Does my business look big in this? The huge power of brand marketing.

Martin 0:00
So here I am in my business is called The Effective Marketing Company. It’s a branding event so I’m going to talk to you now about branding. Actually, I’ve put this presentation together for you, especially today. I haven’t done this presentation before and I thought quite long and hard about a title for it, to work, you know, brand in in a really clever way. What I’ve gone with is,

Martin 0:22
Does my business look big in this? I think it’s all right. Okay, come on this morning with a bit of an argument I always

Martin 0:31
come with a bit of an argument. And it seems to me that you want brand, clearly you want brand, because you turned up at seven o’clock, 7.30 this morning to come to this brand event, and you’re interested in the content, which is brand. It seems to me that you want brand, because you want people to want to work for you. Does that make sense? That’s a good reason for wanting brand. If you have brand you can sell anything, I’m going to argue. Does that make sense? I can’t believe that I am leaving you behind on the second bullet point. So let me make this more interesting and exciting for you. Really can’t belive that I am doing this on the second bullet, point number two. There’s not many bullet points in this whole presentation. There are lots of pictures.

Martin 0:32
Okay.

Martin 0:33
So why don’t you do, if what I’m saying isn’t really that exciting, what I would like you to do is count the pictures, and the person at the end, who can tell me how many pictures there are, will win a seat at one of my seminars to the value of 99 pounds.

Audience 1:30
Oooooh,

What do we cover in this brand marketing talk?

Martin 1:31
But actually, the thing is guys talking about this morning is actually the brand. So if you have brands, you can sell anything. If you have brand, your sales will be easier. If you have brand, you can charge more.

Martin 1:45
If you have brand, you will have stronger customer relationships. And if you have a brand, you will increase the value of your business. That is what your business is worth. Actually brand is incredibly, incredibly cost effective, incredibly cost effective. So these are my seven standout reasons about why you should want brand. Do you want brand already? We do.

What is brand marketing?

Martin 2:08
Okay, well, let’s see if we get more excited about that. So the first thing we need to do is we need to work out what brand is, do we know what brand is? Image, identity all of those things. Well, I found this definition, I want you to believe this definition so what I’ve done is popped up a little Wikipedia logo up there. Okay, so this is the brand definition that I want you to believe. So basically what we’re saying is “a brand is the personality of a product service or company and how it relates to key constituencies, customers, staff, partners, investors, etc. Some people distinguish the psychological aspects of a brand from the experiential aspects. The experiential aspects consists of the sum of all points of contact with the brand, and is known as the brand experience. The psychological aspect, sometimes referred to as the brand image is a symbolic construct in the minds of people and consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product or service.” It wasn’t that long, when I put the slides together, but that makes it much clearer about what brand is. Does is not? For me, I think it’s all in this last sentence. It’s a symbolic construct, we can forget that within the minds of people that consists of all the information and expectations associated with a product, or service, or company.

Martin 3:32
So it’s the stuff that people have in their heads about your product, your service, or your company. What it is really is that a little bit of trust that you get with people when they come to rely on you and that for me is what brand is.

If you have brand people will want to work for you.

So you want brand, reason number one, because you want to have people wanting to work for you. I don’t know if you guys are on big recruitment drives at the moment, not many people are. Seth Godin, who I’m a huge fan of, tells us that one of the key objectives for our business should be to get people wanting to work for us. I think that’s really interesting, and actually really wanting to work with us, not sitting at a desk taking a salary because that’s probably employment. I’m talking about people actually wanting to work for us. So here’s an example I have recently, run a recruitment project with Solutions Inc, I don’t know if you know those guys, they’re down in Brighton, they’re the third largest Mac reseller in the country. We ran a recruitment ad, we run recruitment ads prisoners quite a lot, we get 10 or 20 usable CVs. When we ran the recruitment ads for Solutions we got 20, 40, 60 CVS, and they were all good usable people. We had to interview 30 of them and any of those 30 people could have done the job. The reason for that is because Solutions have name and brand in Brighton. When I used to work in recruitment proper it was famous when we were placing PA’s in Worthing for 35 – 40 grand a year that Richard Branson’s PA was working for 12,000 pounds a year. Why? Because she wanted to work for him.

