Reacting to HBR's Think twice before updating your brand - Reaction Time 024

Reacting to HBR’s Think twice before updating your brand – Reaction Time 024

by | Jan 27, 2023 | Brand, Reaction Time

Click through to the good bits.

00:00 Introduction/Catch-ups.

08:28 Customer loyalty–their consciously choosing your brand–is only half the story.

11:48 What is cumulative advantage and why is it important?

16:19 Just how fragile is this cumulative advantage?

16:49 Tide laundry detergent forfeits its cumulative advantage.

23:09 Instagram redesigns a familiar icon. Why?

24:15 Should brands never do anything new?

Martin Henley: [00:00:13] Hello there. My name is Martin Henley. This is the Effective Marketing content extravaganza. And if this is your first time here, you won’t know that I’m on a mission to give you everything you need to be successful in your business. Providing of course, what you need to be successful in your business is to know more about and be implementing more efficiently, more enthusiastically and more effectively sales and marketing in your business. So what goes on here is I’m giving you everything I know about sales and marketing that happens on a Monday in the What The series. On a Tuesday, I bring in a guest, someone with experience to share with you. If you’re looking to be more successful in your business. That’s Talk Marketing on a Tuesday. On a Wednesday, we look at the news and speculate wildly about what it might mean for you in your marketing life, in your marketing career, or we put together Marketing Reviews we review so you don’t have to. On Thursdays, there’s a new thing coming, Thinking Out Loud on a Thursday and on a Friday. And today will be a Friday. If you’re catching this as it goes live, we react to the very best and the very worst of marketing content on the Internet. So if that sounds like it might be interesting or useful, please tell me it does. We’re only here to be interesting and useful then. Now would be a great time to like, share, subscribe and comment and that will give us the motivation to continue on this epic journey. So today is a Friday. So this is reaction time. And by we, I mean me and Jim. Good morning, Jim.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:01:38] Good morning. Good morning. How are you?

Martin Henley: [00:01:40] I am extraordinarily well, thank you, brother. I’m really glad and happy that you are here. I’m particularly excited about that. Happy New Year. We’ve spoken and it’s the first time we’ve spoken on video this year. So shall we do that? It’s a bit weird talking about Happy New Year’s 21 days into the year. How are you feeling about the year, brother?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:02:01] It’s already flying, isn’t it? Let’s just see what happens.

Martin Henley: [00:02:04] Let’s just see what happens. I’m quite excited about the year. I’m quite excited. I think good things are going to happen. That’s what I think. Even while all of the evidence would suggest that they’re not. Let’s be optimistic. Okay, good. So we’re here to review something. There is a little bit of jeopardy in this. So one of us has to thumb the thumb. One of us has to hum the Jeopardy tune.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:02:29] I don’t know what it is.

Martin Henley: [00:02:30] We don’t know what it is. Yeah, but just so everyone knows, you do have the power of veto.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:02:36] So, no, I mean, I don’t know what I don’t know what the Jeopardy theme tune is.

Martin Henley: [00:02:41] Oh, okay. It’s de de de de de de de de de de de de de de de de de de de jeopardy. Like what is. Yeah, that’s it. So anyway, that’s the Jeopardy theme, right? So maybe we should just drive on. I will. So what we do, Clay has put together the clay list. There are six items on the clay list. We don’t know what they are, what we’re going to do. We’re going to have random dot org, we’re going to roll the dice and it’s going to give us a number and then we’re going to take that number. And that is what we will be reacting to today. You have the power of veto. If the universe selects something that you don’t feel you can talk about without getting canceled or getting as both canceled, then we won’t talk about it and we will roll the dice again. That’s the deal. So shall we see what it is? So this is random, dawg. We will roll the dice. This is when we do the.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:03:37] Da da da da da da da da da da da da.

Martin Henley: [00:03:42] Da da da da da. It’s number five. So then what we do is we go to video number five. So that’s this video from the playlist. We copy that. We come back to us in case my browser wants to betray me and show something that it shouldn’t show. So what we do is we come here and we push the button and then we go back to the thing.

Roger Martin: [00:04:13] It has become very popular in the world.

