I truly believe that ‘small’ brands and businesses are poised for growth in today’s crowded marketing environment. Below is some (free) advice on how to build a brand when you can’t afford the Super Bowl half-time, nor even a local TV spot. I intend to turn the tables here, by giving small brands some tips that large players could hardly, if ever implement.

1. Offer A Product That Is Noticeably Different And Superior

A local brewery can’t compete with Budweiser’s marketing budget. But its product is locally-made, has a distinctive taste and comes across as authentic. Such craft beer should be marketed to connoisseurs that seek your craftsmanship as well as regular beer drinkers that will indulge with your product from time to time. Remember that you are not trying to dominate the lager segment: these same people likely drink Budweiser also and that’s ok. Your play is to secure a niche of loyal buyers and leverage the uniqueness and quality of your product to command a price premium.

This same strategy can be implemented for any artisan-made products, such as small-batch whisky, scented candles, olive oil, barbeque sauce or marmalade. If your production is very small (for now), take the time to write labels, and thank you cards by hand. Yes, it takes ages and doesn’t scale up, but it costs pennies and handwriting is the hallmark of authenticity.

The smaller the budget, the more you will have to rely on your point of difference. If you don’t have one, here are 50 ideas. Brands with small budgets should focus their resources on promoting their strengths, ideally the key point of difference. Often, being local can be your strongest link versus large competitors. In cases like these communicate your local origins, reflect the local culture and reposition the ‘strangers’ as your far away, disconnected rivals.

2. Engage In Customer Intimacy

Jack Trout once pointed out, being ‘mentally closer’ to what’s important to customers sparks an intimacy that is a core advantage for smaller brands. For example, cross-fit studios, spin-cycling studios and other small gyms charge 2-5 times more than large fitness chains. Yet they often offer a lot less amenities, in much smaller venues. Their success is found in customer intimacy. That is, to understand the goals of each and every member, develop custom fitness programs accordingly and track member’s progress. I worked for a large health club chain early in my career. Keeping track of each member in a club that hosts 2,500, let alone remembering their name is next to impossible. For $40/month at a large chain, you buy access to a well-lit parking lot, plethora of equipment and large changing rooms decked out with saunas and hot tubs. For $150/month at a local gym studio, you pay for personalized training and membership in a community.

Of course customer intimacy is not limited to the fitness industry. Consider these examples: The Papercake Gal (a.k.a Larissa) designs custom wedding stationary with monograms that extend to party favors, postage stamps and even lighting at the reception. Also, Klein Epstein & Parker designs made-to-measure clothes at similar or lower prices than designer suits.

3. Provide Useful And Meaningful Content

Meaningful content is one of the great business equalizers of our times, lifting profiles to that of much larger competitors. While this is widely known, today many small brands have yet to take advantage of the opportunity. Creating content (like this article) is hard work, but it’s cost effective and pays off. People seek and value free, ‘how to’ content to help them deliver on their projects. To be impactful, your content must be informative and express innovative and actionable ideas that matter to your target customer while relating to the essence of your brand. The key to success is persistence: whether you maintain a blog, Instagram feed, LinkedIn profile or Youtube channel, it will take weeks, possibly months before you gain any real traction. Therefore, try to produce content that will be valuable to your audience in the long run. ‘5 tips to lose weight in the New Year’ might be newsworthy today, but becomes pretty irrelevant after January.

If you don’t want to educate your audience, you can simply showcase your craft: Mark’s Bake Shoppe in Staten Island produces outstanding videos and pictures that feature Mark’s artisan-made cakes and pastries. It’s no wonder his Instagram account boasts 1,300+ followers. And if you think 1,300 is small, check the following of your local grocery store (assuming it has any).

Be sure to develop your content with customer intimacy in mind, this is key versus the larger players.

To sum up, most of these strategies require hard work and don’t scale well, but they’ll lay the foundation for a stronger brand on a small budget.

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Last week, in response to my piece on whether brands should be un-designed, Paul Bailey made an excellent observation: “as long as we consider people as consumers then they will continue to be passive recipients” he pointed out. “Consumers ‘consume’ value. They are at the end point of the industrial era value chain. For people to be encouraged to find meaning in a brand, it has to be in what they share rather than what they buy.”