Martin 5:03
Apple, there’s a little bit of an apple theme running through this this morning. I’m afraid, I am a screaming advocate of Apple. Have you been to an apple store? You have? I’m quite up on energy and positive vibrations and all this stuff but when you run into one of these Apple stores, and you speak to the people, they’re so enthusiastic, it makes me want to stick one on them seriously calm down about this fantastic thing. I was there with my mother trying to find her like a laptop case for Christmas and while she was buying something else and the guy was jumpimg up and down saying you don’t have to queue, you dont have to queue – I can tke your money right here.

Martin 5:38
That’s what I am talking about people who actually, physically, want to work for you, and are motivated to actually work for you. Brand gives you that.

If you have brand you can sell absolutely anything.

Martin 5:47
So Reason number two, you want brand, because if you have brand you can sell absolutely anything. Does that make sense for us? Yeah, if you’ve got that little bit of trust, well I’ve got four examples for you and the first one is Apple. This is part two of the Apple theme. You might know Apple because they sell computers and it make sense then, because they sell computers that they also sell the software, although that’s not necessarily the model. Then what happened is I decided to go into the portable media market and they develop the iPod. Then what happened is they had to develop the i-store so that they could sell music videos, podcasts and TV programs. That was a departure for a computer program, a computer company, and then they went into the i-Touch business, and then they could sell us games. Then they went into the phone business and then they could sell us applications. Then they bought out the i-Pad and now they can sell us books.

Martin 6:44
So what’s happened recently is that Apple have actually taken over to Microsoft,

Martin 6:50
they haven’t taken over them, that would be a lovely day. They have overtaken them in terms of turnover, not because of the computers that they sell, because they still

Martin 6:59
only provide less than 10% of the desktop computers in America. Because of all of this stuff that they sell. So what they’ve done is they’ve leveraged that brand, and they’ve sold lots of different things, and they now are bigger in terms of turnover than Microsoft. So that’s example number one.

Martin 7:17
Example number two is Tescos. We all know that Tesco sell groceries, don’t they? They also sell PC photo and gaming equipment. They also sell sports and leisure equipment, garden equipment including sheds, home and bath equipment, baby and toddler equipment including prams, they sell clothing and jewelry, they sell Sound and Vision, toys and gifts, they sell furniture, kitchen furniture, DIY and car stuff, phones, entertainment and books. They sell us finance and in case you don’t want to buy their finance, they have now got a comparison website. So they will sell your business leads if you are selling financial services. So there’s another example of Tesco taking over the world with their brand because they have brands, they leverage that brand, they can sell absolutely anything. We happy with this?

Martin 8:17
But you’re gonna tell me these are big brands, you’re not happy? We’ll move on. You’re telling me these good brands, big brands, they can do whatever they like in fact. So I want to talk about this guy called Dave, you might remember tt started off when he was quite good at football. Actually, what happened is he went on to be the most incredible salesperson in the world ever. What happened first, because he was always interested in his hair so it made sense that he sold Bryl Creme, so that’s where he started. Then what happened is his team was selling mobile phone networks with Vodafone, so he also got into that a little bit. Then he got into selling sunglasses and selling brown sugary drinks. Obviously it makes sense that you sell sports kit cause he’s a sports person, then he went on to sell underpants. Then he went on to sell because obviously he had experience with mobile phones, he went to work for Motorola selling their handsets. Then he started actually this was earlier, there’s no way he did that with a razor, that would absolutely hurt, but he went on to sell shaving equipment. Now he sells Herbalife so he can sell you stuff for your dietary requirements. Actually, if there isn’t a corporation in the wings waiting to pay millions of pounds to sell something he and his missus will knock up some after shave and they’ll sell that. Because if you have brands you can sell absolutely anything. But you will say to me he’s an international sports star of course you can sell whatever you like and it will sell.

