WORKBOOK SECOND EDITION
Designing Your Dream Brand
Copyright Š 1999-2014 by Brandgineering, Inc. http://www.brandgineering.org All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from Brandgineering, except for brief excerpts in reviews or analysis. Second Edition
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TABLE OF CONTENTS The Secret Sauce - Designing Your Dream Customer The Secret Sauce - The Three Keys to Effective Branding
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Communicating the Value Proposition #1 Attraction #2 Personality #3 Be Critical and #4 Compelling #5 The Customer #6 The Voluntary Purchase
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Designing Your Dream Brand An Introduction to the Brand.gineering Workbook Brand.Vision Dream Customers The Brand.Masterpeice Brand.Purpose Brand.Beliefs Brand.Focus S.W.O.T. Outcomes Brand.Values One-Year Outcomes Brand.Insanity Brand.Information Brand.Relationships Brand.Hooks Value Proposition
14 15 17 19 20 21 24 28 29 30 31 33 34 36 38 Brandgineering Workbook
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Introduction
The concept for t and this workbook was to provide our customers with a blueprint for their marketing decisions. We find many businesses and business owners confused by the large number of creative agencies selling marketing; however, many of those creative agencies are really selling web sites, graphics, video or something else masked as marketing. Marketing is a business, rather than a creative function. Hiring a creative to develop your marketing is a little like hiring a plumber to design and build your house, that plumber may have some great ideas; but, ultimately you wind up with a house made mostly of pipe. A plumber is rarely an architect. Therefore, we strongly encourage our customers, regardless of their strong desire for creative work to work with a brand architect to create their blueprint. A business can then use that blueprint as a guide for all its marketing decisions. The fact is, most creative is rarely the most cost-effective method of marketing. Old methods of SEO (search engine optimization) are rejected by Google. Having the wrong message structured in a manner that does not attract your target audience is wasted, even with the prettiest graphics or videos. What the large majority of business, especially small businesses, require is marketing done right rather than marketing done creatively. Most business fail because of a poor business strategies. This book helps you as a company or business identify your weaknesses and strengths as a business. We then help you create a powerful business that is marketable. Then, you can work with a firm like ours or give direction to your creatives as to what you need. In the Brand.gineering Workbook, we will shake up your corporate thinking and revolutionize your marketing approaches. You’ll be asked to forget the old, stale models learned in business school. You’ll no longer behave like corporate lemmings that dump huge sums of corporate resources into overblown advertising budgets for methods that perform poorly, do not get results nor contribute to your bottom line, just because everyone else does it. Well ask honest, tough questions and get you on track to meeting or exceeding your brand’s marketing goals, get your customers and entire team thinking on a new level and start moving you toward greater success. Oh, this book is short. If you want to read something with tons of fluff, go buy a novel. I assume you are smart by reading this book and I don’t need to regale you with my life story, when you need to get busy writing your own story. The workbook at the end of this book is the beginning of your blueprint for marketing success. The book is a preparation for the workbook. One client recently told me it was one of the most difficult exercises he had done in his business. It may be challenging for some, but will save you tons of cash in the short and long run; while leveraging the most effective marketing tool you have.
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The Secret Sauce - Part 1 Designing Your Dream Customer There is a reason we have attracted you to explore our philosophy of engineering powerful corporate or personal brands. We believe in the laws of the universe of attraction, apply those laws to building powerful brands. You may have heard some of the same principles applied to your personal lives in movies like The Secret or What the #$*! Do We (K)now?: Down the Rabbit Hole and in the teachings of success gurus like Tony Robbins or Dr. Wayne Dyer. We’ve created a formula that uses some of those same ideas combined with solid, proven foundational principles from many disciplines to create a system of brand engineering that just makes sense and works! The allusion, above, to us attracting customers or other elements to business is one of the most powerful thoughts we can have. We specifically look for and attract customers we want to our business and so can you. Ask yourself what kind of customers you want. Are they poor or wealthy? Do they ask smart questions, think like a winner or add value to your business? Who is your dream customer? I had a client that owned a chain of restaurants; his attitude toward customers illustrates my point about attracting the perfect customer, perfectly. Immediately inside the door the wait-staff exited before interacting with the customers was a sign that read: “Damn it, shut the f#%@ up, the customer is always right!” – I made it a point to eat at the establishment several times before having a meeting with the CEO. The food was good, but the service and attitude of the people serving me was horrible. He had trouble keeping good help and he couldn’t figure out why his customers did not return. He constantly fought for new business. I think the sign said it all. The kinds of customers he was “asking” to attract created many problems for that business. The “law of attraction” tells us that those things we focus on, with great intention, we will attract into our lives. Telling yourself or having an attitude as a business that “I have amazing clients that respect our work and our products, pay well and add value to our enterprise!” is something great for you to attract to your brand. Would it be possible for you think even bigger about what you want to attract to your brand? How about “We have clients that love our work, are powerfully amazing members of our team, are willing to pay the highest rates for the quality service and products we provide. Our clients sing our praises to everyone they know, those people that hear about us seek us out and the chain continues…”? How big can you think about the clients you are attracting to your brand? Brandgineering Workbook
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The Secret Sauce - Part 1 (continued) Designing Your Dream Customer One important piece of the puzzle is telling the world and universe what you want. The words you choose are vital. Expressing or focusing on what you don’t want will destroy your “ask.” Saying “I don’t want whiny and troublesome customers!” will actually attract what you don’t want: whiny and troublesome customers walking through the door. The mind only knows you are focusing on something and goes after it. And, amazingly most people spend more time focusing on what they don’t want in their business or from their customers than what they do want. After all, when you walk into your favorite restaurant and you order off the menu, do you tell the waiter all the things you don’t want or are you laser focused on what you want? If you can order your meal that way, you can order your life the same way - ask for what you want! So, the first part of our secret sauce is asking for your perfect customer and putting powerful positive emotion behind the statement. You are adding the concept of powerful positive emotion because adding that part will be like pouring jet fuel on your vision. Emotions are powerful additives to the formula when asking for what you want. Powerful emotions fuel your “ask” for anything, including your vision for your ideal customer. That’s the end of Part 1 of the Secret Sauce. Take the time to picture, in your mind’s eye that perfect customer walking in your door. Tell yourself with great intention and powerful positive emotion who that customer is and watch your business change!
