We have a date night tomorrow night.
Elizabeth Earin: Ooh! What are you doing?
Steve Robinson: We are going to go see a musical.
Elizabeth Earin: I love musicals, which one are you going to go see?
Steve Robinson: I am going to see “Once” so, I am excited about it.
Elizabeth Earin: Which one is that?
Steve Robinson: I don’t know, I’m a really bad husband and haven’t even looked it up. All I know is that my wife is really excited about it and so I am excited about it too.
Elizabeth Earin: I am going to say you are a good husband because my husband wouldn’t even go with me to a musical. So I think you are up on a lot of husbands out there, so…
Steve Robinson: Well, I will take the credit. What are we talking about today?
Elizabeth Earin: Today we are talking about bringing your brand to life, and last week we had said we were going to talk about brand activation, but since that seems to be something that means something different to different people, we kind of are changing the focus and so instead we are going to call today’s podcast “Bringing your brand to life.”
Steve Robinson: Either way, I know branding is a hot topic these days and a lot of organizations are spending a lot of time and effort on making sure that they have their brand buttoned up, but at the same time a lot of the organizations that we work with will see that that brand document then sort of sits in a drawer or sits on someone’s desk and there’s not a whole lot of clarity about, okay what do we do with this? How do we really bring this to life?
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah and that’s hard because a lot of work goes into that brand definition and that brand discovery, and so for it to sit there and not be used is not a good use of resources and it hurts your brand overall. So what exactly do we mean when we say that we are bringing our brand to life?
Steve Robinson: I think it’s really about applying some strategies and tactics to make sure that every single touch point that a prospect or a customer has with your brand is in alignment with that brand because you want to avoid any incongruence or dissonance in that experience. Actually for every one step forward you take in an aligned experience, any time you create some incongruence or dissonance it’s two steps back, it’s much more damaging.
Elizabeth Earin: And I think it’s important to acknowledge here, we are talking about brand and brand is important, and we are in, I believe this is podcast 12, and we have already talked about brand twice. So if you haven’t had a chance yet, definitely go back and listen to last week’s episode on brand vectors as well as episode 2 on defining your brand, but it’s important because brand accomplishes two things, or accomplishes one thing but in two different ways. It either pulls people in or it pushes them away, and that may sound weird because to marketers we don’t want to push anyone away, but I think you have a great example in the way you explain it in terms of getting people to love your brand.
Steve Robinson: When you talk about pulling and pushing people the goal is really to pull in the like-minded right-fit customers and push away the ones that aren’t like-minded, and the other benefit of creating a brand that’s a little bit more polarizing one that’s going to really do that push and pull, is that when you pull those customers in you don’t just make them ‘okay’ or ‘eh’ about your brand, you make them love your brand because they have – it becomes part of their identity as well, and so by creating that polarizing brand you actually intensify that emotional connections. So if you can think about it, say you got a group of 10 people standing against a wall and you have an opportunity as a marketer to attract or repel those people, if you create a polarizing brand you might pull fewer, say maybe five of those people in, but those people are going to really identify with your brand and they are going to be with you for life. Whereas if you try to create an everyone brand that doesn’t take a position and isn’t at all polarizing you might pull eight of those people in, but they are not going to be nearly as invested or nearly as emotionally attached to your brand.
Elizabeth Earin: And it’s more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep talking to an old one, and so you want those people that love you because they are going to stick with you and they are not even going to think twice when it’s time to go buy your product as long as you are consistently delivering that experience that they need, and that’s where this branding and brand management is so important.
Steve Robinson: I think you hit on a very important point there that really bringing your brand to life, it goes beyond just marketing to new customers, you have to do that all the way through that entire customer’s journey, before they know you all the way through to where they are a customer and not only are they a customer but they are out singing your praises and evangelizing your brand because then that’s where it’s most powerful actually.
Elizabeth Earin: I think at this point one thing that’s really important to talk about is ensuring that every single touch point supports your documented brand position and to do that we really have to look at living your brand from two different perspectives or two different levels. Living your brand is about what you say and it’s also about what you do.
Steve Robinson: Exactly. And the say part is easy, right, because that’s just really auditing all of your existing collateral and taking a look at each touch point, what have we written, what is our messaging, what are our designs and making sure that it says what you mean to say, what aligns with your brand and then also says it in the same tone that aligns with your brand. So for example, if your brand was focused on luxury, you wouldn’t want to have a bunch of messaging out there that talked about discount, discount, discount because that’s incongruent with the brand position of being a luxury brand.