Martin 9:41
So let’s look at this guy, let’s call this guy Richard. Richard, we know Richard? So Richard went into the record business, did quite well. Went into the record store, mega store business, did quite well. Went into the airline business, did quite well. Went into the Coca-cola business, didn’t do so fantastically well. Went into the train business, they struggle a little bit, but he’s persevering with that. Went into the mobile phone business, everyone does. Went in to the media business. Now he’s in the space holidays business and it’s actually happening because I checked this out yesterday, actually, people are gonna be paying $20,000 a go to fly in one of his craft and visit space. So it’s actually happening, which it says something about him, but all of this says something about brands. Now, these are the nine famous things that happened, there are actually 360 Virgin branded businesses, and they all do quite well. So if you have brand you can sell absolutely anything.

If you have brand your sales will be easier.

Martin 10:41
Reason number three, if you have brand your sales will be easier. So, example number one, McDonald’s. McDonald’s have never phoned me and said, Martin, can you come in and do some sales training with our guys. I don’t know why they haven’t, they absolutely have’nt. Has anyone ever objected in McDonald’s? Has anyone ever done any negotiation in McDonald’s? You don’t, you stand in the queue, you get to the front you ask for exactly what they want to sell you and you pay exactly the price that they want you to pay. It’s because they have brand.

Martin 11:17
Mercedes Benz, does anyone drive a Mercedes Benz. I don’t know if this is still the case. But there was definitely a time in Mercedes Benz’s history where they would very famously say to people if they ask for a discount, Mercedes Benz do not offer discounts but if you go to BMW, there’s one just down the road, they will definitely help you with that. That’s brand at work making sales easier.

Martin 11:40
The last one is Apple, this is my personal experience that when I spoke to who is now my very good friend Leo and I said to him, I’ve never spent 2000 pounds on a computer Leo, you’re going to have to give me some discount. What he said to me is, what you need to remember sir is that this is a premium product.

Martin 11:56
And I said okay.

Martin 12:01
Because it has brand and because it is a premium products. So brand makes sales easier.

If you have brand you can charge more.

Martin 12:07
So reason number four, if you have brand, you can charge more. Do we get this? You can charge more if you have brand. I’ve got some examples for you, we’re gonna play spot the difference. Okay, so if you can spot the difference, there’s no prize necessarily.

Martin 12:24
You get arms and feet with this one thats not the difference I am looking for

Martin 12:31
you get a belt with these ones.

Martin 12:36
There’s a person.

Martin 12:36
Yes there is actually a person, not just the hands and feet but you don’t get the person. Anyone else? The difference of course is in the price, because the ones with the belt on the left hand side will cost you 10 pounds and the ones on the right hand side will cost you 100 pounds but you do not get the hands and feet.

Martin 12:58
Why is that?

Martin 12:59
Of course it’s because of the brand; because these come from ASDA and these come from Levi’s, so you pay 10 times as much for that brand, 10 times as much. Can you imagine paying 10 times as much? You have to have a good reason and the reason there is brands.

Martin 13:18
So we’re going to go again ,spot the difference. Wembledon season so we’re talking about strawberries, of course we’re talking about strawberries.

Martin 13:32
Different brands, well spotted, this is a brand event. So they’ve got different brands. So what do we think that does the price? It makes a difference, of course it makes a difference. So actually these are the most expensive strawberries you can buy from the supermarkets. So Tescos you can pay £3.99 or £13 per kilogram. Sainsbury’s, you can pay £3.99 or £13.17 per kilogram. If you want to spend 13 pounds per kilogram strawberries in Asda, it’s tough luck, you can’t, the most you can pay is £4.92. And that is because of brand, and that is because of positioning, because they put these prices on and they expect you to pay. If you have brand, you can charge more.

Martin 14:13
And here’s the last example, spot the difference. So the first difference is …. brand. Okay, so we’re doing much better this. We can see there’s different brands here and what difference do we think that makes to the price?

Martin 14:28
Quite a lot. So you can buy the Skoda for £14,225, 16 nearly 17,000 for the Seat, 17 and a bit for the Golf and £18,350 for the Audi. What’s particularly interesting about this? They’ve got exactly the same engine, they’re owned by the same group, they are ostensibly the same car. The difference is the shape and the brand. It’s interesting, isn’t it? I think it’s really, really interesting. They have all got exactly the same engine and they are all the entry level. So they are ostensibly the same car, you can pay £4,000 less if you’re prepared to drive around in Skoda. 4000 pounds, I think that’s a lot.