I liked Paul’s comment for two reasons. First of all, I thought his point about consumers was astute. As – can I call them buyers? – look to participate more fully in how their lives happen, they are less interested in what gets served up, and more focused on having a stake in what they get. They want to feel acknowledged. Secondly, they don’t want to do so alone. They want to be able to share and socialize what they are involved with, with those that matter to them. There’s a level of intimacy and trust in both those actions that marketers can easily overlook.

Big brands have some distinctive advantages. They’re everywhere. They’re famous. They have big budgets and big ambitions. They have influence. In some sectors, they dominate how things happen and what gets talked about. But in their rush to achieve convenience, prestige or some other ‘compelling’ emotion, big brands easily mistake personas for people. They serve up broad-appeal offerings to profiles and feel they have achieved consumer intimacy. They mistake visibility for effectiveness.

And that’s the opportunity for small players. As Maclean Fisher points out, “As incumbents exploit market dominance and economies of scale, they forget to explore ways to better tailor offerings to customers and strengthen relationships yielding trust. In turn, individuals – hungry, excited, ambitious – are identifying areas where there lies potential to change the dynamic, where individuals could be treated better, and where those in power have either grown complacent, or seemingly lost focus on who they serve.”

The secret sauce for small brands is also size. But in direct contrast to the big brands, that size is focused the other way: on intimacy; on the changes that those who buy or support see themselves championing; on interactions that mirror the ways customers feel comfortable interacting; on the feelings that should be being heard by larger competitors, but usually aren’t.

Maybe that’s the new differentiation for small brands. It’s not about being a big brand in the making, it’s about being a kindred spirit. It’s about how you behave as a brand, and how that makes people feel. It’s about, as Jack Trout once pointed out, being mentally closer to what’s important to customers than the big companies dare.

A brand like this is relatively easy to start, but it’s a very hard brand to grow. That brand cannot rely on efficiencies or technology or even products to lift its game. Instead it must scale its empathy. It must maintain eye contact. It must fight the tendency to broaden its appeal and focus on its constituency. Maybe that’s the real challenge, and the new success.

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The pizza place went a different route. Instead of spreading money between off- and online ads, it spent the entire budget on radio. The spots were simple but extremely effective. So effective, the restaurant’s increased business caused most of the local competition to shut down.

How did they do it?

Instead of offering discounts or merely promoting its URL, the pizza place’s radio ads asked listeners to tear out all the pizza-restaurant pages from their yellow pages and bring them in. In return for the pages, customers received a free pizza of their choice and a sticker with the restaurant’s URL.

Very clever!

Because the contact information for all the other pizza joints in town disappeared from customers’ primary reference source, only one set of contact details was left in households that complied: the URL for the restaurant that dreamed up the promotion. That single outlet is now a franchise.

Creating traffic is not necessarily a matter of buying ads or taking a traditional approach.

Of course, there’s always room for traditional thinking. It works and always will. But if you really want to build effective traffic and branding, go one step further. That is, unless you’re a Microsoft with an almost unlimited marketing budget.

Generating traffic combines traditional thinking with three idea-based elements. The idea is crucial. First, create the idea as the local pizza place did. Develop an idea that not only generates attention but also generates appropriate attention — attention that enables people to remember the information that engaged them and to act on it.

You’ll never forget the pizza story, right? The idea (removing the pizza pages from the yellow pages) is simple, clever, cheap, and audacious. Second, promote the idea via traditional off- and online channels and via new channels. The effectiveness of every piece of your communication is increased tenfold if each promotes that pivotal idea rather than simply touting some special offer, new taste sensation, or new product. Third, optimize any channel you use and ensure the message points in your direction.

I don’t need to remind you more than half of today’s brands have yet to optimize the way search engines secure consumer awareness of their existence. A quarter of the world’s brands have not incorporated their URLs into the message customers hear on the phone while on hold. Nor have they added standard signature lines to emails that include the company URL. These details amount to free branding.

What’s more important: the chicken or the egg? Both. Far too many brand builders believe traffic is secondary to site development. Wrong. Unless you have an unlimited budget, you can’t afford not to think creatively. You risk ending up like all those vanquished pizza competitors.

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Who are they? What are their hopes, needs, fears, desires, aspirations, values and anxieties? What need(s) do your products and services fulfill for them? Why would they choose your organization’s products and services over those of one of its competitors? That is, what makes your organization different in a customer-relevant and compelling way? Put another way, what would your customers miss most if your organization ceased to exist?

Next, the organization must identify the primary benefits it delivers to its customers.

Benefits can be:

•functional (This car was rated the safest in its category by Consumer reports)

•emotional (Harley Davidson makes me feel like a rebel, a free spirit.)