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The Secret Sauce - Part 2 The Three Keys to Effective Branding We get the question a lot and there is plenty of confusion by creatives selling branding. Logos and graphics are called brand identity, your brand is the impression your brand leaves in the mind of your ideal customer. When you provide that amazing product or service and memorable experience to a customer, they talk. And, BINGO! You learned the second big lesson of branding. Regardless of what any ad agency says, they know that word-of-mouth and leveraged or managed word-of-mouth is the best form of advertising. However, the dirty little secret of advertising is that they make their money on creative services and they have little incentive to do anything else. You’ll hear this question often from us. If advertising is so effective, then why don’t advertising agencies advertise? Advertising agencies use leveraged word of mouth. Agencies all enter contests to win awards for their creative work and issue tons of press releases. Unfortunately, all the creative work gets them more work and leaves their customers wanting. The next three-part element to the Secret Sauce of Brand.gineering is rooted in deep human needs and emotions. A powerful brand is: Much more than what your product or service is. Features and benefits matter, but people rarely make a purchase purely on your features or benefits. Yes, what your product is, is important to you and ultimately, if you had no product or service you would have nothing to sell. However, there is little new or different under the sun and most of your competitors have similar things to sell. That is why many in the advertising and public relations business may tell you that you must differentiate your product or service, but… It is more than why your product is different. Some experts in the field of branding say this is the most important part of your branding. I disagree. It is high on the list, but there are other factors that weigh heavier. If there are two products on the shelf, a cola and orange soda, it is all the same product: colored, carbonated sugar water with flavor. The flavor and color make them different and thus give the customer a choice. In a crowded marketplace, it is important to be different, because there can only be one product in that market that is number one. And, in a crowded market it is almost impossible to spend enough to become number one over an existing, dominating brand. But, being different is important to your product when you have little else to separate you in a market that has many very similar products or services. What will really sell… Brandgineering Workbook
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The Secret Sauce - Part 2 (continued) The Three Keys to Effective Branding Your product must have an attraction and personality that is so critical and compelling to the customer that they voluntarily take money out of their pocket and spend it with you! In business this is commonly called the “value proposition”. The term is thrown around a lot, but it’s a hard thing for most people to define about their brand. I’m going to stop for just a moment and make you think about this concept, because a value proposition is such a common term that I will restate my definition: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is so 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. All except #6 are focused on the customer. If you meet his/her driving wants and needs listed in #1-4, the sale is a no-brainer. STOP! Before you go further, understand YOU have the ability to focus and control the customer with items #1-4 through various means that we teach to effect item #5. When you learn the powerful tools we teach and help you outline in our system and in the Brand.gineering Workbook, you will be on your way to building a powerful and profitable brand. The other thing I get asked all the time is “Where all your facts?” Okay, I’ll let you do the work and seek the answer yourself. Go look up the Direct Selling Association (www.dsa.org) and on their home page they list the statistics for sales each year. Normally, the figures hover around 70-80% of sales are based upon a relationship or perceived relationship between the company/product and the buyer. Think of it this way, your brand becomes a person with a personality that constructs a perceived relationship based on emotion and trust, they then have a easy path to purchase. Your next path in the sales funnel would be the ask for the business and managing any objections your customer has to pricing.