Brand strengthens customer relationships.

Martin 15:14
Okay, so you want brand cars, I think we’re up to reason number five, because brand strengthens customer relationships. So what I’m going to do is speak to you very quickly and is share some of my brand and relationships. I’m a Manchester United fan, it’s fantastic, basically United branded football I’m very interested in. I’m a keen photographer and I decided that I want to use Nikon as opposed to the other people who are for amateurs. I ride my mountain bike regularly and I ride a Specialized mountain bike for my specialised mountain biking. I buy my jeans in Gap, I trust them to sell me jeans. I’m an Alfa Romeo fan, although at the moment I’m having to drive an Audi which I can’t get excited about. I’m a huge Apple fan, you may have guessed already. I’m a barbecue fan and my barbecue is from Weber and I make make amazing food on that. I buy my socks and my pants from Next, no I don’t I buy those from Marks & Spensers, I buy shirts from Next. I buy sunglasses every five years from Ray Ban. If we buy furniture, we typically go to IKEA and my particular brand of dog is a Puli. Pu;i’s are a very particular brand of dog.

Martin 16:30
It’s interesting, if you sit down and think about it, we all have relationships with brands, we all have people that we trust, people that we go to first to provide us with the thing that we’re most interested in. That makes brand relationships, customer relationships stronger, it absolutely does.

Brand increases the value of your business.

Martin 16:47
Okay, so you want brand because … I think we are up to reason number six – brand increases the value of your business. Now there are lots of things that you could be achieving with marketing in your business, you could be picking up a sale or a lead, achieving profitability or income, developing new products, understanding your business; all sorts of things that you could be achieving with effective marketing. You could be taking charge of your business, how would that be? If you actually knew what was going on in your business, you were in charge of it, instead of chasing around after it all the time. But the one thing that gets me excited is the idea of increasing the value of your business. That is making it so that somebody will come and write you a check and say, I will have that from you, thank you very much. That is the objective, or should be the objective of all of your marketing. You will have a valuable business if people want to work for you, if you can sell absolutely anything, if your sales are easy, if you charge more and have higher profitability and if you have strong customer relationships, your business will be valuable.

Brand is incredibly cost effective.

Martin 17:51
Okay, you want brand because brand is incredibly cost effective, incredibly cost effective. And there’s a good reason for that. Oh, no, was it £350,000 that they paid for this logo? That’s not the way you do brand, you can’t go out and spend hundreds of thousands of pounds, that’s not actually the way that it works. You will get ripped off if you try to do that.

Martin 18:13
Okay, so what’s the difference? We’ve had this before we’ve done this already. Yes, it’s different. Actually different brands within the same business. These car manufacturers are all part of the VW Group. This is an interesting piece of positioning for me because if you want to spend £4,000 pounds on a car, or a million dollars on a car with the Bugatti Veyron, VW Group can sell it to you. That’s interesting, isn’t it? That’s an interesting way of positioning, occupying the entire breadth of the market.

Martin 18:54
Surely there must be a cost benefit to having all these brands, because how would you distinguish A3 from the Skoda unless it was a different brand? How could you possibly explain to someone in the in the store, this one’s 4000 pounds more because …. because of what? So you have to differentiate them because of that, which leads me to think that brand is actually cost effective, certainly much more cost effective than setting up seven or eight completely different businesses, seven, eight different cost centers, seven or eight different marketing departments, all of those things.

Martin 19:22
So here’s another spot the difference. They’re all the same. They’re all part of the Dixon group.

Martin 19:29
Now there was a time in my life before I was a Mac fan. Well, I wouldn’t shop in Dixon PC, well encouraged thing. I’ve done a good job shopping around before buying something. I was the mug, you know, it’s interesting because it must be more cost effective for them to run those three brands rather than running three separate businesses.

How to develop your own brand.

Martin 19:47
Okay, so all you have to do if you want to develop your own brand is break it down into fonts, logos, messages, values, positioning, all of these things are things that make up your brand, your service, your customer experience and your reputation. It’s a buyers market, you are about 20 minutes away from Brighton with 11,000 VAT registered businesses a third which, reportedly, are creative businesses. Brighton is absolutely a buyers market if you want to be buying brand. If you don’t even want to be spending that much money, you can go to businesses like LogoYes, I did, I paid $60 for my tree five years ago, it’s been fine.