Martin Henley: [00:04:15] We are.

Roger Martin: [00:04:15] Branding and business in general to think of the importance of.

Martin Henley: [00:04:19] Autoplay. That’s annoying, right? So what we are going to be reacting to today is think twice before updating your brands.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:04:31] Okay?

Martin Henley: [00:04:32] Okay. So this is good, isn’t it? Because you’re not in the brand business? Precisely. But you sort of are a little bit in the brand business, aren’t you? You’re in the print business. You’re dealing with brands all the time. So you should be able to give us some expert. Do you have a view before we start on it. What the considerations when people come to renew their brand, update their brand?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:04:57] Well, I think with my customer base, it’s very much SMBs, small businesses. So, you know, I couldn’t talk about if Coca-Cola need to rebrand or when they rebrand and stuff like that. But when I’m talking to a business about their brand, often that first logo will be something they did themselves and it pretty much shit. So, you know, you’ve got to get to a stage where you, you know, you swap out that logo of something good, but there’s nothing wrong with starting a business with just text only and then working towards something.

Martin Henley: [00:05:25] Okay.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:05:26] It does. The whole launching the business doesn’t revolve around the brand.

Martin Henley: [00:05:30] It doesn’t revolve around the brand. And you supported me with my brand, didn’t you? My brand was absolutely rubbish. It was that. It wasn’t rubbish. It cost me my logo inasmuch as I had a brand. It cost me like $11 on. Yes. Lego.com in 2005. And I think it was around 2012 that we found something that was better than that. And we did it, didn’t we? You design that for me. So but I say what I think about brand is I think the sooner small businesses invest in brands, the better off they are. I think there’s real value in brand that small businesses don’t really.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:06:05] Gross Yeah, sure. But then you’ll get then, you know, five years in, you know, I think we need to refresh our brand. Like, do you really? Because you don’t I mean, take your logo. Ten years, 11 years on is perfect. Still perfect.

Martin Henley: [00:06:20] Yeah. Is that because you’re still waiting for me to pay the invoice that you’re saying that.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:06:23] Or that would help. But. But, you know, there’s no need to be refreshing all the time.

Martin Henley: [00:06:28] No, there’s not, is there. And there’s famous graphics, isn’t there. If we were more organized, those famous graphics of like the evolution of like really famous brands, evolution of the Shell brand. And so Shell has been in business for. There we go. We are organized. Shell has been in business for 100 years, and it’s kind of gone through. It’s not quite working out. It’s not quite working out. I can’t do it. It’s the truth. There we go. It’s gone through, like, eight things. So, yes. So I think maybe people do get caught up a little bit with their brand and updating their brand very often. And the thing that I really think about brand is it’s an exercise in trust, isn’t it? It’s an exercise in consistency. Do you know what I mean? So what I really think about brand is it’s about investing in that relationship that you have with your client. And if you go chopping and changing the relationship every 20 minutes, you’re not going to get that benefit. And the benefit that you want is trust. So this video is by the Harvard Business Review. So very well renowned. It has had 26,000 views. My picture is really small, so I can’t really see what’s going on here. The channels had 16.4 million. They are the Harvard Business Review. Shall we react? See what on earth they’re talking about. Good. You need me to stop? Just shout. Was that.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:08:03] Take you from the top. Just put it back to the start.

Martin Henley: [00:08:05] Yeah, I need to do that over here. Right. Okay, good.

Roger Martin: [00:08:11] Let’s go. Customer loyalty and how you need to promote loyalty. You know, it’s a good thing you’d want people to be loyal to your product and keep on repurchasing your product. But it turns out that there is something more powerful.

Martin Henley: [00:08:25] All right. Sorry, I didn’t get it quite back to the beginning. He’s Roger Martin.

Roger Martin: [00:08:28] It has become very popular in the world of branding and business in general to think of both the importance of customer loyalty and how you need to promote loyalty. You know, it’s a good thing you’d want people to be loyal to your product and keep on repurchasing your product. But it turns out that there is something more powerful by far than loyalty. You should think about loyalty as the tip of an of an iceberg. But the 95% that you don’t see below the water is habit. It’s the subconscious saying to you, You should do this thing again. The modern fantasy about how business is changing so quickly. You’ve got to keep morphing and changing, updating your brand, getting a new visual identity, all of those things, they’re just bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Don’t do them. Why? It’s because you interrupt habit. So rather than a consumer thinking about.