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Communicating the Value Proposition
In today’s highly competitive technology-based economy, communicating your value proposition to the masses on a local, regional, national or international level and getting the sale requires the effective use of communication tools. It’s no secret that businesses and individuals have been using tools like video on mass distribution web sites to attract attention. Brand.gineering combines the best techniques used in marketing, advertising, film production, linguistics, technology, neural pattern setting and a host of other disciplines to create or nurture a brand to be wildly successful with speed and agility. We created this blueprint to teach our clients the requirements for leveraging word-of-mouth using content like videos and customer targeting to attract more attention to their brand; providing immersive customer experiences using content-casting and relationship building experiences. However, many businesses find it difficult to stand out against the massive content competition. Generally their content was produced at a very low cost by a freelancer or producer that had little or no understanding of how to effectively create a video or media that would attract customers and/or leverage word-of-mouth using content or media to generate sales. While there are plenty of talented graphic artists, web designers and video producers out there, one fact remains: they have little intentional knowledge about the neural imagery and linguistic psychology behind the media they create. Many years ago a friend of mine was on a photographic tour of the Yosemite Valley. As the tour started her instamatic camera jammed – for those of you that have never used anything other than a digital camera, at one time we had cameras that used rolls of film to record an image – an older gentleman stepped up and helped her fix the camera, but not before the entire tour group had moved far ahead. The old gentleman continued on walking with her for several hours, guiding her through taking pictures of the beautiful Yosemite Valley. They eventually parted and she went to the 1-hour photo-developing store in the park to develop her pictures. She was amazed at the quality of her photos. Her little instamatic camera had never taken photos that good! Later on her trip, she went to one of the many gift shops at Yosemite and began to shop for large picture books, grabbed a large coffee table book featuring the grandeur of Yosemite, examined the back of the book and to her surprise the man that helped her take such amazing photos was pictured on the back of the book, Ansel Adams. I tell this story for one important reason – it was not her camera that took the pictures; she took the pictures with the help of an expert photographer. When the simplest tool is put in the hands of a master, you will likely get amazing results. I know this goes against what some well meaning “experts” tell you, but just having a video, even a poor video, can damage your brand. Will it work? Yes, you can produce low quality or low cost content and obtain some kind of result, but will it be the most effective and powerful result for your brand? The fact is, right now search engines are looking at the quality of the content on web sites and giving lower rankings for using poor quality elements and Brandgineering Workbook
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Communicating the Value Proposition (continued)
content. Faking out search engines with SEO trickery is being penalized. If you asked me the question one year ago, I would tell you that just littering the Internet or the market with mass amounts of content would work. However, current trends have search engines rewarding quality content with better rankings and filtering out the lower quality content; simply search Google Hummingbird and see what pops up. Just like the early days of radio or television, with a public starved for content, there was a lot of poor content produced to fill a void, but that has changed. Now, the gatekeepers are more watchful of the quality of content using indicators such as time viewed to help determine content quality. Quality does matter, BUT its more than quality and high quality media production – to achieve optimal results it is critical to integrate neural science, marketing, and all the other elements we spoke of earlier into the media to effect a desired outcome. One of my clients teaches me some really good techniques he has discovered over the years, by accident. He is one of the few people I know that uses direct mail for his small business on very targeted client. He is actually a very wealthy man, but he never waves it at his clients, that are usually in financial trouble. His mailings look horrible. They are intentionally photocopied, part of the words are cut off and it looks like it was done by an amateur, complete with occasional misspellings. However, he gets great results because the potential customer almost instantly trusts him because his mailing appears to be common and not from a huge, slick company. He also pays little old ladies to address the cards by hand. HOWEVER, the message is carefully targeted at his ideal customer. Will a video, advertisement or other media get you business? Yes, if it follows the rules you see in our other videos and in this book. It takes more than creating media; it must have a specific structure and level of content quality. We are not saying produce a feature film – what I am telling you now is that using the formula we have developed along with quality content, you will get great results. What I will also tell you is that most media producers don’t learn in school what we teach, yet we rely on those vendors to create content for our businesses. What we have done at Brand.gineering is combine the best and latest in the structure of film or media theory, media marketing, and psychological and neural sciences to provide a solid system that builds amazingly strong and powerful brands. Again, if you want a building designed, go to an architect not a carpenter; solid foundations are first designed with great intention and then built. This should make sense; building a world-class message and attracting your perfect customer should be done with great intention. The Brand.gineering Workbook portion of this book walks you through carefully crafting a brand; in the end that also includes choosing someone to engineer your brand message that can design and build the strongest foundation. 6
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Communicating the Value Proposition #1 Attraction When we discussed value proposition, we defined it as: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. We have our own terms for #1 and #2, which we define as Brand.Hooks or attraction and Brand. Personality. The first important part of the Brand.Hook is being unique. If you listen to music, there is a part of the song that is called the hook. It is very popular in Country and Pop music to take the song title from the hook. Several intentional things are done by music producers to create a musical “hook.” The first is being different and the same at the same time. Find me a duplicate of these musical artists: Elvis, Green Day, P!nk, The Who, Rush, 3OH!3, The Stray Cats, George Strait, Patty Paige, Andy Williams… …the fact is that the music industry does this with great intent. To build a music brand, the general rule is that you don’t duplicate the sound of an artist. While it has been done, it has not been done with great success. A big part of the Brand.Hook is the element or elements that set your product apart or differentiate it from the competition. If you have a local construction company and there are 20 other construction companies in your area, you have to set yourself apart and make yourself a lot different than the other companies, in the mind of your customers. As we described earlier, if you have a product like a cola competing against the cola that is #1 in the market will always be a struggle. However, if you develop a cherry cola, orange soda or root beer, your chances will always be better because you have the perception in the mind of your customers that you are different. However, you ALL are still selling colored, carbonated sugar-water. Perception is everything. The other part of the Brand.Hook is your message sticking in the mind of the customer. Let’s go back to the music illustration. When you listen to music, and you hear the hook you’ll notice several intentional things that are done by music producers. The hook is that part of a song that sticks in your head and even after the music stops you keeps tapping your foot. Its mental cocaine – it’s an addiction. After your customer stops engaging with your brand, you want that message about your brand stuck in their mind. The hook is about more than repetition, it is repetition that can’t be shaken. Remember, you want your Brand.Hook to illustrate what differentiates your brand and stick in the mind of your customer.
