Branding

Creating a Mark in the Mind of Your Target Public

Back in the 70s, 1972 specifically, marketing mavens, Jack Trout and Al Ries wrote a booklet called The Positioning Era. In a         nutshell, “positioning” was a vital movement in the development of marketing as a force shaping society.

In that booklet they stated:

“Today it has become obvious that advertising is entering a new era. An era where creativity is no longer the key to success.

“To succeed in our over-communicated society, a company must create a ‘position’ in the prospect’s mind. A position that takes into consideration not only his own strengths and weaknesses, both those of its competitors as well.

“Advertising is entering an era where strategy is king.”

A year earlier, the eminent ad man David Olgivy wrote:

“The results of your campaign depends less on how we write your advertising that on how your product is positioned.”

Now, this is 1971 – note the use of the word “position.”

In that same week, further testimony indicated major change in the world of advertising.  In the New York Times and in Advertising Age some big wig Madison Avenue types said:

“Accurate positioning is the most important step in effective selling.”

Well, what in the… is positioning? And who cares anyway?

Well, let’s back track a little more and you will see why I am bringing up these subjects – we are actually getting to the history and necessity of a phenomenon called “Branding.” You will see the relationships here as I go.

My point is to break down the slick talking marketing stuff so you can use it to forward your own little lonesome.

Back in the 50s, advertising was in the “product” era. These were the good old ‘build a better mousetrap’ days and companies could throw money at advertising and get somewhere.

Product features and one’s “Unique Selling Proposition” were in their heyday.

The late 50s saw technology beginning to rear it’s ugly head. It became more and more difficult to establish that “USP.”

The era came to an end with a snowstorm of “me too” products – most of which you don’t see any more.

Everybody had their better mouse trap and everybody’s trap was better than the other guys trap.

Competition was pretty fierce and along the way some guys got downright dishonest.

Another era bites the dust.

The next era, the party time 60s gave little thought to failure. With the magic of money and enough bright people, a company felt that any marketing program would succeed.

Look at how many dead bodies are floating up on the beach  from that one – DuPont’s Corfam, Gablinger’s beer, Handy Andy all-purpose cleaner, Look magazine.

The world and the advertising business changed at that time and things were never to be the same again.

Rewind a bit back to the 50s

In the 50s Amway began a revolution of their own. Rich and Jay created a new business model. Multi-level Marketing.

This is the era when the current sales techniques that are still being touted as the only way to go by most companies and most of your up-line leaders, came into being.

Is it starting to make sense yet?

Somehow, that 50s business model has resisted the change that has swept the larger business world. It’s sort of stuck in the 50s and has missed not only the boat, but the fleet.

I am guessing that the MLM industry is looking at a wrong set of statistics – the growth of the overall company, not the overall prosperity of it’s distributors, or numbers that fail in the business.

As long as they themselves grow as and pay their stockholders, as long as their overall stats keep climbing, I guess they are happy.

That could well be a reason to resist change. After all, modern marketing methods are not duplicable by the normal guy who starts a home business. Right?

That was probably very true back then.

Okay, fast forward back to the 70s and positioning.

So, Let’s define positioning. It’s what the advertiser does for the product in the prospect’s mind.

An advertiser is dealing with the human mind. Like a memory bank the mind has a slot or “position” for each bit of information it has chosen to retain. It’s a lot like a computer, the mind. One difference though – a computer has to accept what is put into it. The mind doesn’t. If fact, it’s quite the opposite. The mind has built up some pretty decent defense mechanisms to deal with the sheer volume and velocity of today’s communications.

It screens and rejects much of the information offered it. It takes what matches its prior knowledge or experience and filters out everything else. Back then when a viewer saw a TV commercial that said, “NCR means computers,” he didn’t accept it. IBM meant computers. Nowadays, It could be Amazon means books, not everything, including the kitchen sink. (NCR stands for National Cash Register – yes, they attempted to take IBM head on in computers. They lost.)

Positioning is what the successful advertiser does for the product in the prospects mind.

In other words:

Successful advertising positions a product, it does not try to sell it’s advantages or features.

File that one. It will come in handy a little bit later.

So, in summary, the average human mind cannot deal with more than 7 units at a time. The normal guy is exposed in a year to over half a million advertising messages. That was in the 70s – now, it’s probably double that.

The big boys learned that the slot they occupied in the mind of the consumer, meant success or failure in the market place.

Morph Into The Phenomenon Called Branding

If you’ve studied anything about attraction marketing, you have heard about “branding.”

Uh huh. I hear it all the time, tossed off like “of course, you have to brand yourself…”

Do you have any clue what that really is?

I didn’t – I mean, I had some faint inkling, but almost knowing something isn’t enough when you are in heated competition in a marketplace. The better you know your onions, the less you smell like one.

What is branding and how to do “brand” yourself? Well, branding is a marketing phenomenon and with any such “phenomenon” there is a technology to it. There are laws, and just like the law of gravity, if you don’t obey it, you find yourself with broken bones.

Positioning is placing your product in one of those few available slots in your prospects mind. So, when the subject comes up – they say give me a “_______” (insert yourself, your product or company here) instead of your competitor.

Branding could be called burning it in.

According to the book “The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding” by Al Reis, (remember him?) one of the world’s best known marketing strategists:

“Conventional marketing is based on selling when it should be based on branding. Marketing is not selling. Marketing is building a brand in the mind of the prospect. If you can build a powerful brand, you will have a powerful marketing program. If you can’t, all the advertising, fancy packaging, sales promotion, web designs and (auto-responder salvos – my embellishment) in the world won’t help you achieve your objective.”

“Marketing is brand building.”

Okay, we’re getting somewhere here….

The dictionary defines a brand as:

“Brand: an identifying mark burned on livestock or (esp. formerly) criminals or slaves with a branding iron.

“ORIGIN Old English, of Germanic origin; related to German Brand, also to burn.

The word originally meant [burning] or [a piece of burning or smoldering wood.”

No, I am not being entirely facetious. Al Ries parallels that definition in his book by stating:

“From a business point of view, branding in the marketplace is very similar to branding on the ranch.

“A branding program should be designed to differentiate your program from all the other cattle on the range. Even if all the other cattle on the range look pretty much alike.”

So, what are we supposed to do when we brand ourselves? Well, first you have to understand that this is what you have to do in order to be successful in generating income on the internet, or in any other field. The statements – ‘You have to market yourself’ and “marketing is brand building,” are two mouthfuls.

Let’s break this down one more time.

In any group of people, there are what we can call “opinion leaders.” I will state that this phenomenon is at the core of attraction marketing.

Through wisdom, proximity to data sources, personality or other factors, certain members of a group are looked to by others to evaluate; to take information in the environment, sift through it and determine what’s good or bad, right or wrong; what’s survival or non-survival.

This is what is called “adding value,” in our business. Opinion leaders in our field are who we call “alpha marketers.”

An opinion leader or alpha simply put is the person that the group assigns subconsciously to determine what is survival information and what isn’t. Simply put, the “tribe” doesn’t listen to others opinions but they do listen to their chief. So, by increasing your knowledge and using it to help others become successful you become that opinion leader or tribal chief so to speak and you are listened to.

This then “brands” you correctly in the minds of others who then will do what you suggest to them – that is to say, they buy from you.

Al Ries says:

“The essence of a brand is some idea or attribute or market segment you can own in the mind.”

This is the connection to your home business, marketing and the internet. In the over-communicated world on the internet, you have to somehow distinguish yourself from the crowd. This is branding.

In the next page, we move into the steps you can take to begin branding yourself in your market.

Al @ Components of Success