Martin Henley: [00:09:34] Okay, so I agree with this, but I don’t really understand what the difference is between customer loyalty and habit is when I teach brand, when I’m teaching digital marketing, I tell them about my Adidas dependency where like I go to play tennis and I’m wearing an Adidas shorts, shirts, shoes, bag, all of the stuff. And it’s not because when I go to the sports store to buy sports equipment, I’m wondering what Adidas have. But it’s the weird thing where actually when I leave the sports store, typically it’s Adidas that’s in my bag. Do you know what I mean? So is that the habit that he’s talking about?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:10:15] That’s because you’re you can’t it’s like you have if you’re wearing Adidas, it’s like, no, I’m going to do this. You can’t have, like, puma socks because you look like a dick. Yeah. Now you have to branch throughout. It’s got to be added out because otherwise I’ll look weird and someone will say, Oh, you’re wearing the wrong brand.

Martin Henley: [00:10:35] No, you don’t think that about something different. I’m talking about. I buy Adidas all the time, but I never go out to buy Adidas. You know, when I go to the sports store, if I go to Sports Direct or wherever, there’ll be an added dance section, there’ll be a section, there’ll be a they’ve all got a section. But essentially when I leave the store, it’s typically added added stuff that’s in my bag. So it’s not because I think it looks cool. It’s not because it’s whatever. It’s because of the relationship I’ve had with Adidas since I was a little kid. When our German students turned up when I was eight and they told us that Adidas stands for all day. I dream about sex, you know what I mean? When Rinaldo did his his contract, I mean, or whoever it was in the tennis. It’s like they’ve just layered upon layer upon layer. They’ve just sort of put themselves at the front of my head. And it’s just like when you’re buying sports stuff, added is the stuff you should buy. Do you know what I mean? It’s like that sort of a thing. Maybe that’s the habit that he’s talking about, and I suppose it does get in the way of habit. I’ve got a very I’ve got I’ve got a thing about McDonald’s at the moment. But anyway, let’s go. Let’s go on and see what he has to say. Okay, so I have to press play over there.

Roger Martin: [00:11:48] Or wow, I am loyal to, let’s say, Tide. I’m loyal to Tide detergent. I really should buy it. It’s actually that person’s subconscious saying, you know, the most comfortable thing to do. The thing we in your subconscious are most confident of is that thing that worked for us before. So please.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:12:13] That’s it. So that’s your Adidas thing. It’s like you’re so used to the the brand that you can’t help yourself.

Martin Henley: [00:12:20] Yes. So it is like that’s subliminal, isn’t it? So when I talk to people about brand, it’s in digital marketing and it’s about display advertising. And it’s like like no one clicks on display ads necessarily, but when you land on the Financial Times pages and in the top right hand corner, there’s blogs and blogs, financial services, wherever you are where Sussex, then you just make that associations, you know what I mean? So if you’re looking for that financial service in West Sussex, then they are somewhere there in your in your subliminal or in your subconscious. Okay, good. Play over here.

Roger Martin: [00:12:59] Please, please, please don’t think about buying something else. Thai has been around for 76 years, and it has what we call cumulative advantage. Cumulative advantage is what you increasingly build as the customer becomes more and more comfortable with using your product or service each time they use it and get the benefits they wish. You get more cumulative advantage that causes the subconscious to say, I’m totally comfortable with this and I would be uncomfortable if we did something else. That’s the win of cumulative advantage.

