The Organicism of Small Business Branding

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Organicism is a philosophical orientation that asserts that reality is best understood as an organic whole. So, now you know I know how to use Wikipedia, but the word Organicism has such a true ring to it for the small business. Small businesses do have brands, can take full advantage of branding, but not like BigCo. A big brand can create the impact it’s after with slick ads, spokesperson celebrities and decals on NASCAR winners.

A small businesses brand is almost always experienced more organically through stories, surprises, flourishes, people and processes. It’s much more than a logo, product package, colors, and tagline. Everything the small business does is a part of who they are and that’s about as close to defining branding for the small business and you’ll get. In fact, my definition for small business branding is: the act of becoming more knowable, likable, and trustable.

I had the pleasure of visiting with Sarah Endline, CEO and founder of Sweetriot, a New York based maker of dark chocolate. Sweetriot had created a product that is growing in popularity and a brand that is expressed in every aspect of the business. Their mission, positioning, and story set the table for a unique brand, but it’s how they carry that brand message intentionally through other supporting elements that ignites the entire brand expression.

Sweetriot’s stated mission is: To create a more just and celebrated multicultural world for our next generation. Sounds ambitious enough, but it’s how it manifests in seemingly every aspect of the business that makes people take notice and get connected.

Their product is all natural and healthy, but so is their business. “We create sweet experiences for our customers, partners and employees, says Endline when asked to define what gets people talking about Sweetriot.”

Sweetriot has positioned chocolate as a health food and this innovative differentiation allows you to get engaged without the need to page through reams of scientific proof of the benefits.

While Endline is Sweetriot’s CEO, she’s still their top salesperson as well, and states that she has a 100% close rate with new retailers when the focus of the sales presentation is as much about her company’s story and mission as it is about the products.

And what about the other flourishes?

The name – Sarah tells me she agonized over finding something that felt sweet (ok, duh), but also felt full of the energy that she and her team planned to bring to this space – A sweetriot is a joyful celebration of culture, diversity, and understanding — it is the opposite of a civil riot, which is dangerous, violent, and oppressing.

The logo – this one is subtle and in fact, I missed it for a while. Sweetriot’s logo is a thumbprint (it’s actually Sarah’s sister’s thumb) with a globe motif layered over the thumb.

The product – sweetriot’s primary product is an all natural, anti-oxidant-rich, dairy-free, kosher, gluten-free dark chocolate cocoa nibs – except of course, they’re called “peaces” – I mean, what else would you call them, right?

The package – Core products are shipped in stylish tins adorned with artwork from up and coming artists. In addition to the chocolate, the tins contain a fortune. Each quarter sweetriot customers are offered the opportunity to help choose the next new featured artist. The tins are recyclable and sweetriot produces ideas on ways to reuse the tins as well.

The process – Since cacao is generally only found in Latin American, Africa, Asia, most is imported away to North America and the U.S. sweetriot of course pursued fair trade practices immediately, but wanted to take it a step beyond fair trade to create opportunities not only farmers and fair bean pricing but also for the production of product in the country of origin. There is a new term coming about called equitrade and sweetriot uses these principles as further differentiation. Packaging and marketing materials contain stories about the farmers and suppliers in Latin America.

The people – sweetriot’s staff members are called rioters and her website includes a host of volunteer rioters and her rioting gurus – a group of volunteer advisors. First day of training is called Riotation. My guess is that if you sat in on a staff meeting there would be plenty of brand planned attributes, processes and sweet training rituals.

Moral of the story – everything counts and the little things are how you deliver on the one really big thing – your brand.

Do Small Businesses Really Have a Brand?

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Yes, if you have a small business, even a one-person shop, you have a brand. Many small business owners don’t think this way, but when you grasp what a brand really is, I think it may become a clearer. Read the rest of my thoughts on the Small Business Marketing Guide site brought to you by HP. I talk about Brands vs Personalities – love to hear your take.

Please join me and a very fun panel of small business branding pros on Wednesday, March 18th at 11am CDT for – The “Truth” About Small Business Branding – using your small business brand to outsmart the competition – a panel discussion featuring practical branding tips and tactics from leading small business branding experts.

Panelists:
» Karen Post – The Branding Diva & Author of Brain Tattoos
» John Moore – Creator of Brand Autopsy & Author of Tribal Knowledge
» Sam Horn – Author of Pop! – Stand out in any crowd
» Aaron Weiss – Chief Product Officer for MarketSplash

This won’t be your typical Branding 101 discussion, trust me, these guys get small business.

Register here for the Truth About Small Business Branding

5 Ways to Amp Up the Personal in Your Brand

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

This is a special guest post as part of Make a Referral Week 2009.

By Pamela Slim of Escape from Cubicle Nation

As small business owners, the line between our business and personal lives can be a little bit challenging to define. Some people worry that the term “personal brand” means sharing about their twelve cats, troubles with their mother-in-law or penchant for collecting pez dispensers.