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Communicating the Value Proposition #2 Personality When we discussed the concept of value proposition we defined it as: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. The previous section explained that we use the best and latest in the structure of film or media theory, media marketing, and psychological and neural sciences to provide mental hooks. The next step in creating a powerful brand message? Brand.Personality! Most schools and even those in the field of business are very focused on the technical side of developing brands. One of the first things we often hear from a client wanting address branding in their business is that they want to design a logo. While a logo may be important, what is more important is the narrow view or myopia behind that question. The essentials of developing a brand are really buried deep in the psychology of human interaction. Customers want several things and they don’t really care about your logo. On a simple level, most people use their primal brain or what some people call the caveman brain. The caveman is defending himself against harm. If you are in hard sales, you are constantly working against the potential clients defenses or caveman brain. However, in today’s market people are usually seeking out your product on the Internet or in a store. So, you are already past breaking down the primal defenses; they already want your product or a product like yours. The majority of products are sold on a basis of human interaction, people want to feel good about our purchase and have a relationship with the person selling us the goods or with the store. Sure, people do purchase based on price, but only in certain market segments. The fact is, people want an amazing customer experience and relationship while getting a great deal. Yesterday, I walked into a local business – a small business – the owner was behind the counter. He wasn’t rude, but he certainly made no effort to show me his great products and he made no effort to build a relationship with me. He simply pointed to the choices available and took my order. What capped it off was the large sign behind him that said, “Closed Sunday, owner tired and needs a vacation!” Contrast that against another similar business I visited, one of the owners personally greeted me at the counter and immediately engaged me, wanting to know where I was from and immediately connected 8
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Communicating the Value Proposition (continued) #2 Personality my story to how she had moved to town from New York. She then moved on to making a connection about the product and understanding my personal likes and needs, all with the enthusiasm of a 5-yearold that had eaten an entire bowl of candy. I didn’t know her business was struggling – it was – and I didn’t care. It was all about me. And, her product was probably double the price of her competitor. But, the quality was amazing and what pushed me over the edge to make the purchase was not that her product was different or better than another business; it was that she cared. If people love you and your brand, you have a customer for life. Our system uses proven media development and creation techniques to build Brand.Relationships and if they don’t actually know you, they at least feel like they know you – and the feeling that they have had an authentic client interaction with your brand. In fact one of our systems actually allows interaction with a mass social media audience, but all the user to feel as if they are interacting one-on-one. Authentic customer interaction and relationship is probably the most important thing you can do to build your brand.
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Communicating the Value Proposition #3 Be Critical and #4 Compelling When we discuss the concept of value proposition we defined it as: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. Being both critical and compelling to your customer depends on the needs of that customer. One thing that is great about the Internet and current marketing trends is that many people come searching for your product or service – they don’t want or need your product until they search for it –. This is known as inbound marketing. The other side is the hard sell and usually comes from pop-up windows, billboards, or television commercials that are broadcast at midnight when you can’t sleep. Ya never knew you wanted it until then. Customers either want or need your product or they have a desire or forced requirement. If your customer comes looking to fill a critical need, you need to move them quickly to being compelled to purchase the item and if your customer has been compelled to come to you, you need to move them to the area of critical need. Both emotions must be filled. If your customer has a bad water heater and goes to the Internet searching for a plumber to supply their need to make a rapid replacement, your marketing effort must be directed to providing compelling reasons to use your service, through a system of brand engineering that includes managed word-of-mouth and communication that evokes feelings of appropriate trust in the time of critical need. However, if you are also a plumber that specializes in remodeling bathrooms in tight financial times, your efforts would be focused on an effort that establishes you as the local expert on cost effective bathroom remodels and channels them toward feelings of critical need to take the next steps to purchasing from you. Either of these is easily achieved by using a mix of media, communication techniques and a good sales funnel. Using the first example of a broken water heater, our team will have already established the plumber as a market leader through media; Internet, traditional media and the like (regardless of their actual status in the marketplace) and then when the customer searches the Internet, entry to the plumber’s portal will include a mix of media that builds trust in that plumber using embedded neural commands. However, our advanced methods normally require a team of experts constantly analyzing the videos or other media to understand customer-viewing habits to refine the efficacy of the media. Creating the emotional critical and compelling need are at the core of our approach, because engineering a brand requires managing the customer attraction and brand personality and evoking the appropriate emotional elements to move them toward a voluntary purchase. 10
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Communicating the Value Proposition #5 The Customer When we discuss the concept of value proposition, we defined it as: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. Communication to the customer over the last 50 years has changed as commercial advertising has evolved into more of an entertainment medium. Television commercials have become mini-movies to satisfy the creative urges of the commercial director or advertising creative director and less about selling products. Likewise, magazine articles have become an outlet for graphic artists to showcase their artwork and not benefit the brand or product. If advertising works so well, why don’t advertising agencies advertise? “If advertising agencies don’t believe in advertising, what do they believe in? What the advertising industry believes in is public relations. They bombard Advertising Age, Adweek, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today and other publications with press releases about their latest campaigns. And why the intense interest in winning advertising awards? Awards generate publicity and publicity generates clients. We looked through five consecutive issues of Advertising Age, and except for a few classified “help wanted” ads, there wasn’t a single advertisement from an advertising agency. “Do as I say, not as I do” seems to be the motto of the agency establishment. They sell advertising to others, but they don’t buy advertising for themselves.” Ad Agencies Should Take Their Own Advice AdAge.com - Al Ries Somewhere, in the equation, advertising forgot that it was about building relationships with the customer and evoking emotions to sell products. When large mega-stores began to dominate the landscape they cut out the salesman and the commissions they receive, in order to reduce costs. People that, at one time, were engaged by the relationship with their favorite butcher or tailor became less loyal as consumers and focused on price Brandgineering Workbook
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Communicating the Value Proposition (continued) #5 The Customer and convenience. When business declined at large corporate owned stores and as the department and mega-stores got lazy, they fell back on advertising – blankets of advertising or promotions in magazines, on billboards, radio and television were done to influence your purchase. They traded one low expense for another, higher expense. Somehow, when the small business saw this trend of mass advertising, and jumped on the bandwagon – it was easier to advertise and hire a low paid store clerk rather than build your brand and its relationship to the customer. I described in a previous section about the business that had a really offensive sign instructing workers as to their relationship to the customer and we also discussed the idea of your dream customer. Having an amazing business requires a nurturing of your relationship to your dream customer and fundamentally altering your communication to your customers. How you communicate your message to your customer is critical and that usually happens through your marketing materials and your customer service. Brand.gineering is a holistic system of building your business rapidly around managed communication about your brand and building authentic and magical relationships with your customers, through media and other interactions, that uses neural blueprint control and targeted linguistic pattern definitions.
