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7 secrets of brands that sell

July 1st, 2010

Ever wonder why some brands just sell more easily than others? Why some brands are just more memorable than others? Why we like some brands more than others?

Consider the following seven secrets of successful brands, does this sound like your brand?

1. Compelling Story: Your buyers attach meaning to your brand because they truly understand your brand’s platform (i.e. the essence, promise, differentiators and proof points).

2. Reputation: You don’t settle for “me too”. Instead your brand is positioned on a reputation idea that reflects where your organization excels, how you’re different, special and relevant (i.e. innovation leader, fun leader, knowledge leader, are a few examples).

3. Core Values: Your brand is based on 3-5 core values which your organization unequivocally defends (even when it costs you more money).

4. Humanized: You don’t settle for a “vanilla” brand personality. Instead you’ve developed a unique personality for your brand which may be based a universally recognized brand archetype (ex. hero, rebel, powerbroker, creator, siren and others).

5. Owning Color: You’ve developed a color palette for your brand’s identity and consistently use 1 or 2 colors primarily (ex. Susan G. Komen’s pink, UPS’ brown, IBM’s blue).

6. Strong Stewardship: Your brand has clear brand standards (ex. Do’s and don’ts regarding your logo, colors and typography). And you’ve made your brand assets accessible to those who use them. Brand assets include digital files of logo, photos and graphics.

7. Living the Brand: Because a customer’s experience with a brand will cement their perceptions, you deliberately work to align employee’s attitudes, knowledge and behavior with the desired brand experience. You leverage, in this order, people, programs and “propaganda” (aka internal communications) to help everyone “live” the brand each day.


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Unforgettable Brand Positioning- The Four C’s

April 12th, 2009

If there’s one song to sum up what I want my clients’ brands to be, it would have to be “Unforgettable” made famous by Nat King Cole. It’s powerful, heart felt and of course unforgettable.

Yes, positioning a brand to be “unforgettable” is a tall order for anyone. And it’s no longer enough to simply throw a lot of money into the marketplace to “buy” awareness for a brand. Today’s consumer has become too savvy at blocking irrelevant marketing messages. So brands, more than ever, need to have relevant ideas behind them in order to establish and protect their positions in the marketplace.

What’s positioning strategy?

Positioning strategy is one of the greatest challenges clients face. It’s not because they don’t have great ideas, it’s usually because they cannot pick ONE overriding idea and commit to it.

Many call the positioning the proverbial “stake in the ground”. It’s how you intend for your target audience to see your product, service or cause relative to competing alternatives. Committing to a brand’s positioning strategy means having a focus. And by focusing, it means admitting that their branded product, service or cause is not intended for everyone. This can be scary because we fear leaving out a critical audience. But when we don’t stand for something, we end up standing for nothing. We end up being quite forgettable.

Where are you now?

I just moderated focus groups last week for an association client who is evaluating what to do with a newly acquired brand (another membership organization). I used a car metaphor question to get a quick thumbnail on how the participants perceived the client’s market position relative to competing organizations. If there’s one thing focus group participants always seem to know, its car brands (thank goodness!).

The car question goes like this, “If X organization were a car, what kind of car would it be and why?” This question ignited a fury of excitement for both the participants and the client. And the answers solidified for the client where their brands (old and new) really stood in the marketplace, what they really symbolized. It’s now the jumping off point for us to refine their brand’s position in the marketplace.

Evaluating your strategy- The Four C’s?

When forming (or evaluating) brand positioning strategies, I like to use the four C’s to help vet and eliminate the forgettable options. The four C’s are…
1. Clarity
2. Compelling
3. Credible
4. Contrasting

Clarity- Does the desired positioning strategy make sense to the audience? Is it singularly focused? Can they easily and accurately repeat back the main idea (or is it more like a game of “telephone” where the idea exponentially deteriorates as it passes through more and more hands?).

Compelling- Is the desired positioning strategy based on something your target audience actually cares about? Or is it based on something safe, vague or “me too”?

Credible- Does the positioning strategy come across as believable coming from your organization? Remember you can’t be all things to all people. Don’t give consumers yet another thing they can roll their eyes at.

Contrasting- Does the positioning strategy contrast you enough with your biggest competitor? Since consumers are not especially good about sorting out shades of gray, it’s very important to be as opposite of a competitor as possible. Being opposite should not stop with the positioning statement, it continues on with other brand decisions, such as brand personality, color palette and the desired brand experience.

Using the four C’s will help you challenge, narrow and brand’s unforgettable positioning strategy. And once you get the positioning strategy right, you’ll have a solid platform upon which to create that unforgettable marketing.

Listen to Nat King Cole’s “Unforgettable” for free.

About Pecanne Eby, MBA
With 20 years of marketing practitioner experience, Pecanne is an independent Marketing Consultant in Denver, CO. As the founder of Brand Mentoring, Pecanne teaches, guides and supports her clients in their efforts to leverage branding as a powerful differentiation strategy.


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Customer Pain is North Star in Down Economy. Find Out What You Don’t Know.

March 13th, 2009

I went to a networking lunch last week in downtown Denver, the mood was friendly and understandably a little down. As expected, conversations centered on things like spouses losing jobs, managers losing staff, and the unemployed losing their minds! Interestingly, there was also a new openness to changing how we do things, an air of, “let’s get back to basics.”

For those of us in marketing, now is a clear opportunity to “get back to basics” by realigning our marketing messages to better attack our audience’s real pain. It’s time to reexamine our target audiences’ pain to make sure we are truly TUNED IN to what is happening right now. Don’t assume your market research from one year ago still holds water. And if you don’t have market research from a year ago, don’t wait any longer.

It does not matter if you’re marketing for a private sector company, a nonprofit, a trade association, professional society or even the government, your message had better be crystallized around your audience’s primary pain, otherwise it won’t register as a priority during this down economy. People are looking for solutions from people (or brands) they know, like, trust AND who appear to “get it”.

How do we really understand our audience’s pain?

We only have to ask, with a detached heart, what their greatest challenges are and they will likely filibuster on it. Why? Because chances are they are probably spending a lot more time isolated and are happy to unburden themselves by talking about it.

My sales coach, Debbie Scott of Achievement Dynamics/Sandler Training (I call her the Queen of Pain, that’s a compliment) would call this discovery process: taking someone through the “pain funnel”. The pain funnel is part of a sales process developed by David Sandler. It’s about asking your audience a series of questions to allow them to discover the breadth and depth of their pain.

The pain funnel starts out with intellectual questions posed as if you were a nurturing doctor, like: tell me what’s happening, how long have you been experiencing X problem and what have you done to try to fix it? That’s the “warm up” before moving into more emotion provoking questions that uncover the financial and emotional impact of their problem (this is where the real pain comes out!).

From a market research perspective, I find the pain funnel a fascinating technique because it breaks down those intellectual walls and gets our audiences spilling their guts about all the things that are REALLY bothering them. This catharsis can provide invaluable insight to marketers as it brings us closer to messaging strategies that will really connect our audiences to our brands (as solutions!). Just like the best friend who listens intently to an anxious friend or the doctor with the good bedside manner.

Once you’ve got a handle on today’s pain (or the “pain inventory”), look at your overall brand promise and your promotional messages and see if there is opportunity to refine either of these to be more pain/solution oriented. People are hungry for answers to their pain right now, use this as your hook to get their attention. Your customer retention and new customer acquisition could be dependent on making this critical shift, and it may be now or never!

P.S. If you want to learn more about the “pain funnel” or high performance selling, Debbie Scott would be happy to invite you to a complimentary Executive Briefing (valued at $150), just send her an email at debbie@achievemoresales.com.


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