Reality Upgrade

Sight and hearing are easy. But in order to really connect on an emotional level with someone, you need to do more. Memories are usually connected with a particular sensory input, and that type of sensory input will most easily trigger that memory. Since the goal of branding is to be remembered, and stand out, the more senses you can attach to your brand, the higher the chance you will be remembered.

Also, if you pay attention to the “other” senses, (touch, smell, taste) you will have more control over what you are remembered for. You may have the best presentation, and a great product, but if your clients only remember you body odor, or even only that you shake hands strangely…well, you missed your goal. By thinking about all five senses, you can make sure that your clients’ entire experience with you is reinforcing your brand.

The sense of smell, in particular, has an incredibly powerful effect on memory and emotion, and is often overlooked when marketing.

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There are five major car companies in Germany, and to the outside world they could easily seem very similar. After all, they are all “German Engineering,” they are all luxury models, high quality, and stylish. In fact, they all have rather similar symbols, all of them based around a circle in some way.

However, each different manufacturer has a different brand. BMW is about sporty, classy, and fast. Mercedes is also classy, but more about luxury then sport. Audi is young and hip, but with sophistication. Volkswagen is a more affordable brand targeted at young people. And there’s Opel, which I had never even heard of until I started looking into German car manufacturers. (continue reading…)

You have 8 seconds. No, I’m not kidding.

Continuous Attention Span

The average continuous attention span on an adult human is 8 seconds. This is how long a human can focus on an object without any lapse at all. After this amount of time, it is likely that an individual’s eyes will shift focus, or that a stray thought will briefly enter consciousness.

This means that you have 8 seconds, and only 8, to get across your brand message.

That does not mean you have to give an entire presentation on what you do in 8 seconds, but your brand message - the “Just Do It” - has to fit there. Any longer, and something else will distract the audience from your message. After all, how effective would “Just Do - huh, how’d that bug get in here - It” be?

General Attention Span

The average attention span of an adult human is about 20 minutes - this is how long a person can stay concentrated on one general thing without needing a break or some kind. That means that if you are making any kind of presentation, you must keep it to under 20 minutes, or your audience will stop paying attention, without even noticing that it is happening.

You can get around this time limit by giving the audience “breaks”, but in general your should keep it to under 20 minutes. Anything you really need to say, you can say in that amount of time.

And in the spirit of keeping it short, see you next week.

Step 1 - It’s all about them

Step 2 - Hearts, then minds

Step 3 - Keep it simple

Step 4 - Keep repeating it

Once you have a simple message that is relevant to the client and appropriately targeted at their feelings rather than their logic… keep repeating it.

This sounds rather simple, but be careful. It is easy to forget about some great opportunities here. Your brand should be on, or in, everything you do. Eat, sleep, and breathe your message. Every time you have any communication with a client, reinforce your brand. You need to associate yourself and your product so strongly with your brand that it stops being something separate from you and becomes who you are, at least in the mind of the client.

The memory neurons in the brain form memories by building patterns of connections between neurons. If a new pattern is similar to an existing pattern, the new pattern is easier to remember. Similarly, if a pattern is repeated, it becomes easier to remember.

If you have a hard time remembering the names of people when you first meet them, you are probably familiar with this concept. It might take you four or five times of hearing someone’s name before you remember it. Some of the tricks people use to remember names, like associating someone’s name with something else about them, tend to work using this concept as well. By tying together a name and something else, you have reinforced that pattern, and therefor make it easier to remember.

Unfortunately, your clients are not likely to try to remember your brand. They are not going to use memory tricks, or songs, or anything else to remember better. You have to do the work for them, by repeating it over, and over, and over, and over, until they remember it.

One thing to note, before we move on, is that it is very important to have a consistent message. It is one thing to repeat it all the time, but if you are not repeating the same thing every time, repeating it is not reinforcing the memory. In fact, it is probably just confusing.

Step 1 - It’s all about them

Step 2 - Hearts, then minds

Step 3 - Keep it simple

Step 5 - Keep it short

KISS: Besides being a band of relative success and questionable taste in facepaint, it is also a great acronym.

Keep It Simple, Stupid.

This is very appropriate when it comes to branding. A simple brand is incredibly important, for several reasons.

1: A simple brand is easy to remember. It is important to have a brand that is easily associated with you or your company, and so it has to be easy to remember.

2: A simple brand is easy to incorporate. In order to stay congruent with your brand, everything from your advertising to your slogan to your shirts should point back to your brand, and if you have a complicated brand image, this can get hard to do.  After all, how do you make a slogan that implies your company “has a great work ethic, cares about animals (but mostly pandas), likes long walks on the beach, and does software really well, mostly in the military field.” 