Martin 20:28
Logo designs, Marvel logo designs, we do some work with them. Weebly, if you are free websites, and Joomla if you want really free websites, and you’ve got some skills, you can do all this stuff, but not very much money if you need to break it down into its components.

Martin 20:42
So decide do you want your business to like a tramp? Do you want your business to like a tramp?

Audience 20:49
No.

Martin 20:56
Even when you’re on your uppers you will find the money to get your brand of beer. Do you want your business to look too stern? Do you want your business to look like a spiv?

Martin 21:02
Not really no. You probably want to look a little bit knowledgable, a little bit friendly and approachable. Actually, I’ve been thinking about this over the last few days, probably what you want is to have your business looking like Mary Poppins; calm and in charge with a few natty ways to get things done quickly. Absolutely.

Martin 21:37
Okay, so your message. Messages are difficult but I think if you can understand your value proposition, ie what can I do for you in less time and for less money, then you can do for yourself. It will typically be a way around saving people hassle, time and money, probably in that order. People don’t really believe if you tell them, you’re gonna save them time and money because who hasn’t fallen for that one already. If you can save people hassle, time and money, then you’ve got the basis of a good message.

Martin 22:05
Then you need to make it accessible for them. So we’ll offer you something to get you in and talking to us. Like we might offer you a presentation, for example. And the Why is important, people are people talking about the why do you do things? I do things because I am on a mission to help small businesses, because I think businesses should take charge of their business and if they understand marketing, then they can take charge of their business. That’s my why, that’s why I’m standing in front of you this morning, that’s why I’m running The Effective Marketing Company.

Martin 22:32
The last one is how do they do it, your call to action, tell them do this and it will be happening, do this and we’ll be saving you time, or money, or hassle very, very quickly. Okay.

Martin 22:42
The other thing, the other component is obviously your customers experience. You need to understand in 2010, that your customers are your key asset, your most valuable, your most important asset in your business. What I say to people is take some of the money you invest in getting new customers and invest that in your existing customers, because like I say they are very, very important.

Martin 23:03
Then association. Here’s some of my associations, some of my customers, and it starts to look like I’m in business if I’ve done business with these people. That’s for free sometimes.

Martin 23:21
The key to brand is consistency and the best people at that are McDonald’s because McDonald’s never said we’ll make you the best burger, we’ll make the most satisfying, romantic meal. What they said is you will get exactly what you expect every single time, that’s why we stand in the queue, the service is what it is, and the food is what it is and we don’t complain because that’s the expectation because it’s consistency. Consistency is absolutely free of charge. It’s absolutely free of charge. So start thinking about having a font that everyone in your business uses that is a great step towards getting a new brand.

Martin 23:53
Okay, and just be careful. I don’t normally do the be careful stuff because I’m not a be careful sort of a person but brand cans sometimes be very expensive and you dont want to do a Ratner, do we know about Mr Ratner? We do?

Martin 23:58
Mr Ratner used to run Ratners before he said “we also do cut glass Sherry Decanters complete with six glasses on a silver plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on for £4.95. People say how can you sell this for such a low price? I say because it’s total crap.” He went on to talk about his earrings “which are cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn’t last as long.” Because his brand was one big unique thing of course the whole thing just broke. The line between love and hate is very thin and that cost him 500 million.

Martin 24:04
Did he deserve it? I think he deserved it.

Martin 24:42
If I have done my job you are now wanting brand because if you have brand people will want to work for you. If you have brands you can sell anything. If you have brand your sales will be easier. If you have brands you can charge more. Brands strengthens your customer relationships. Brand increases the value of your business and brand is actually incredibly cost effective. So I’m hoping that you’re excited about brand, are you excited. Good, because I’ve got nothing else. What we’re going to do now is we’re going to take 10 minutes to refresh our glasses, or our tea cups more likely at this time in th emorning and then we’re going to hear from Duncan Smith who is going to frazzle your minds.

WHAT DO YOU THINK?