The reality is, people don’t refer companies or brands; they refer the people in those companies. The more your customers know your personality, your interests, your values and your real voice, the more likely they will refer business to you.

So here are some ways to amp up the personal in your brand:

1. Hang out with your customers.
When I asked my Twitter buddies which companies they considered great in personal branding, Freshbooks jumped to the top of the list. When I asked what it was about their brand that felt very personal, I learned that the CEO and staff blogged, Twittered and participated in user forums. There is nothing that builds good will faster than answering a customer question immediately and personally. If you have a face-to-face business, take time to stop by and visit your customers just to see how they are doing.

2. Show your face.
As the daughter of a photographer, I might be a bit biased when it comes to the importance of good pictures. But pictures really do convey personality and style in a way pure text cannot. So make sure the “About” page on your website has good photographs of you and your staff. Look at one of my favorite examples, the team of mechanics at Pat’s Garage in San Francisco. You thought car mechanics had no personality? Think again.

3. Write clearly and with personality.
Check your website, blog posts, marketing materials and emails and make sure you are communicating in a clean, clear, engaging way. The basic rule of thumb is to write like you talk. If you are a corporate refugee-turned small business owner, you may be used to using words like “value-add,” “paradigm shift” and “out-of-the-box-thinking.” You wouldn’t use these words in regular conversation, right? Strike them from your written communications and people will find you are not the tremendous bore they thought you were, you are actually down-to-earth, funny, and engaging. Colleen Wainwright aka Communicatrix demonstrates this well in her Hire Me page.

4. Create your posse.
Are there any small businesses that serve your market in a non-competitive way? When you build relationships with other like-minded entrepreneurs, you can expand your brand to include a network, not just your company. Then you can refer business to each other with confidence, knowing you share similar style, values and results. Your informal posse could develop into a collaborative network like Men With Pens.

5. Serve the right customers.
Do you ever feel a bit nervous about communicating with your customers? Are you afraid that they will find out that you are really an imposter? When my clients share these fears, we almost always discover that they feel that way because they are not working with the right market. When you find your ideal customers, talking with them will feel calm and comfortable, because you will know with conviction that you are the perfect person to solve their problems.

You do not have to share your entire personal life to have great personal brand. You just need to show up fully, clearly and passionately in your business.

Pamela Slim is a business coach and author of Escape from Cubicle Nation, coming out in May, 2009 with Penguin/Portfolio.

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Casting Sounds Into Content

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Hopefully you’ve concluded that today’s marketing requires lots of content, lots of education and lots of trust building via expertise sharing. And you’ve also likely concluded that all of that is a ton of work. It is a ton of work, well worth it in the long-run, but work to build no matter.

The secret to maximizing this content production play is to develop strategies that help you multiply your efforts, that make it naturally easier to produce content, and that employ technology and services that provide huge return on your time invested.

One such strategy that puts all of the above into service utilizes the recorded word as the foundational tactic. For some reason many people find it easier to say what’s on their mind than to write what’s on their mind. Funny thing is for most the spoken story is much more authentic and personal too. When business owners sit down to write a marketing piece, they end up sounding like marketers trying to sell something and make it sound important. When they speak the same marketing piece it comes off much more engaging and real.

So, get the Belkin Tune Talk stereo mic attachment for your iPod and start speaking your marketing materials and web pages and then get them transcribed by a service such as Casting Words and then use a service like TaskUs to “punch it up a bit.” This little content creation routine may just be the secret weapon that turns you into the content super-producer.

But, why stop with marketing materials per se? What about white papers, expert interviews and customer success stories. Start recording this type of content via the phone using a service like SkypeIn and Ecamm Call Recorder. Take your interviews back to CastingWords and all of sudden you are creating content and information products on the fly.

I did a live interview with Seth Godin recently and exposed one audience to the live session, thousands more to the audio download and now, thousands more will consume the audio transcript of our session.
Download interview transcript with Seth Godin.

Content creation mirrors the recycling mantra in many ways – reduce (your time to create), reuse (what you create in different formats), and recycle (what you create in different forums and audiences.)

Bigg Success Radio Interviews

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

I did a 3 part interview with George and Mary-Lynn of The Bigg Success Show. The subject was one that I get a lot these days – Marketing in Tough Times.

Check it out – they do a nice job with this show and include lots of text content from the interviews. Listen to Part 1 here

Adding a Chief Conversation Officer

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

“Markets are conversations – talk is cheap, silence is fatal” – from the cluetrain manifesto – Levine, Locke, Searls & Weinberger

The statement above embodies for many the changed landscape of marketing. Bigco started to embrace this over the course of the last few years and now it’s time for Smallco to aggressively do the same.