Elizabeth Earin: You said something, you said what you say is the easy part but I think I might disagree with you on that because I think for a lot of brands especially who tuck their brand guide or brand sort of direction away in a drawer, it’s not easy, because if you are not looking at this every day and you are creating collateral and you are writing website copy and you don’t have this top of mind, then you start to get away from that brand message that you are trying to support. So I think I’m going to disagree with you on that point that it’s not as easy. I have seen a lot of brands misstep here.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, I think that, I know that when we coordinate any sort of creative either for ourselves or for a client, we generally make sure that we provide four documents, right, you have your credit requirements, that’s the obvious one, but then we also include the customer journey and where this piece of content fits in the customer journey, the persona and then some sort of a brand document that outlines, and it goes beyond just graphic standards but also outlining what is that brand personality, what is that brand voice and how does it feel to be part of that brand.
Elizabeth Earin: And then you mentioned it, it goes into how you say it as well and it’s important that the tone and the tenor matches the personality with the brand and aligns with the brand standards. And you, I know have been doing a lot of work with Marketo lately as we are onboarding a client and you came across a great example of this.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, I love the Marketo documentation because it’s written in this quirky fun style. So at one point they are talking about leads and contacts and sales force, and it said, oh, no, I forget the name of the product, but it said that a Frisbee aspires to be the air pro ring and they linked to this product of this like super Frisbee, right, and a lead aspires to be a contact and then they quoted this and attributed to ancient proverb and it’s just quirky and fun and that’s a great example of what you say in that documentation is really around how to connect Salesforce to Marketo, but how they are saying it is in a quirky fun way that aligns with the Marketo brand.
Elizabeth Earin: Anyone who has tried to work with Salesforce and Marketo knows that that’s not always – it’s a little bit complicated, it can be complicated, and so by taking that casual and approachable style in their writing that fun quirky, they are really reinforcing that, hey, take a deep breath, it’s going to be okay, we are all in this together, and it makes you like them more.
Steve Robinson: Every each one of us has an opportunity to go and audit our content and make sure that it does that, that it establishes an emotional connection or at least reinforces that personality or that brand position that you work so hard to define, right, but we can go even one step further and create content as well that is dedicated, its only purpose is to communicate that brand.
Elizabeth Earin: And when we do that we need to consider two types of communications and I think this is where a lot of times I think I have seen companies messed up here. Obviously we want the external communications, it’s very important what our customers are seeing how we are talking to them, what we are saying to them, and that’s important, but we also need to focus on the internal communications, and too often I think sometimes we forget our internal teams and this is where we have a huge opportunity because our internal teams are the ones, our internal communications are going to the people that are living our brand every single day, so we want to make sure that they are reflecting what we want them to.
Steve Robinson: Yeah. When was the last time you looked at your employee handbook and is that written in your brand voice? And you might think, well, why does that matter? And the answer is because that’s the tone and tenor you are setting with your team and that’s just as important as we get into do here after our break, that’s just as important as external, and the same thing is true is if you do launch an external branding effort and you have television ads or radio bits or you have banner advertising or whatever it is that you are trying to get that brand personality and that market position out there, if that is only projected externally then you are not bringing the team along for the ride and that makes it hard to maintain congruency. So, I think now is a great time for us to take a quick break and when we come back we’ll talk about how you live your brand from a Do standpoint, so we said – we talked about how you say your brand, when we come back we’ll talk about how you make sure that your actions are also in alignment.
Elizabeth Earin: Before we continue I’d like to take a quick moment to ask you Iterative Marketers a small but meaningful favor and ask that you give a few dollars to a charity that’s important to one of our own. This week’s charitable cause was sent in by Katharine Braunschweiger of Mueller Communications in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Katharine asks that you make a contribution to the Sojourner Family Peace Center, providing an array of support aimed at helping families affected by domestic violence. Learn more at familypeacecenter.org or visit the link in the show notes. If you would like to submit your cause for consideration for our next podcast please visit iterativemarketing.net/podcast and click the Share a Cause button. We love sharing causes that are important to you.
Steve Robinson: And we are back. So before the break we were talking about how do you say your brand or make sure that your content, your collateral all align and support the brand. Now, we are talking about how do you do, how do you live that brand. Elizabeth, what do you think is the most important component when we talk about living your brand?
