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Own Your Brand!

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Stop Hiding What Makes You Great

Is 2018 the year you step forward and present your authentic self to the world?

Do you want clients that are a better match? Customers that appreciate you? Vendors that “get” what is important to you?

Volunteer and non-profit opportunities that “click” with your values?

In my new book, Own Your Brand I explain how to use the popular LinkedIn service to present yourself and your abilities to a worldwide audience of 467 million people, following a proven step-by-step method.

The book guides you through a process that uncovers your abilities and capabilities, and helps you define yourself through specific techniques and numerous examples, just as dozens of my clients have done in the past several years.

You can buy it on Amazon (or get the Kindle version).

Barnes & Noble also has it. And 800-CEO-READ provides the book with volume discounts.

And my old friends at Powell’s Books in Portland, Oregon are stocking it too.

What They’re Saying About Own Your Brand:

I have found that David Billstrom’s wise counsel goes to the soul of meaningful living.  He is a gifted consigliere in the very best sense of providing strategic insight, tactical acumen and prescient context in the adventure of finding your authentic self.

David has the extraordinary ability to help executives and leaders learn powerful business and life lessons from others’ experience — as if we ourselves went through their journey.  In this book, he’s put the skills and insights down on paper, and we’re the winners.

– Reuven Carlyle Washington State Senator, Business Strategist

Learn more about my books on my website.

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is…

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One of my clients recently clued me in to what I believe is one of the secrets of increasing sales, social media marketing, and brand promotion.  Yep, all in one tidy package.

Most of us know from Malcom Galdwell, Seth Godin, and other erudite observers of the human condition that word-of-mouth is one of the most effective methods of promoting a business or product ever imagined.

And most of realize that that the power of social media, applied to commerce, transforms geographic distance and can even restore an “Olde Time” sense of community.  Angie’s List has acquired more gravitas, more impact than the Better Business Bureau (remember them?).  And as generations can attest, the vendor your distant cousin used, is the one you will use, if you have no other input on the matter.

So how does this matter to entrepreneurs? gift

Your customers are your ambassadors. The statistics are obvious: celebrities and athlete role models can absolutely drive brand and sales.  But when you can’t afford these famous people, there’s nothing better than a paying customer.

So why would a paying customer even bother to Like you on Facebook (or join your Network on Linkedin, for the business-to-business set)?  Why would they help you sell your next widget (or sign your next deal)?

The cruel answer is that they won’t.

(Coke and other established brands just can’t seem to understand this, despite research that proves their customer social media chatter doesn’t help them).

They’ve already purchased.  They’ve already had their needs met.  You’ve satisfied your part of the vendor-customer relationship.  They’re done.

Anything after this… is a favor.  Frankly, if you ask, you’ll owe them.  (dirty little secret: it’s the asking that implies the favor… even if they don’t follow through, you’ll owe them.  Ugh.)

And that’s after you have convinced them that you’re worthy.  And then pushed them to take action… on the favor you’ve asked them to do.  And risk annoying them.

 

But:  there’s another way.

It’s called gratitude, and it is universal.  And it’s worked for centuries… despite the more “recent” research that helps defend this essential human emotion.  You may find yesterday’s fascinating article in the New York Times illuminating: it describes the Professor Adam Grant and his research on empathy and the gift of giving.

How does this work?

Coupon ImageMy client, struggling to promote his awesome but expensive products, realized that he can increase sales, promote his brand, and reward his customers by a simple concept: he invites his presumably happy customers to personally convey to their specially-chosen friends… a substantial and significant discount with a special coupon.

And he doesn’t discount.  Ever.  He owns a luxury brand, and there is absolutely no point in discounting, ever.  Well, never is a long time, but I can tell you I can’t remember the last time I saw BMW or Patagonia discounting.  Yes, retailers offer Patagonia on discount (picked up a tasty sweater a few months ago) but I and everyone else attribute that kind of discounting to the retailer, not the brand.  The Patagonia and BMW brands are definitely not discount.

But you can get one of his products on deep, deep discount… if you know someone.  Like a dear friend.  Who already bought.  A happy customer.  That’s the only way.

 

And there is the genius.  Rather than the vendor being magnanimous and generous… he empowers the customer to be generous.

The customer is the hero, not the brand.  The customer gives the gift, not the company.  The reward for buying… is to be able to give.

And the customer thinks carefully (only one coupon is provided) about who is the worthy recipient…

Which:

  • Increases the likelihood the coupon will actually be used, i.e. gets another sale
  • Rewards the customer’s initiative to buy in the first place
  • Reinforces the customer’s buy decision with special recognition, now they are the member of a club
  • Supercharges the Word-of-Mouth, with a call to action (coupon expires soon)
  • Expands the network (both giver and recipient emails are captured; coupons are uniquely numbered)

The recipient receives this gift from a friend, from an intimate.  This gives the coupon itself a kind of gravitas that far out-weighs the endorsement provided by a celebrity, a review service such as Angie’s List, or even a product review by a branded media outlet.  And it is far, far beyond a mere Facebook “Like”.