Actually, a panda made of lines of code and carrying a rocket launcher would be pretty cool.  But you get the idea.

Examples of great brands that keep it simple are everywhere, from Nike’s Just Do It to Geico’s Save 15% (or more!). The trick is not so much to have a short slogan, but to have a simple concept.

For instance, Coca-Cola does not exactly have a slogan like Nike or Geico, but it does have a concept, which can be nicely summed up by “Ahhhh…” - refreshing, fun, tasty, etc.  Simple, yes. Easy to remember, on a feeling basis, yes. Easy to associate with all kinds of advertising, yes. Check plus for Coke.

So learn from the best, and keep your brand identity simple, stupid.

Step 1 - It’s all about them

Step 2 - Hearts, then minds

Step 4 - Keep repeating it

There are different ideas of how long it takes to form an initial impression of someone, from 7 seconds to 60. However, everyone agrees that within only a few moments of meeting you, your new contact has already decided whether they like you or not. From that point on, all of your interaction with that person will be either reinforcing that opinion, or fighting hopelessly against it.

The reason that the first impression is so important is that most decisions are made emotionally, not intellectually. For all that we would like to believe we are rational beings, humans are more controlled by our subconscious than we would like to admit. If a potential client likes you in the first sixty seconds, then the only thing you have to convince them of is what to hire you for. On the other hand, if a potential client does not like you in the first sixty seconds, you have almost no chance at all of being hired, no matter how much convincing you do.

The trick to real marketing, then, is not to sell what you do, but to sell yourself; or more specifically, your brand. And you have between 7 and 60 seconds to do it.

A great example of marketing to emotions rather than intellect is Budweiser. Anyone who drinks beer regularly knows that Budweiser is not the best quality beer. However, they sell more than 50% of the beer sold in the US. The reason for this is that they are not trying to sell their beer as the best, but as the one that is the most fun. After all, the “beer drinking ideal” is to have a six pack and hang out with friends. So Budweiser is trying to connect their brand with the feelings of being with friends, partying, hot girls, etc. And it is clearly working.

So learning from Budweiser’s example, you need to find what emotion your potential client is looking for, and connect your brand to that emotion. Then, throughout your relationship, reinforce that emotional connection. Remember, there may be hundreds of people/companies that can do what you do, but only you make your client feel the way you can.

Step 1 - It’s all about them

Step 3 - Keep it simple

Branding? What?

Branding has become a catchphrase in the marketing world. I tend to be biased against anything that is a catchphrase for anything, but in this case I will make an exception, because the concept of branding is incredibly useful. 

Branding can be a great marketing tool, and I will talk about it from that perspective in this article and the ones that follow, but “branding” like this can mean a lot of things. Branding can be the brand name of a huge company, like Coca-Cola or Nike. It can be the local reputation of a small company. It can be the “personal brand” of a consultant or freelancer. 

But it can also be your own personal brand, the image of you as a person. 

In the same way, marketing can be selling a product or a service, but it can just as easily be selling yourself. You sell yourself in everything from a job interview to meeting someone in a bar. Developing your own personal brand is critical in social situations of all kinds. In future articles I will talk more about using branding in casual social situations, rather than business. But for now we will discuss the general concepts of branding in business. 

The first step to branding success is that it’s all about them.

Find out what your client wants, and provide it.

That sounds a lot simpler than it actually is. The real difficulty is in the first part: Find out what your client wants.

This is probably the most difficult part of branding success. The problem is that most of the time, even clients themselves do not know what they want.

For example, I worked for an engineering firm who performed design services for new buildings. The obvious answer to the question “what do our clients want” was simple - they wanted good engineers, for a good price. If we asked them what they wanted, they would even say so.

This was a problem for us, because no matter how good and cheap we were, there is always someone better and cheaper.

Luckily, we realized that what our clients actually wanted was something else entirely. What they really wanted, whether they realized it consciously or not, was comfort. Designing and building a new building is a very complicated, expensive, and confusing process. Our clients were rightly nervous. They were afraid that the engineering firm they hired would mess something up, cause them problems, and cost them more money in the long run.

So, we stopped selling our design services, and started selling comfort. We became the company that an owner would not have to worry about later. Yes, we were more expensive, but isn’t it worth it to know you won’t have headaches later?

And it worked.

So the first step is find out what your client wants, and then give it to them.

Step 2 - Hearts, then minds