Martin Henley: [00:13:44] Right. So the next ETF that we do is going to be brand marketing. It’s been about six months in the making. But we interviewed a guy called Barnaby Winter on talk Marketing, and he runs a business called the Brand Bucket, and he is behind like what are now household names, boots, the chemists, like just reams of them, reams of the Eurostar, blah, blah, blah. And he says that actually brand has very little to do with branding and brand is, is only that relationship with actual customers, with people who put their hand in their pocket and actually buy from you. And what he actually says is it’s the promise of that relationship. So I argued like part of the Ferrari brand, for example, is that it is really exclusive and no one can afford like very few people can afford to buy it. And he didn’t care at all because he says, I don’t care about those people. I care about the people. I’m only going to invest money in the people that actually end up buying the thing from me. So this is what this is kind of what he’s saying, but this is why. So then if you think about it on that level, then when you invest in brand, you’re investing in that relationship, that customer relationship. And then so probably what you’re not investing in is you are investing in the logo, you’re investing in the whatever, but what you’re not but the actual investor. So nowadays we call it customer experience. So really when you’re designing your brand, you should be designing that customer experience rather than thinking about what colour does my logo need to be or what are my company fonts going to be, or those kinds of things. Is that the way you think about it?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:15:23] Yeah. Brands. I mean, we, you know, we jump straight in, we’ve talked about the logo and it’s of course much more than that. It’s everything that goes with it. Yes, yes, yes. Immediately you think logo like change your brand, this whole video, we’re assuming this guy is basically saying, don’t change, don’t change your brand. Don’t you know. Yes. So don’t go under the tide. Example. There is like, you know, this is 75 years of smashing that that brand into people.

Martin Henley: [00:15:53] Yes. Yes. Or not even I think because very often I think the actual marketing is is quite subtle. You know what I mean? It won’t always be. I mean, washing detergent brands are spend a lot on advertising, but it’s in all the ways, you know what I mean? So the brand might be passed on from your mum, always use this brand. So you use this brand, you know, so it might be more subtle. Okay, good. I’m finding this interesting. I’m finding this really, really interesting.

Roger Martin: [00:16:19] When you rebrand. The subconscious is saying, Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Where’s where’s that thing we were comfortable with? And in some sense, it puts you back to square one. You’re now competing to establish a new habit. So Tide was the dominant powdered detergent that worked in this new thing called the washing machine as of 1946. On the basis of that, it had the greatest cumulative advantage.

Roger Martin: [00:16:49] 30 ish years later, when chemists figured out how to formulate liquid detergents, P&G created a fantastic liquid detergent called ERA and brought that out. And they said, Well, we need to do ERA a new brand because this is a new product. Tide stands for powdered detergent and ERA will stand for liquid detergent. It was a complete bust and never got anything but fractional share. And then some smart person at Procter and Gamble said, How about we do this? How about we put it in an orange bottle with a target on the front that says Tide all across it? And it quickly became the number one liquid detergent, number one. And it has been ever since. Even with that huge advantage in detergents, right.

Roger Martin: [00:17:39] You couldn’t switch and get people to say, I want this entirely new brand. You needed to double down on the habit of buying Tide. And every once in a while the Procter people, even though they’re super smart, make a little boo boo. When they came out with detergent that could wash entirely in cold water, they said, You know that orange tide bottle? That’s a warm color, right? We need a cool color. So we’re going to put it in a blue bottle. What happened, do you think? Disaster. It was just a disastrous launch. What did they do? Put it in an orange bottle and it became the dominant cold water brand. All of that can only be explained by the subconscious because the conscious should be saying, Oh, yes, that cold water, blue blue equals cold, etc.. That’s that story is a conscious story. The unconscious is saying, where is the familiar bottle? Where is it? You’ve taken it away. You put this weird thing in. I don’t want to think about that. And that’s the story of your subconscious saying, I want to keep this habit.

Martin Henley: [00:19:00] Right.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:19:00] So an.

Roger Martin: [00:19:01] Example.

Martin Henley: [00:19:01] Of the only issue I’ve got now is why? How is this different from customer loyalty? This is just another level of customer loyalty, isn’t it? So I suppose it works with his iceberg, but it’s like where you want to get your brand to the point where subliminally people don’t want anything else, do you? I mean, but that’s only like super charged customer loyalty. So the thing is, this isn’t I don’t know if this is relevant. I mean, God help us if Coca-Cola are watching this because they need some help with their brand. I don’t think they are. I think the people who are watching this are people who are either running their own businesses or are in marketing positions or sales positions, in which case. The thing I think of is I think of Ratna about Ratna, the jeweller. You remember when we were kids, there was Ratner’s, and then he. He went out and made those statements in his public speaking. Do you remember what they are? Yeah.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:20:00] It’s basically said the this this metal tray, the silver tray was like 1.37. We sell it for 35 quid. It just exposed the shit that he was selling.

