Branding Basics


Strong Brand: Every Company Needs One

  • What It Is: A unique value proposition that evokes gut reactions from target/actual customers: military, industrial, commercial, and consumer

  • Brands & Products: Products and services are incidental brand-delivery vehicles — they come and go — and either boost or kill the brand. Customers buy solutions and value, not products … and certainly not technologies

  • Brands & Selling: Continuously sharpening the brand is a necessity, not a luxury, through every economic cycle — especially a recession. Unique, strong brand is Teflon for the sales funnel

  • What It Ain’t: Displaying a photo, product/industry/technology description, tagline, and fancy logo (“Do They Understand Your Brand?”)

  • CEO’s Neck on the Line: If the brand is murky to employees, investors, partners, customers, and suppliers, they’ll redefine it to suit themselves — killing revenues and share value, and putting the CEO’s neck on the line (“NBC’s Brand: Clear as Mud”).


Strong Brand: Teflon for the Sales Funnel

In today’s competitive, tech-oriented world, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish one vendor from another. Look, for 15 seconds, at a typical Website; what do you see? Product attributes, posted for and by product designers. Waste of words. White Noise. Confusion. No brand. Window shopping. Search-engine optimization (SEO/SEM) can’t fix that!

This discussion is not about Website design. If you think it is, go back to the top of this page. Start over. Read carefully.

I focus on the Website because it’s the container of the brand, the jar that exposes the jam, the most-visible indicator of brand ingredients and strength.

If your brand is weak on your Website, it’s weak everywhere: CEO presentations, sales pitches, employee training, channel recruiting, financial documents, executive summaries, product brochures, corporate advertising, and, therefore, in customers’ guts. (“Brand Always Pulls the Revenue Cart”)


Strong branding begets easy selling. The ideal salesforce is a group of ordertakers, every CEO’s utopia. You want ordertakers? Invest in becoming a unique standout, in creating a strong brand: Teflon for the sales funnel. The stronger the brand, the faster and easier the sale.

Weak branding begets slow selling. Weak branding means life in the white noise — locus of slow sales, no sales, or being ignored altogether. It’s true. If customers don’t grasp your brand, your sales funnel will operate like a clogged drain (“Branding vs. Blending”).
 

Why CEOs Should Care: Weak Brand = High Cost of Sales
Why Investors Should Care: Weak Brand = Anemic IRR


Marc Rudov: The WhiteNoise Doctor™

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a unique, skilled executive, strategist, and communicator — an internationally known thought-leader who coined GutShare™: that portion of the customer’s gut that a brand occupies.


RADIO: Marc Rudov Tells Steve Bengston
of PriceWaterhouseCoopers:

The Root of Weak Branding is Poor Communication

(Click on icon below to hear interview)


Why does Rudov focus on GutShare? People decide with their guts, not their intellects, in both their business and personal lives. Mindshare’s meaningless: it doesn’t grab people and move them to spend money. Penetrating the gut is a brand’s sole objective — impossible to achieve while stuck in the white noise.

Using his extensive business & media backgrounds, Marc Rudov will help CEOs break through the white noise, create a unique brand, penetrate customers’ guts. Remember: Be unique or be ignored.


Branding Action Items

  • Startup Company: Baseline Branding. In one day, we’ll forge the unique, compelling messaging that will resonate with your prospects and bring you visibility — for company and product launches. If there’s more to do after one day, and there usually is, we’ll proceed accordingly. CLICK HERE to contact me.

  • Existing Company: Messaging Makeover. In one day, we’ll review corporate & product value propositions, compare them to customer feedback, and create new, impactful, customer-infused messaging. We’ll extend our engagement, as required, to gather and analyze the input necessary to create a strong, unique brand. CLICK HERE to contact me.

  • All Companies: Media Coaching. I’ll help you nail the next keynote, board meeting, or radio/TV appearance, to ensure that your words have impact — people react to them, remember them, and repeat them — and reinforce your company’s brand (also see Media Coaching). CLICK HERE to contact me.



    • More About Branding

    Your Company’s Key Branding Platforms:

    • Keynotes
    • News Releases
    • IPO Roadshows
    • Advertising
    • Business plans
    • PPMs
    • Investor presentations
    • Sales presentations
    • Websites
    • TV appearances

    Do these platforms effectively articulate your company’s value proposition? Do your target audiences get it — how do you know? You can’t build a brand they don’t understand.

    Two indicators of messaging effectiveness are length/close-rate of sales cycle and length/close-rate of capital-raising cycle.

    If you ever say, “Those customers are idiots; they just don’t get it,” you are the problem — your message is the problem.

    *****

    Do people ever ask, Tell me again what your company does?

    Do journalists consistently mischaracterize your company?

    Does every employee describe your company differently?

    *****

    If the answer to any of these questions is yes, your competitors will eat you alive. I’ll bet your best customer could not stand in a crowded room or elevator to explain — compellingly and succinctly — what your company does.

    Why? Because you can’t explain — compellingly and succinctly — what your company does. This communication deficiency attenuates your success. It negatively affects product development inside your HQ and its acceptance outside your HQ. Poor messaging repels potential customers, partners, and investors.

    Why did people camp out to get the first iPhone, a ridiculously expensive and inadequate product? Because Apple knows how to get people emotionally jazzed up. Apple can communicate.

    Look at your company’s Web site and brochures. Listen to its sales pitches. Are they laden with vendor-speak or replete with customer-speak? Are they full of technology and product jargon, or well-articulated customer problems and associated solutions?

    *****

    Stop thinking that customers care about your products. They don’t. Customers care only about themselves and their problems.

    *****

    Communicate so that customers react to, remember, and repeat your value proposition, so that investors fatten your balance sheet. Get them to get it!

    Most companies cannot do this effectively.

    *****

    Engage me on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. I can help get your company’s brand reacted to, remembered, and repeated. As a radio/TV personality, with exec-level experience in technology, I have the unique blend of skills to help you communicate effectively to your customers, investors, and partners. CLICK HERE to contact me.