Elizabeth Earin: Your team. Making sure that your team understands and your team is able to be guided by your brand is so important because again they are the ones that are coming in contact with your customers every single day and you have got collateral out there in market that is reinforcing your brand and has a clear brand message, and then your customers come in and interact with your employees, whether it’s on the phone or in person, and they are getting a different experience. It doesn’t matter what you are saying in market, people are going to remember what they have personally experienced, what they have felt, and so making sure team members are on board is vital.
Steve Robinson: Yeah and a lot of marketers, a lot of business owners will jump right to, well, okay, let me script this, let me script the actions that people need to take and let’s create processes and procedures that are all in line with our brand, but you have to go one step further, and I think the greatest example of this is there’s a story and if you Google I think Disney and lost giraffe story or something you will get this to come up, we will link to in the show notes, but there was an instance where a child had lost a stuffed giraffe at Disney World and one of the employees found it, and this was completely unscripted, this was not their process or procedure, but the employee went and took that little giraffe on its own adventure within Disney and took pictures of it along the way, and then when they figured out whose stuffed giraffe this was they put it in the room along with a little photo book of everywhere that giraffe had been throughout the day. Now you can expect that the parents of that child and that child are probably Disney Fans forever, because of this amazing over-the-top experience that by no means could you have a process or procedure for this. This was just how the employees understood to live the Disney brand.
Elizabeth Earin: I love this story, and for those of you watching us on video you get to see me tear up a little bit, because every time Steve tells me this or I hear this, for some reason the mom in me just, I am like, oh, they took care of them. So I think that’s a great example of where they have really engrained in their employees that this is what we stand for and this is what we deliver to our customers, and they have empowered them to make that decision on their own.
Steve Robinson: So while there is an angle of this that involves auditing your processes and your procedures and making sure that they aren’t incongruent with your brand and maybe adding a few here and there where it’s easy, I think more importantly than that it’s communicating those values and communicating the brand itself and what you stand for in the promises you make to the public inside the organization on a regular basis in order to get that across. How have you seen that best on, Elizabeth?
Elizabeth Earin: Once you have taken a look at your processes and procedures and made sure that those are in alignment, taking a look as you mentioned earlier the employee handbook and making sure that from that first touch point, even taking the step back, even that first job description that attracts that employee in, those are great ways to really make sure that people understand what it is that you stand for and attract the right people, and then from there its communicating it out to them. It’s reinforcing this in communications like your signage, your brand cards, you want to recognize the employees that are living the brand and get other employees involved in that recognition, and as I mentioned earlier the job description hiring to your values. I know that one of the things when I was out looking that attracted me to Brilliant Metrics was the job description. The first line just hooked me right away and I thought that is the company I want to work for. And so job postings are important. Your onboarding process, making sure that every step just like you would with your customers every step of interaction with your employees your brand is being reinforced, and when you do that you are showing them this is important to me, this is what we value, we want you to value it too and you are living your brand and they are going to live your brand in return.
Steve Robinson: A lot of what we talked about today has been reinforcing an existing brand, it’s been making sure that stuff is in alignment and a lot of it sounds an awful lot like brand management. How does this go beyond brand management?
Elizabeth Earin: That’s a great question. And to some extent what we were talking about is aligned with brand management, we are planning, we are auditing, we are aligning our current customer journey with our brand to make sure that it’s consistent along every single touch point, but where we start to see a difference in brand management and truly bringing our brand to life is when we start to create new touch points to communicate that brand, whether it be through media, whether it’s through experiences, or it’s through our content.
Steve Robinson: I think that you brought up a really great example of this. Was it Lays?
Elizabeth Earin: Oh, gosh! I love potato chips. Yes, the Lays do us a flavor. They had a problem, they were falling behind in the market and so they needed to come up with a way to get market share back up and get people talking about them and engage with their brand, and so they developed this ‘do us a flavor’ and I’m sure you have all heard of it, you have seen some of these flavors on the shelves and thought ‘oh, my gosh that sounds disgusting’ or ‘how have I lived my life without them’ and it makes you want to try it, even the gross ones, you just kind of want to know what it’s like, and so they put together this program that with a goal of building sales and increasing the emotional connection with the 18 to 34 demographic, and it worked, it led to brand awareness, their product ratings went up, the number of purchases went up, purchase intent went up, sales went up. I know I have personally gone and bought multiple bags because I wanted to test them. I haven’t actually gone and voted but I bought the bags and some are great and some not so much.