Martin Henley: [00:20:09] Yes. Yes. So what he actually said is we have a pewter tray with pewter teacups on it that your butler can serve you tea in the afternoon and we sell that for whatever it was, 3.49. And people say, how can you sell it so cheap? And he said, because it’s complete crap. And then he said, we also we also sell a pair of silver earrings which cost about the same as a Marks and Spencers sandwich, but won’t last as long. And then his business was gone overnight. So I think that’s the other thing about brand is the fragility of it is where you can completely break it in a second because the line between love and hate is really thin. And I think this is going on right now, not right now, but like in the last three months with Kanye West, where he’s gone on like he can sell anything, he can do anything, and then he comes out and make some unfortunate comments and now he is persona non grata. And I think that goes on where we are in 2023 with this whole cancel culture is you get it wrong. Like by the time you are this thing, this brand, this relationship, you know, that becomes, I think, entirely fragile.

Martin Henley: [00:21:18] So but I think the thing that we need to say to the audience of this and your customers is you need to invest in that relationship as soon as possible, like when and it goes back to the very basics. So it’s not all about the logo, but it goes back to the very basics. So if your logo is different colors or in different places or if they receive yeah, if they see a presentation and it’s in one font and one color scheme and then they receive a proposal and it’s in a different font with a different color scheme, and then they receive an invoice and it’s like all of these very subtle things, like he’s saying it in a much less subtle way, but all of these subtle things will affect the way people feel subliminally, feel, subconsciously feel they might not think that’s a bit weird, you know? I mean, but they will just feel that. So I think for the people that you deal with and the people that might be watching this, what they need to know is that they need to invest in that consistency as early as possible. What do you think?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:22:18] Yeah. Consistency is key, isn’t it?

Martin Henley: [00:22:21] Consistency, is it?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:22:22] And then that’s just what that show we’ve tied. That’s what that showed that the trust was in that Target logo and the orange ball. Look, Coca-Cola does a cherry flavor. They don’t call it, you know, cherry Blast and a whole new branding. They’re like, no, no, Coca-Cola is the trusted brand. And this is just the version, you know. Yes. The whole products and then product offshoots and, you know, new new portfolio products are all linked. Yes. So the trust, you’re not starting from scratch.

Martin Henley: [00:22:54] Yes. And with Richard Branson and the Virgin brand, it’s always virgin this and virgin that and virgin something else. And with David Beckham, it’s always David Beckham doing this thing. I mean, so it’s about leverage the brand. But you don’t change it necessarily.

Roger Martin: [00:23:09] What not to do on this front was the Instagram change in logo is just a self inflicted wound where you’ve got a camera. Right, that everybody understands it’s Instagram and then you’ve got some designers saying, well, that’s old fashioned. Yes, it was. Yes, it was. It was an old fashioned looking camera that everybody understood meant Instagram and they created something kind of new that looked really new. Who cares? Right? Literally, it just it it’s boggling to me. I’m blown away at how often websites get enhanced. It drives me nuts. I have a favorite sports app. My favorite sports app did a refresh and everything was in a different place than it was before. How you clicked on it. I finally said enough already and went back and picked a new one. They put themselves back to square one.

Roger Martin: [00:24:15] Keep as much of the cumulative advantage you can keep. Does that mean don’t ever mess with the product? No, no, no. Right. If the product is advancing in your competitive set, you have to advance it as well. But you can advance it in ways to say, Here’s how I connect this product to the previous product. So how much has your iPhone advanced since that?

Martin Henley: [00:24:44] Not very.