This year’s next position for many small business should be a conversation officer – someone in charge of the story.

That officer could be employed to create, curate and sometimes manipulate the conversations that must be coming from your company. In the broad sense the duties of this position should include

Content – this one is pretty simple – full fledged blogger, article publisher, white paper creator and education based marketing materials and webinar creator.

Context – this one is a little trickier, but your conversation officer should employ RSS technology to aggregate and filter the content and conversations going on in every online and offline corner and package it to make it more useful for your organization and your prospects.

Connection – your CCO should be in charge of developing ways to include your customers and partners in the building of your business for mutual benefit. Your CCO should be in charge of the conversations your customers are having after they buy, as they decide to buy more and in the process of becoming a referral source.

Community – your conversations must eventually come together as community. You must facilitate conversation among your prospects and customers, introduce partners and find ways to co-create value. Intentionally hosting the conversation your customers are having with each other is a must.

The primary toolset for this new position is indeed social media, but don’t neglect traditional forms of conversation as well. twitter, Facebook, blogging and RSS must supplement phone calls, lunch and handwritten notes to produce the ultimate, full-bodied, authentic, value-based conversation.

Perhaps you can’t yet invest in a full-time employee to carry out this position, add it to the org chart and start developing the position, because it’s no longer an optional function.

Marketing is Everyone’s Job

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

Far too often businesses of all sizes leave the official job of marketing to, well, the marketing department, which can also be known as the owner of the business or top sales person turned into the marketing person. But, here’s a little flash – anyone associated with your business that comes into contact with a prospect or customer is performing a marketing function. So the question is – are they prepared to carry out that function well?

I believe that one of the smartest things any business can do is create and perform official marketing training for everyone in the business. This goes for delivery people, administrative people and finance related people (especially finance related people)

Here’s an example of a marketing training program:

Once a quarter at a minimum (and with every new hire) conduct an all hands brand meeting.

This internal seminar can and should include training and examples on things like

• Why you named your company what we did – attach this to your personal story
• What colors, images, fonts are official and why – create a simple style manual of standards
• Your core marketing message – and why – help everyone connect their position to the message
• The way you want the brand to be thought of in the market – your goal, your one word of association
• Benefits of your products and services – demo them and present them just like you would to a customer
• Description of your ideal customer – use photos and success stories of real customers
• Your current lead generation activities – show off ads, run radio spots – sell them on the campaign
• Your lead conversion process – everyone should know the next step when a prospect calls
• Key marketing metrics – sales generated, leads generated, referrals generated, PR generated
• Your marketing calendar – show everyone you have a plan for the future

In addition, I would help everyone write or rewrite some aspect of their position to include a direct relationship to the marketing function they perform. An administrative person who primarily answers the phone might have the directive to answer the phone and route calls to the proper person, but in a marketing world that person’s directive is to answer the phone and act as the very first impression and representation of the brand. Now, could that change that person’s role in a powerful way, I’ve seen it happen.

Then take it up a notch and create marketing scorecards for everyone. Simply list all the marketing related ways that every position in your organization can score marketing points throughout the day and turn it into a game. ie – asking for and getting a referral, turning a customer complaint into a win, writing a blog post, participating in a social network, sending a hand-written thank you note, giving a referral, making a contact at a Chamber event. Challenge everyone to score X amount of marketing points each week and create an award program as part of your marketing workshops.

Getting marketing understanding and buy in from your entire team makes them feel more empowered to act on behalf of the brand and better ambassadors wherever they encounter prospects and customers.

I Didn’t Know You Did That

This content from: Duct Tape Marketing

So, honestly now, have you ever heard the words in the title to this post from a long-time customer? We all have, I’m afraid, and shame on us.

When a customer becomes a customer, it’s usually to purchase a specific product or solve a specific problem. When we solve that problem or ship that product the job is done, right? To build true marketing momentum the job has just begun.

I often talk about part of the lead conversion or selling process containing what I call a “new customer kit.” This is simply a set of orientation materials that provides your new customer with all the information they need to successfully work with your organization.

One of the elements of this kit should be an introduction to all the products and services your company has to offer. That’s a good start of course, but you must do much more than that to drive this information home. When a customer is new to your organization they may only have one simple need so your must commit to a long-term process of education as well.

My advice is to create a monthly process of introduction to some aspect of your business and offer this information in several forms. For example, a monthly mailing to your entire customer base, a lunch and learn with your referral sources, a telesession open to the public, an autoresponder series for newsletter subscribers, and post on the company blog.

Keeping all of your products and services featured and top of mind is one of the best ways to do more business with your existing customers and partners. Build this education system and put it on auto-pilot and you may start hearing, I’m glad you offer that!

I don’t say this enough, but the images I use on this blog and in my workshop presentations are from my favorite stock photo site iStockphoto. It rocks, just go check it out.