Steve Robinson: I think beyond that it also helps shift the perception or maybe better align the perception of Lays as more of the fun out there experimental type of brand and not your stagnant Ripple potato chip, so. I think it’s really important that you do those sorts of activities under certain circumstances. I mean at all times you should have some sort of media or experiences or something out there to communicate that brand and dedicated brand programming, but there are certain instances where it’s particularly important where that investment needs to be higher. The first one that comes to mind is if you are a new brand or if you are re-branding an existing brand.
Elizabeth Earin: Yeah, definitely, and it’s not just a new brand, you may have an established brand already. I had a client a few years back who had a very established brand and had realized that there was a submarket, they hadn’t realized that they could sell to, but it was very different in their target demographic. The product they were selling was well in the same type of product, had a very different use and so we went through an entire brand development for the subbrand of their core offering, and so that’s another great opportunity to really put this into place.
Steve Robinson: I think another example of where you need to put a little bit more behind your brand marketing is when you realize that there’s a problem and this usually comes from a discovery process, and we talked about the brand vector process last week, and I think that’s a great example of a discovery process you can use to help identify these issues, but sometimes you find out that how you picture yourself is not how the rest of the world pictures you. So, I’m sure we have all had those awakening moments personally, but the same thing can happen with your brand, and when that happens you have to make a choice because that incongruence will only cause you to create touch points that aren’t in alignment with your brand.
Elizabeth Earin: And there’s two ways that that can go. If what you are promising in your written communication doesn’t align with what everyone thinks about you, you can either change how you talk about yourself or you can change how you interact with the customer and that’s a decision that you’ll have to make internally and decide what is the right choice for your company.
Steve Robinson: Are you going to try to redefine who you are internally or are you going to try and drag the public over to the perception that you think they should have, right?
Elizabeth Earin: And like we talked about last week that the second is it’s hard to do it, it’s not possible but it is hard to do.
Steve Robinson: Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. I think the last example of where you need to make a more solid investment in brand programming is when you realize that you need to make a conscious shift in your brand, so this may be isn’t a traditional rebrand, right, but you need to pivot one component of your brand personality or your market position in order to remain competitive in the market, may be you are too close to another competitor and you become easily confused or maybe you recognize a new opportunity to compete in the markets, you want to emphasize some component of your brand personality or your market position that maybe was played down or never really saw the light of day in the past.
Elizabeth Earin: I think this is something that is starting to come up in the insurance industry a bit, as you have got this new group of millennials coming up in and starting to buy insurance and how we have always done business or how they have always done business isn’t necessarily working anymore, and so they have got to go in and quite a few insurance agencies are working on that re-branding and trying to figure out how can I continue to survive in a way that’s authentic to me but also resonates with my market.
Steve Robinson: I think in all cases though you want to make sure that you are doing this consistently, so it doesn’t do any good to be projecting something out through paid channels only to have your team not fulfilling that brand on the other side, right? So really it’s a matter of making sure that you are looking at every single touch point and making sure that to the best of your ability all of that is in alignment from the inside, from the outside and the messaging that you are creating, and the experiences you are creating, that everything supports that unified brand and then you are really set up for success.
Elizabeth Earin: All right, and I think that is a great point to wrap this up. Today we went over bringing your brand to life. Next week we are going to talk about persona research and where you can start to really dive in and start putting together those personas.
Steve Robinson: All right, thank everyone for making time for us this week. Until next week onward and upward.
If you haven’t already be sure to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube on your favorite podcast directory. If you want notes and links to resources discussed on the show sign up to get them emailed to you each week at iterativemarketing.net. There you’ll also find the Iterative Marketing blog and our community LinkedIn group where you can share ideas and ask questions of your fellow Iterative Marketers. You can also follow us on Twitter. Our user name is @iter8ive or email us at podcast@iterativemarketing.net.
The Iterative Marketing Podcast is a production of Brilliant Metrics, a consultancy helping brands and agencies rid the world of marketing waste. Our producer is Heather Ohlman with transcription assistance from Emily Bechtel. Our music is by SeaStock Audio, Music Production and Sound Design. You can check them out at seastockaudio.com. We will see you next week. Until then onward and upward!
Leave a Reply