Roger Martin: [00:24:45] Much. Who’s thing back in 2007? Enormously, in almost every way. Have the visual cues changed dramatically? Does it look a lot different than it did? Heck no. It’s it’s always had similar visual cues. Look and feel operation are cues to the subconscious. That said, you know, that last iPhone you had that you loved so much, this new one is very much like it only better. And the subconscious is like, Wow, that’s great. That’s awesome. I’m happy. Go get that. Go get the 13. So for cumulative advantage, if I had a choice between using new and using improved. It’s a no brainer. Improved creates a link to the past. New if anything suggests a break with the with the past. What I’m saying is hard to do. There are people who are absolutely utterly convinced that refreshing something beloved is is a good thing, that it’s just a bad thing to let something get kind of old and tired. Unfortunately for them now, all the behavioral research, like all of it, says exactly the opposite. This lies beneath the rational conscious mind. Think about appealing to the subconscious and you appeal to the subconscious when you help the subconscious feel as comfortable as possible.

Martin Henley: [00:26:33] Good. So I think this is interesting and useful, and I think it’s something that people are talking about right now. People are talking about have you heard people talking about biosafety where people don’t want to take a risk and they want to know that the thing that they’re buying is going to work. So it goes to that. But I think there’s another level to this which isn’t really getting to, which is where if your Apple people will buy anything, people will buy a phone every year because they just want the latest thing. So I don’t know what psychological trigger that is or if it’s a psychological trigger or whatever it is, because I think the criticism of Apple in terms of their phones right now is that they’re not there’s not enough evolution in it. I mean, they’re not like there’s not enough change. They’re selling fewer because people are not seeing enough benefit, enough change in the technology to drive it on. I think. What do you think?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:27:33] I’m not sure there’s a question there.

Martin Henley: [00:27:36] The question is there’s there’s something else to this, isn’t there? Like like the apple effect is that apple are apple have innovated. Like when Apple came through with the iPad, for example, there are people queuing up When the new launch comes out, there are people queuing up. So it’s kind of contrary to what he’s saying where new is not cool. But actually Apple like that brand may be so deeply rooted that it’s got to the point where it doesn’t matter what they’re going to sell, there’ll be people queuing up and hoping if they get to buy it. Do you think?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:28:09] Yeah. I mean, you mentioned that safety. I don’t I don’t know if I can relate to that. I mean I won’t I’ve, I’ve been Apple. I was BlackBerry, right. I was BlackBerry until BlackBerry broke itself. It had the massive outage and like it was out of action for a couple of weeks and, you know, can’t really rely on that because, you know, the whole life was in that little keyboard. I moved over to Apple and I’ve never gone back. And and you were I mean, you’ve got a similar story about being an Apple fanboy and that will go into it’s up but yes, I can’t even pick up an android. I don’t know how to turn one on. I just don’t understand. I don’t get it. The tablet doesn’t matter if it’s if it’s not Apple, I can’t even I don’t know where the power is. I don’t know how to turn the volume up. I can’t take a photo, so give it back. So I don’t know what this is. I have it back. Yes, I can take a photo from me. No, I’ve got no idea how that works.

Martin Henley: [00:29:05] Yes, well, we’ve been like ships passing in the night because I was an Apple fanboy and everything I had was Apple. And then I was out with a customer for dinner, and he said, Is that your phone? And I said, Yeah. And he said, Oh, you’ve got a mum’s phone. And that was all he had to say for me to think, okay, the next time I get a new phone, it won’t be an app, it won’t be an iPhone.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:29:22] And why was that? It was like a six year old, you know what I mean?

Martin Henley: [00:29:27] So, no, it wasn’t. It was our age. No, no, no. He was our age. She was just it’s like and then I say that to people now and then they say, well, it’s not a mum’s phone. I say, Where’s your mum? Got one? And they all go, Yeah, so it is a mum’s phone. But then you’ve always used PCs and I’ve since 2008 I’ve always used Macs and I think I played a part in convincing you that you should also have a mac, but you still use Patty every day.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:29:55] And this is a PC here because it’s desktop, it’s my workhorse. I have a laptop which is a mac which could replace this, but it just doesn’t because there’s nothing wrong with it. Yes. And I’ll take the laptop everywhere. Great. But everything nowadays didn’t used to be. Everything nowadays is it doesn’t matter what platform or operating system you are. Adobe doesn’t matter. Word doesn’t matter. Google Chrome doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter why I’m using it doesn’t matter as long as I can turn it on and move the mouse doesn’t matter what it is.