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Communicating the Value Proposition #6 The Voluntary Purchase When we discuss the concept of value proposition, we defined it as: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. I have a close friend of mine that was educating me about effective sales closing techniques. For several hours he kept the conversation going about this or that thing that would need to be said if the customer said this or that in order to illicit a sale. Soon he sat back and in the middle of one of his breaths I interrupted. I think I startled him: “I don’t ever have to use any of that, almost every time I make a pitch I get the sale.” He almost dropped out of the chair. It is no longer required to manipulate your customer into a purchase when you can make them want it naturally. You see, when someone wants to buy your product because they have a relationship with you and you have hooked them with a powerful, critical and compelling reason to purchase, the response is almost, “Where do I sign?” Sure, will there be an objection to price or financing. - Yes, questions about pricing is about the only question I get, but even the least skilled salesman or woman can deal with that. And since I have price points that work for almost everyone the sale is easy. A short time ago I was pitching a client and he picked up the proposal and started looking through the million dollar numbers. I stopped him. “The question is simple Bill, you know me and the numbers are solid; either you like our pitch or not, the numbers are a formality.” He laughed out loud and threw the pitch on the table and told me I was right. Even the big players make their decisions on emotions and relationships. This is where the secret sauce we discussed earlier starts to work – by the time we get to step #5 there is very little to be done. Using media to accomplish steps #1-4 requires a bit of practice and skill; it’s so absolutely different for each brand, product or service. It requires analysis of your business, the marketplace, your goals and desired outcomes by an expert in Brand.gineering. Ultimately, building your brand is about effectively managing your brand and taking advantage of all the opportunities available to you. And, in this electronic age of promoting yourself, that means managing your message. Branding is, in fact, effectively managing the word-of-mouth or message about your product or service. Taking that to the next level; engineering your brand to a magical, powerful level requires a focused, intentional effort with the proper team members. Brand.gineering is about getting the optimum return on your marketing investment and spring-boarding your brand light-years ahead of the competition. Brand.gineering drives you to the top, building authentic relationships with your customers, in person and on-line – and having them in line, begging you to take their money. Brandgineering Workbook
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Designing Your Dream Brand An Introduction to the Brand.gineering Workbook In Brand.gineering we have developed a system that starts you on a trajectory for developing a powerful, magical and amazing brand. We take you through: 1. creating a compelling vision for your brand, 2. designing your most impactful outcomes, 3. creating a magical purpose, 4. understanding the beliefs you hold about your brand, 5. how to have the proper elements of focus, brand values, effective habits and then, 6. moving on to creating what we call your “brand insanity” – manifesting your dream customer, Brand.Hooks, Brand Relationships and being on your way to having a value proposition and basis for the next step in having a brand, product or service that could dominate its market. We normally have two groups of people that come to us. First, those people that want solutions to a brand or business that is struggling. Most people deal with things from a perspective of pain versus no pain. As long as there is little or no pain in life, they make no changes. However, once there is a change in life that creates pain they want to be back to a place of no pain. That person calls a creative agency asking for a new brochure or video hoping that will solve their business pain. That seems foolish, but about 90% of the people live in that space with their business. They have little interest in change to make their business amazing, they just want to take a pill from the marketing doctor to alleviate the pain. These people, when introduced to the basics of our system and ask them to complete our Brand Vision Analysis and they usually walk away, because we ask some really hard questions and the questions are too hard or painful to answer. The next group, regardless of where they are on the bell curve of success, want an amazing – a powerful – a magical business and brand. Those are the people that understand the foundation of what we do and how powerful it is and they take the time to work with us to engineer their brand. Are the questions sometimes still challenging? Yes. Then we are a phone call or email away. The nuts and bolts of what we do are unique to each business or brand. Just filling out the Brand.ginnering Workbook will make you think and improve your approach to your business.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Vision What is your vision for your brand? Where are you going and what kind of business do you want to attract to your brand? I understand its common to ask this kind of question about a brand or your business, but I am going to ask you to do some unique things. 1) In the area below, start out by doing the counterintuitive thing, tell yourself what you don’t want. What are the things you don’t want – debt, bad employees, unsold product, or other things that are important to you.