Ultimately this is about broadening the customer base, spreading good will.  It isn’t about discounting.  In fact, I recommend against providing current customers discounts (how exactly would that be a good idea?).

And broadening the customer base with positive interaction is how you build a great brand.

This method works for products or services.  And especially well for any differentiated offering.  Seth Godin in Purple Cow goes farther and says that the product or service must be remarkable, a purple cow in a sea of brown cows.  And that it can’t be “painted purple after the fact” – it has to be inherently and authentically unique.  And that this will drive explosive Word-of-Mouth.

ducati monsterIf you offer unusual quality for your market segment or geography (e.g. custom home building, top-tier outdoor apparel, a tree-trimming service staffed by botanists), or if your offering is relatively expensive (e.g. BMW automobiles, yachts), or if your customers are highly selective because of the nature of your offering (e.g. hair stylists, massage therapists, highly-ranked legal counsel) you will benefit from this method to broaden your customer base and deepen your relationship with your customers.  I’ve seen it work.

 

Help your customers give you to your next customer.  And be sure to thank them.

 

Further research:

Profile Your Customer

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I first was taught to use a “customer profile” in 1993, as an entrepreneur attempting to delight CD-ROM users with high-quality content.  It was invaluable, as I’ll explain…

The exercise then was to create a group, a series if you will, of customer profiles that included demographics, psychographics, and even a “face” (clipped from a magazine) to make the profile more “real”… a methodology one of our advisers brought from Microsoft.

We found the technique invaluable, because it provided a shared vocabulary for the factors that would affect the customer’s experience of our CD-ROM.  In fact, just following the methodology itself was a way of focusing on the customer’s experience, rather than the product in and of itself.

This had the effect of reducing the internal conflict in the organization as our staff debated “what the customer really wants” — as opposed to the old “I” statements.  “Well I think it will be much more compelling if it was in green instead of blue” became “I wonder if Molly (name of one of the customer profiles) would find that compelling?”

So it shouldn’t be any surprise that my friend Jim Ewel, also from Microsoft, reminds us this month of the modern methodology for this (19 years later) with a far better name… the “Persona”…

I advise that you click through to his discussion here, which is in terms and process used in Agile Marketing.

Big Data for Small Businesses

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Two stories are provided in the November Inc magazine with “big data” and “analytics” used in small/medium-sized businesses at a cost of $1,000/mo and $50/yr respectively.

Starting to look like Moore’s Law applied to software-as-a-service, driving the cost down and the value up!

But regardless of price, the wisdom of building analytics into your business is spot-on. Consumer, or B2B, you need to be collecting data, running experiments, and looking at the results. At a minimum you can increase revenue, and possibly margin.

It is an old (and wise) insight that it is more efficient to sell to an existing customer than it is to recruit a new customer; analytics is the strategy that informs the tactics of doing exactly that.

It is also best when it is more of a lifestyle, than a diet. In other words, don’t look at this as a project (or series of projects)… it should be a core function of your business: collect data, innovate, measure.

Why Big Data Matters

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Recommended reading for all entrepreneurs… is this article on Big Data from the Harvard Business Review while most startups in the early stages don’t have ANY data to analyze, let alone enough data that you could call it “big data” and derive any meaningful insight from it…

It won’t be long before many “startups” have data stores filled with information (if you choose to collect it, even 500 customers will provide you with rich data)…

and analyzing that information, deriving insights from it, and acting on it (a three-pronged skill set that few people have… thus the article’s focus on how to find Data Scientists) will be ESSENTIAL.

I’m not talking about being competitive here, I’m talking about survival.

One retailer assumed from their extensive hands-on experience, that service person turnover was a key metric… that would determine customer satisfaction. Makes sense intuitively, eh? You want great service/counter staff, and you want them to stay.

Once they truly questioned their assumptions, re-ran their analysis and plumbed their sales per store… they determined service staff was irrelevant. Store manager turnover, however, absolutely determined if the location was profitable or not.

I’m sure my clients can relate, even though some of them have “smaller” businesses right now. Read and heed!

Doctor Heal Thyself

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I love that Norm Brodsky, long-time columnist and startup expert for Inc magazine… turned his formidable skills on himself, to diagnose the need for experiments and metrics in his own startup, the recently launched Kobeyaki.

Read this to get a taste of why (and how) they measured their new restaurant in order to establish profitability… and next they will experiment with location, in preparation for expansion.

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