Every person in your organization is telling your story. Paid, volunteer, happy or disgruntled, everyone matters when it comes to your brand’s perception. People talk about brand management like it’s something a highly paid executive carefully orchestrates from the company’s headquarters. But more often than not, managing a brand’s perception is left to those at the front lines of contact, such as hourly sales workers or volunteers. Millions of dollars in advertisement cannot overcome a poorly trained or unhappy minimum-wage employee.A while back, I went to the Guess store looking for a shirt. The store was somewhat busy, but soon a helpful sales lady opened a dressing room for me and brought me several shirts she she wanted me to try on.  Through the course of the conversation, she asked about my jeans preference and brought me 4 or 5 pairs to try. Beth was great at her job. When…

The question is almost always the same: how can I improve my __? Whether the question refers to a skill, a product, an experience, it’s ultimate about a brand.  How can I improve my brand, then becomes the question. There are corporate, product and individual brands. A brand represents a promise that it makes in the mind of its intended audience. A successful brand evokes positive feelings and delivers in its promises. We all want to improve and grow, but the answer to that question is not as obvious as you might think. Before we can get to the next level, whatever that might mean, we must know at least two critical concepts. What’s my brand promise? Who’s my audience? Your Brand Promise. That’s what your audience/customer/client can expect to get from you. Walmart’s brand promise is simple: everyday low prices. There’s a lot of things you don’t expect from…

In the new world of marketing and advertising, it’s not as much about your message as it is about engaging your audience in a dialogue about your message. Long ago marketing was all about exposing a product to the public. As competition grew and more products and services continued to vie for our attention, exposing a product was no longer enough. Marketers then began positioning it within a category or industry. They strived to place products in the minds of consumers by creating an unique promise, claim, or even story. But in today’s social-media drive culture, position is not enough. Consumers want a conversation with their favorite brands. Consumers now want, and will soon demand, marketing that gives them a chance to dialog with their brands of choice. It’s not enough for us to know the story behind our favorite car, soap, or burrito. We now want to be able…

Your organization’s brand is more important than you might realize. Branding is not the “voodoo of marketers” but the sum total impression of everything you are as an organization. In a nutshell it is the essence of who you are organizationally. Communicating it properly is essential; not doing so can be disastrous. Here are the most critical brand mistakes you should avoid: Assume your target audience understands your brand promise. Whether you manufacture guitars or lead a local church, you must always fight the insidious thought that…just because you have been around for a while or just because you are the biggest building on your side of town…your target audience understands and even cares what you have to offer. Successful brands know they need to continually tell their story to an ever-growing population faced with an increasingly noisy and crowed world. Assume those closest to yo, your consumers or constituents,…

The larger an organization grows, the more its brand message and promise gets delivered by their lowest paid employee: the front liner. Whether your business is retail, food services, theme parks, or a church, those first interactions with a customer usually happen with the lowest paid person in that organization. These are part-time sales people, wait staff, hourly workers and in the case of churches, not-for-profits, and ministries, those positions are volunteers who give of their own time to serve. The challenge here is to create a effective system to screen, train, and measure the effectiveness of the front line team. Disney Parks figured that out a long time ago and has created an effective way to make sure that each “cast” member understands the importance they have as spokespeople for the Disney brand. Chick-Fil-A is another organization that hires and trains their front line employees to carry the company’s…

I was listening to a discussion today about people’s online identity. Years ago it was taboo, and even considered unsafe to have your own name in forums and chat rooms–the precursors of today’s social media. And a lot of people still create user names that allow them to be anonymous. I’m looking at my Twitter feed right now and see names such as “Shoemoney” and “Angelcollector.” Creating pseudonyms online is web 1.o thinking. Intuitively I have always used my first and often last name in chat rooms, forums, and now Facebook, Twitter, Google+, and whatever comes next. The main reason I use my real name online is because, for me, the web is not a place where I go to hide, but I place where I go to connect,  share my voice, and engage clients and potential clients. It’s a place where what I do and who I am intersect…

Sometimes your best PR and marketing campaign is not telling everyone of about your “new and improved” product, which, by the way, are the two most over used and no longer effective words in marketing. People don’t really believe that the new and improved is necessarily better than the old. Think about it. What’s your reaction when you see a label that touts that? Late in  2009 Domino’s pizza had a massive PR nightmare in its hands. Thirty-second spots on national television featured Domino’s own employees saying things like “the sauce tastes like ketchup,” and “the pizza crust tastes like cardboard to me.” The spots were excerpts from “Pizza Turn Around,” a four-minute documentary about the company’s two-year battle to re-invent a better pie…commissioned by Domino’s itself. The “our pizza sucks” campaign worked. After the episodes aired, Domino’s posted a 14.3 percentage increase in sales per store–a record for the…

“We are afraid of wasting money on social media. What’s our ROI (return on investment?)” said a potential client recently. I understand the hesitance, especially from organizations that have successfully fundraised, or sold goods, for decades through more traditional means such as events and direct mail. I understand their concern. It’s a legitimate one. What should they do? Here’s my answer: Continue doing what’s working. If you are finding success through direct mail, it would be foolish to stop pursuing it. But also look at trends and costs. Most likely you are seeing a diminishing return on your investments in these campaigns. With good strategy and planning you can incorporate social media tools inside your traditional advertisement or appeals. Reach a new audience while you can. There are great groups of people that do not respond to letters of appeal or glossy brochures. If you don’t engage them now, you…

A logo is a visual representation of an entity, may it be a business, a church, an organization or an individual (remember when Prince dropped his name and wanted to be know by his logo?). My company, The A Group, has created hundreds of logos over the past several years. The process has been as simple or as complicated as each client, but at the end all good logos ultimately share the same DNA. 1. It can be reproduced in one solid color. If your logo needs two or four colors to look good or it needs that nifty 3D effect to look ok, it’s not a successful logo. If it works in solid black then it will work in any color or rendering. 2. It’s simple. I cannot tell you how many times I have run into logos that tried to “tell a story.” Like verbosity, these overly symbolic…

“We are good at copying but not good at being authentic.” Those were difficult words for a pastor to say, but both he and I knew they were true. As we talked, he told me he had visited enough congregations to know how churches freely “borrowed” others’ identity.  I ran into that problem early on in my marketing career as I was asked to create something that looked exactly like someone else’s work . Even today, my company gets calls from churches that want to use one of our client’s  logo, brand identity and promises as their own. That’s a disaster waiting to happen. I believe that’s a problem way beyond churches and businesses.  We often want to copy the style of something or someone without possession any of the substance.  I know church leaders go to great lengths to look and act like  prominent Christian leaders without spending the…