Now, write down what is it about those things that hurt so much? Dig down and feel the pain and the twisting in your gut that happens each time those things your don’t want occur. Do you yell and scream? Do you complain to your wife or husband about what happened today for hours and hours? Write down the feelings and emotions underlying your hurts.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Vision 2) In next section use the items you wrote down above and turn them around. Instead of talking about all the debt, talk about the abundance you have and do it in the present tense. It should read something like this “I have vast abundance of cash flow and profit for my business or brand and every day I generate the income to cover the cost to the vendors that make my business powerfully successful.” – Using words or phrases like “I don’t have debt and I can pay my bills.”, lead you down the path of actually focusing on debt or what you don’t want and what you don’t want actually is manifest in your life or business. Using the form below, match each disempowering statement you wrote in section #1 above with empowering visions in the section below. As you write the second section, feel the power behind those statements. This exercise has two benefits, you become conscious of words and messages – the messages you send to yourself and ultimately those same beliefs actually become transmitted to your customers – those message come out through your pores and are felt or seen by everyone. The same about the second section, but in reverse, you will become even more conscious about your empowering beliefs about your business and your brand.
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Designing Your Dream Brand Dream Customers How do I get my dream customers? What kind of customers do you want for your business? Any customers? Paying customers? Any paying Customers? Your business is dying on the vine and you’ll take whatever you can get customers? What kind of customers do you want? Customers that help you fulfill your dreams? Customers that pay before the job starts and appreciate your work? Repeat customers that love you and your work? In this exercise you will be outlining your vision for your dream customer. Immediately, when we discussed the first portion of our “Secret Sauce” we discussed defining your “Dream Customers” What does your dream customer look like? What do they look like when they walk through the door? What are they wearing? How do they treat you? How do they pay you? How much do they pay you? Do they spread the word about your business? Next, what are your emotions tied to your beliefs about your dream customer? Just like in our other exercises, focus on those powerful and positive beliefs about your customers. Instead of talking about all the rude or cheap. customers that come in your door, talk about how well they treat you and how well they pay. It should read something like this “I have amazing customers that love our work and treat our staff with respect and professionalism.” – Using words or phrases like “My customers are not rude.” or “My customers don’t behave like cheap bastards.”, lead you down the path of actually focusing on what you don’t want. Focusing on the kind of customers you don’t want actually attracts those kinds of customers to your business. Bottom line focus on what you want, design your amazing dream customer with positive emotions and intent. You have the bottom of this page and the entire next page to design and describe your dream customer(s).
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Dream Customers
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Designing Your Dream Brand The Brand.Masterpeice It’s rather common for a business to talk about goals or a vision statement. Goals or visions are what we talk about when we think about what we want to happen in the future. A goal is about a wish, it’s not real, its something to shoot for. When we think about a goal it is almost like holding a carrot out there that you can never reach. When we talk about a masterpeice we talk about something amazing that already happened and when we write, discuss or think about our Brand.Masterpeice, we use language as if it already has occurred. Within this exercise create something great or can you see in your mind as a finished masterpiece. Think on that for a moment, because the next part of the exercise is to be able to see your life and brand as a masterpiece five or ten years in the future, as if it is a finished masterpiece, today.mFirst think about what you want to change, grow, or improve about your brand and put that in terms as if that has already happened, and with language that is energetic and powerful. Speak about your vision about your company or brand in amazing terms, from your gut. See and feel your brand as it is in 2014 in terms that energize you. In fact, stand up for this exercise and feel that power and energy now, see it with great intensity and emotion. This tool alone is transformational and powerful. Be present every day, feel and act as your Brand.Masterpeice has already manifested itself. – Do you jump out of bed every day and perform as that great CEO with a powerful brand or as the struggling brand or start up brand. NO! You act and perform every action, every thought, every moment as the powerful company and brand is if it is happening now. So, do it now. Take the area below and start writing now. Begin your Brand.Masterpeice transformation today!
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Purpose The previous section discusses your Brand.Masterpiece. Now, we want to take this one step further and now dig deep down about who your brand is to your customer – what is the purpose of your company, product, or brand? In The Secret Sauce - Part 1 Designing Your Dream Customer section we talked about your dream customer, and designing your dream customer. This exercise takes you even further because you are going to write down why your brand is here on the planet. What great thing is it here to do? Step up now and use that same powerful language we did in the last exercise. What is your brand here to do in powerful and amazing ways? You know your brand has a purpose, an amazing and powerful purpose – its time to own it and embrace it with great intention. Again, another tip that will transform your business – with great consciousness, approach every business interaction with absolute focus and intention. Get that word intention solid in your vocabulary. Have you designed your purpose for every customer interaction, before it starts? Think about that and act on it, now! Write your Brand.Purpose in the space below with absolute focus, set your positive intention and design a magical purpose for your brand today!
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Beliefs This section is about your beliefs about your brand. This section is critical in helping us to have a baseline about where you are today, in your business. These questions are a great help in examining your brand or business. Be absolutely honest about where you are and how you see things today. Regardless, of if you are a start-up or a well-established company, it’s a valuable exercise. The first set of ten questions below are about your top beliefs surrounding your brand; they are those things that you know with 100% certainty are true. Write down the ten beliefs that drive your decisions you make about your brand. When you advertise or purchase equipment, these beliefs govern your actions. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Beliefs Next we are drilling down further. Write in your workbook the top 10 positive beliefs you have about your brand. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Beliefs The final questions are the top 10 negative beliefs that you have about your brand. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
Understand, all of these questions actually govern your day-to-day actions when making your decisions and furthering or hindering the growth of your business. Take the time to thoughtfully answer all 30 questions. Push as hard as you can to get all 10 for each category, in one stream of consciousness and don’t hold anything back, be totally honest. Brandgineering Workbook
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Focus You may have already heard of the concept of towards and away – the fact that you attract or move towards the things that you focus on in life. You may have seen movies like The Secret, that talk about the laws of attraction, what you think and focus on you attract. In the workbook write down the top 5 things you want to focus on for your brand – talk about the things your you want more of for your company or your brand. 1.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Focus Next, write down in your workbook the top 5 things you want less of for your brand, those things that are bugging you and that you want to move away from.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Focus Now, this is the kicker. Unless you reframe those last five, you are going to keep attracting those negative things. So, in the last part of the exercise reframe those things to postitive versions. If you say that “Our company attracts low paying customers that treat us poorly.” You are going to reframe that to: “Our company attracts the most amazing, high paying customers that respect our work.” 1.