Martin Henley: [00:30:26] Because the mouse.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:30:27] Works.

Martin Henley: [00:30:28] Yeah, because it does matter. Because two years ago was it two years ago already? Might have been 13 months ago, whatever. I was looking to replace my computer because it was slow and I want to edit videos and I want to edit photos and blah blah blah. And then I kind of got drawn to these PCs that are super designed for exactly that function. But then I start speaking to people and it’s like, Well, where are we with the operating system? Because when I left in 2008, it was Vista, which was awful. And then there were seven, and then there was a and then nine didn’t happen and then they’re ten. So there’s only been $0.04. And two of those, according to the person I was buying it from, are failed operating systems, you know what I mean? And then I say, so can I expect to see a blue screen? And he’s like, Well, yeah, of course you’re going to see that. It’s like, Oh, and do I also have to give Bill Gates money to buy that actual software? He’s like, Yeah, yeah, you’re going to have to do that. And am I going to have to have antivirus? It’s like, Yeah, you’re going to have to do that. So the whole thing, he blew it, blew the sale, because then I remembered all the things, all the pain of it, you know?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:31:27] What have you got there then? What’s this?

Martin Henley: [00:31:28] This is a MacBook. I’ve used exclusively Macs since 2008, since I made Toshiba. Not for.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:31:37] Phones.

Martin Henley: [00:31:39] Not for phones? No, I’m on Android. I’m on Google Pixel. So I’ve got my third Google pixel now.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:31:44] I mean, that might be good. I’ve never tried one, but.

Martin Henley: [00:31:47] Yeah, yeah, it’s good. I mean, it’s good. But the thing is, we’re not arguing, but what we’re talking about is, is the thing. It’s horses for courses. Now I’m on this. I’m on this Apple Mac journey. I’m on the Google pixel journey. I’m on in terms of like, well, everything. We have brand relationships, don’t we? When I do my does my business look good? In this presentation, I talk about my brand relationships. Manchester United branded football, specialised branded mountain bikes, Alfa Romeo branded cars, Marks and Spencers branded pants and socks. You know, next branded like we have these brand relationships. So we have these places where we go to buy these things always. And I think the sooner small businesses start to invest in that relationship and invest in that what we call now the customer experience, I don’t know when we started talking about that, but maybe only in the last five years and that customer relationship, then I think the better off they will be. And you don’t see brands, you don’t see businesses come into all of our consciences go viral and come into all of our consciences unless they have got their brand sorted. You know, they’re always brands by the time they appear. So that’s what I think what we do sometimes is look at the comments. You ever look at some comments, see what they see, what they’re saying, But this is all a bit weird. Can I move that that way? No. Um. Minus. Minus, minus, minus.

Jim Cunliffe: [00:33:17] No.

Martin Henley: [00:33:18] I can’t read these. It’s no good. I’m sure they’re just going to be saying stuff like we’re saying. Shall we draw a line? Are you having your breakfast now?

Jim Cunliffe: [00:33:26] Draw a line.

Martin Henley: [00:33:27] Okay, good. Let’s draw a line. So I think this is interesting. I think businesses should be investing in their brands. They should be knowing that it’s not actually just about the logo and the fonts, but that’s probably where you start. And the colours is actually about investing in that customer relationship, in that customer experience. And the sooner you start investing in that, the better off you will be, I think. I think you invest in brands, so you have that loyalty, you can charge more, you can sell more stuff. These are all the reasons that we have. Brand Okay, good. So I hope you found this interesting and useful. If you have found it interesting and useful, you should like share, comment, subscribe and we’ll be here the next time you stop by. Thank you.

Martin Henley

Martin Henley

Martin has built a reputation for having a no nonsense approach to sales and marketing and for motivating audiences with his wit, energy, enthusiasm and his own brand of audience participation. Martin’s original content is based on his very current experience of running effective marketing initiatives for his customers and the feedback from Effective Marketing’s successful and popular marketing workshops.

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