How-To Tactics for Positioning Your Agency

Almost no branding expert in America seems to know what a brand actually is. Branding is not about you. Branding is about them. This is a critical point that separates the real brands from the blowhards. This is the bell you want to ring in your end users’ heads when they give you the once over. You want them to see your competition and come running your way bellowing, “Nobody understands me the way you do!”

That’s what gets them in the door—and keeps them coming back for more. So how can you tell a good brand from a bad one?

1. Delivers the message clearly: Our politically correct culture dictates that taking a stand on just about anything guarantees that somebody, somewhere will take offense to it, spawning an entire industry that specialize in saying nothing with as many words as possible. The best brands go against the cultural grain and make clear, concise statements. You don’t have to be a creative genius to make these kinds of statements, either. Simply stating something clearly in a society weaned on weak generalities is the first step toward creating a solid brand.
2. Communicates quickly: The same people who brought you multisyllabic gibberish are also responsible for creating the short attention span. The bad news, incidentally, is that attention spans aren’t getting longer, either. This has never been more true than it is online, where your homepage does it all. If your brand doesn’t get them the second after they’ve hit you, they’re back to searching—and you’re dust.
3. Projects credibility: Sometimes it seems like everyone is trying to sell you something. Somewhere along the way, the claims, language and promises became so ridiculously inflated that they actually mutated from non-believable all the way to becoming laughable.
4. Strikes an emotional chord: Everyone concentrates on technology and products—everything but the people who do the purchasing. Even online, programmers push pounds of technology across the wires, promoting its efficiency, all the while forgetting that technology isn’t doing the buying. The technology is there for one reason: to put people in touch with other people. It’s the same thing with a big time band. It’s not about you. It’s not about your product. It’s not about your service. It’s about them. It’s about their problems and their solutions. And that’s an emotional contact. It’s driven by your strategic goals and objectives. But it’s the brand’s job to integrate the two of them to the point where they become inextricably intertwined.
   A big time brand makes it easy for people to like doing business with you.
5. Motivates the respondent: When people like doing business with you, they’re more prone to actually doing business with you. But lowering that barrier to sales does nothing for you unless you close that sale. A big time brand will motivate the respondent to cross that line. It could manifest itself as a higher rate of response, higher purchase per visit or greater propensity toward upsells. In any case, a big time brand not only presents its solutions, it draws in end users to try it as well.
6. Creates a strong user loyalty: This quality is the one for which branding is most widely known. Yet it’s just as misunderstood as the rest because it’s almost always wrongly attributed to any number of causes. The very best brands are a mix of rational differentiation and compelling personality, two powerful ingredients that cause end users to invest their emotions—along with their wallets—into your brand. I

Rob Frankel is the author of “The Revenge of Brand X: How to Build a Big Time Brand on the Web or Anywhere Else” and has appeared on FOX, CNN, NBC and CNBC.

Define It
Branding is definitely the most misapplied term in all of marketing. Everyone seems to think they know what it is but still can’t define it. So let’s take a moment and set the definitions straight.
Q: What is branding?

1. That thing they burn into cows.
2. A logo or a trademark.
3. A jingle or a slogan.
4. I don’t really know.

The answer is No. 1, “that thing they burn into cows.” And it makes a whole lot of sense. The term “brand” refers to searing the hide of one rancher’s cattle with his distinctive mark so that it couldn’t be confused with anyone else’s. The point, of course, is that if you work hard to mark your product or service that much better than everyone else’s, you certainly want to make sure that the differentiation isn’t lost on your prospective buyers. In fact, you want to go out of your way to make sure they don’t miss it. In the rancher’s case, that means burning his brand into the hide.
—R.F.