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The last part of this exercise is going back to all five negative items of focus and put a big “X” through each one.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Focus Understand the power of Brand.Focus – to move to what you want, you must eliminate those areas of negative focus and reframe those to positive, powerful statements. Now, the last part of this exercise is to revisit the first five positive statements and re-write those elements of focus with language that has great power and intention. 1.
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You now have ten statements of Brand.Focus for your business for attracting what you want!
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Designing Your Dream Brand S.W.O.T. This is a common analysis of a business, it’s called a SWOT analysis and helps you further establish some baseline information. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. There is ample room in the workbook to make notes and make an honest assessment. Look at your brand and‌ Just like an analysis for a company, this analysis is specific to your brand. 1) Describe the Strengths of your brand.
2) Describe the Weaknesses of your brand.
3) Describe the Opportunities for your brand.
4) Describe the Threats to your brand.
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Values We discussed the effectiveness of traditional advertising in a previous section, in discussing your Brand.Values in your workbook, look at your current situation and practices. Describe your company internally and the culture. Are there internal reasons why you use certain methods of advertising or marketing? Does Madge, your advertising buyer get a big lunch from the radio station every month? Is it just habit? Maybe your current methods work just fine. Be honest.
Now write down the things you would never do in your advertising or marketing. Is there something you find objectionable? Maybe you had a bad experience with radio or television. Again, be honest. Now, what are the things you could never be without? Do you mail a printed catalog out to your customers? Maybe you have an internal group of trusted in-bound sales reps. What works for you? Fact is, some industries have specific things that work well for that industry. However, some companies may have tried one technique, but because of poor execution by a vendor, they stopped using that method which properly implemented may add significant value and increase sales.
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Designing Your Dream Brand One-Year Masterpeice In an earlier chapter/video we discussed the concept of a masterpiece versus goals; how when we speak of goals that places them in the future. In fact, it’s common to speak about trying to do something. Trying is giving yourself the opportunity of failure with honor. “Well, I tried to succeed.” Trying is not winning! Doing is winning! And, as Yoda says, “Do or do not, there is no try.” In this section of your workbook we are looking at the short-term outcomes for the next year, the things that you will have accomplished for your brand in the next year. What will that masterpiece look like? These are things actionable right now, written as if it already has occurred. Right now, write in your workbook and make that list of items will be completed in the next twelve months.
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Insanity Success is about having an audacious, huge vision for your masterpiece. Some of us have vision and then some of us have insanely wild vision. This exercise is about designing an insanely huge masterpiece that is your brand and your business. I didn’t say anything about obstacles you think are there. Think about the visionaries or achievers out there like Thomas Edison or Steve Jobs, athletes like Michael Phelps, actors like Oprah Winfrey, authors such as Tony Robbins or Tim Ferris, or business leaders such as Donald Trump that were slapped around or went through difficult circumstances and still achieved insanely huge outcomes. ...And, they went through huge trials. One of my clients was one of the top moto-cross riders in the world. His knees were gone, shredded by a life of extreme sports. He had braces on both his knees for life. But, he wouldn’t have had it any other way. On any given day, when he got out on the course he had probably fallen more than any other rider. His body was ravaged by fall after fall, but he was the best because he fell. Each time his bike flipped over, he healed, got up and did it again. Being at the top of his game required falling as part of the process. To him, that fall was not a failure, but a lesson on what to do to be great. – Greatness involves stretching yourself and taking some amazingly huge falls. If you are still back in your neighborhood, on a tricycle or with the training wheels on your bike, you won’t be the greatest you can be. Insanity about your business and your brand means going out on the edge and taking some huge risks and huge spills, getting bloody, learning and getting back up. Don’t let the idea of taking a huge spill hold you back; it should excite you. When you are flying through the air and then hit the ground with a spectacular fall like you would see on ESPN Sports Center, dust yourself off and learn from the experience. Are you holding yourself back? Are you poking your business with a stick. Get the training wheels off. Stop holding back and design some world-class outcomes for your business.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Insanity This part of the exercise in your Brand.gineering workbook is about brand insanity – what are those huge, insane things you want for your brand? If there were a genie standing in front of you offering three wishes for your company or brand, what would those be and write that in your workbook?
Then, after that, write down in your workbook what is holding you back from having your insanely wild goals?
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Information We discussed earlier about critical elements such as differentiating your brand and value proposition. However, first you need to outline the basics and build on those basics. We consistently teach that brand information is the least important part of the secret sauce behind marketing your brand, but it is important. Many times the brand information is those basics about your brand that you would put on a sell sheet. Some people call that information features and benefits about the product or service. In your workbook begin this exercise by outlining what your brand is or does for the customer. It’s critical to the process to place yourself into the shoes of that dream customer we discussed at the beginning of the process, write these from the perspective of your dream customer. One of the big mistakes businesses make is to sell to customers from the perspective of the company and not the customer. This isn’t about you. People are insanely self-centered; they want to know what the product will do for them. So, clear your mind, shut up and become your dream customer. Again, write down the information about your brand from the perspective of your ideal customer. If you are just designing your brand right now, this is the perfect time for you to start writing your design documents with the dream features of your ideal customer. However, visionaries also see the future, so if your niche includes innovative products or service, list those items too.
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Relationships We emphasize the concept of Brand.Relationships and repeat the importance of relationships because 70-80% of products are sold based on relationships or a perceived relationship. Not everyone has the luxury of direct and personal contact with the customer. That is why we talk about the importance of a perceived relationship; because the reality is that almost all customer relationships are perceived relationships. Rarely, will you have your customers over to your house for dinner and the saleperson at Nordstrom’s or Macy’s probably will not remember your name, unless it is on your credit card. However, your vast customer database must feel as though they have an authentic relationship with your brand. In this workbook we ask two sets of questions. First outline the things you are doing now to build or maintain your relationships with your customers. If you are still designing your brand, discuss the things you would do to build relationships with your customers. The second section asks you to describe what kinds things you would be doing with your dream customer to build relationships and attract those customers. We are going to stress the importance of your relationships with your customers. Regardless of the method you use to interact authenticially with your customer, be it Facebook, Twitter or in-person, take the time to think about these two big questions and commit them to paper. 1) Outline the things you are doing now to build or maintain your relationships with your customers or the things you would would do, if you are still in the process of designing your brand.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Relationships 2) Describe what kinds things you would be doing with your dream customer to build relationships and attract those customers.
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Designing Your Dream Brand Brand.Hooks Remeber when we discussed the value of Brand.Hooks or those things that stick in the mind of your customer long after they interact with your brand? What are your hooks? Are they it stellar customer service (or not) or a product or service that went above and beyond the customer’s expectations? Think of that song that stuck in your head, “that song” you’ve heard that just plays itself over and over and over in your mind. You want that same kind of thing to happen with your customer when it comes to your brand. Music is a powerful tool for psychology and a great marketing tool, as well. In psychology, many times a therapist will connect a positive emotion to a favorite song and ask their patient to listen to that song to evoke specific feelings. Hey, you probably even remember the song that played when you had your first dance with that special someone. In this exercise in the Brand.gineering workbook, your assignment is to write down those things you want your dream customer to feel and keep with them after they interact with your brand. What is that one message that sticks with them? Put that down.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Brand.Hooks Next, write down those things that make your product different from others in the marketplace. What meaningful things set your brand apart? Keep your dream customer stuck in your mind. Picture that person as you write your Brand.Hooks and feel the same emotions and thoughts you want them to feel and remember when interacting with your brand. Get started now!
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Designing Your Dream Brand Value Proposition Why should your customers want to take money out of their pocket to purchase your product? Why should they care about your brand enough to make a purchase? Your product must have an attraction and personality that is so critical and compelling to the customer that they voluntarily take money out of their pocket and spend it with you! Business calls this value proposition. The term is thrown around a lot, but it’s a hard thing to define. I’m going to stop for just a moment and make you think, because a value proposition is such a common term that I will restate my definition: Your product or service MUST have 1) attraction and 2) personality that is 3) critical and 4) compelling to 5) the customer that they voluntarily take their money out of their pocket and spend it with you. In this exercise in the Brand.gineering workbook that is available for free on our web site, I recommend that you take the time to prepare for writing each element in the value proposition. Take the appropriate time to complete what is likely one of the most important parts of honing the message about your brand. Do this with great focus and intention. Review your notes for each of these points: 1. The “Brand.Hooks” section of your workbook that define the attraction of your brand along with the elements of your “Brand.Personality” 2. What makes your brand critical and compelling from the perspective of your dream customer? 3. Finally, give your dream customer an extremely compelling reason to take the money out of their pocket and spend it with you. We really like the “So what?” questions. Be hard on yourself and ask “So, what? Why should I care about that statement.” I have many a company CEO sit across the table from me and when I say “So what?” they almost explode from frustration. BUT, the fact is, you need to ask this question about your brand, because if you don’t ask it, your customer will. Take time to do this exercise carefully, its some of the most valuable time you will spend when it comes to designing your dream brand. When this exercise is done, you have the core information that will help you build your dream brand and take you on your trajectory to amazing brand success.
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Designing Your Dream Brand (continued) Value Proposition Review the previous sections on Value Prosition and complete the exercise.
1) Describe the attraction of your brand:
2) Describe the personality of your brand:
3) Describe why your brand is critical to your dream customer:
4) Describe why your brand is compelling to your dream customer:
5) Finally, based on #1-4, describe to your dream customer why would voluntarily make a purchase. Remember to use the “so what� question.
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Conclusion
Exercise gets the blood pumping and invigorates the body, mind and spirit. Exercise actually breaks down the muscles so the body can rebuild and they can become stronger. The exercises in this book is intended to help you break down your business or brand and make it stronger as you intentionally set your mind one greater, amazing things for the future of your business. What are the next steps? At minimum, you need to review and implement the lessons learned. However, our intention behind this document was originally for our customers to be able to effectively articulate to our staff a “Level 10� message about their brand, so we can most effectively provide the services required to help them build their business. If you have any questions please contact us or visit the blogs and message boards on our web site. Sure, most people would love to sell you something; after all we all have to turn a profit. However, we are more than happy to talk to you and provide a free consult or just make another friend. Happy Brand.gineering!
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