•experiential (I pamper myself when I take a break at a Starbucks. It is an inexpensive indulgence. They make me feel so welcome there.)

•self-expressive (People know I have money and good taste when I carry a Gucci handbag.)

Emotional, experiential and self-expressive benefits are often more compelling and less easy for competitors to copy than functional benefits.

It is very powerful to translate that brand promise into a tagline (The Nature Conservancy: Saving the last great places on earth or Nike: Just do it). Typically, that tagline would accompany your organization’s logo wherever it appears.
 Ideally, your brand’s name, logo, colors, visual style, tone of voice and personality will also reinforce (or at least not clash with) your brand’s promise. All of these should be carefully crafted and consistently applied to all of your organization’s internal and external communications.  You can achieve this by developing ‘brand identity standards and systems’ and mandating that all of your employees use them.

Next, you can ideate ways to make your brand’s promise real at each point of contact your organization makes with its customers – pre-purchase, at the point of purchase, immediately after the purchase, during product/service usage and ongoing to build loyalty. The following are possible points of contact: advertising, sales associate contact, product/service usage, newspaper articles, customer support, technical support, special events, membership organizations, web site, promotions, direct mailings, newsletters, etc.

If your organization is relatively young, the most important thing you can do is build brand awareness quickly and aggressively. If your organization provides the highest quality products available, supported by outstanding service at the best prices, but no one has heard of it, it will not sell anything. Brand awareness building is the most important aim of advertising and almost any other marketing activity, especially for smaller and younger organizations. Find and use every way possible to let people know about your brand and its promise.

One of the least expensive and most powerful ways to build brand awareness quickly is through proactive publicity and ‘word of mouth marketing’ that creates ‘buzz.’  Saturn transformed a potential crisis into positive publicity and a television commercial that spread the news about one of its dealers flying to Alaska on a rented plane to replace a part on a recalled car in the customer’s own garage. And many brands do the same without the advertising. All of the following brands initially built their business with little to no advertising: Harley-Davidson, Body Shop, Starbucks, Gateway, Compaq, Wal-Mart, Haagen-Dazs, Palm Pilot, Hotmail, Trivial Pursuit and ICQ.

Another thing to consider, if your organization is relatively new is the importance of building trust with and offering assurance to your customers and potential customers. That’s what brand building is all about — building trusting relationships and emotional connections. But, it takes time.  First someone has to know your brand.  Then it takes time for them to like it. Finally, they begin to trust it.  In the interim, these are some things you can do to build trust quickly: offer guarantees, provide testimonials from current satisfied customers and deliver outstanding service.

Following are some marketing tactics that smaller to medium sized businesses should consider:

•Conduct demonstrations, classes and workshops.
•Speak at conferences and for professional associations.
•Hold contests.
•Write articles for newspapers, periodicals and professional journals.
•List employees as experts.
•Be a guest on or host a local radio or television show on your area of expertise.
•Network online and offline (in professional associations, conferences, trade shows, benchmarking groups, chambers of commerce, usenet groups, chats, online forums, etc.).
•Publish newsletters (online or offline).
•Write a book.
•Hire a publicist.
•Maintain relationships with the press.
•Get involved in civic organizations.
•Donate money to local charities, especially complementary causes.
•Volunteer to judge competitions.
•Wear branded shirts and other clothing.
•Cross-promote with complementary or nearby businesses.
•Give away insignia merchandise (featuring your business’s name, logo, tag line and contact information).
•Write letters to new residents introducing them to your business (perhaps offering them a free or reduced-price trial).

Finally, the most important thing a business can do when it markets itself is to put itself in its customer’s shoes. What does the customer really want? What are the most important factors in the purchase decision?  Where or how does the customer prefer to shop?  What information sources does the customer rely upon to make purchase decisions? When is the customer most inclined to buy? What can our brand say or do that will make the customer choose us over the competition?  Ultimately, the success of your marketing efforts will depend on thoughtful, honest analysis, a good understanding of customer psychology and behavior and common sense.

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Q. Many of us throw branding, marketing and advertising into the same bucket. Can you help us sort out the differences?

A. Marketing is a discipline (or set of activities) ultimately designed to generate and increase revenues.  It includes a wide variety of sub-disciplines, strategies and tactics.  For instance, all of the following can be components of a marketing program:

•Marketing research
•Customer knowledge/analysis
•Competitive knowledge/analysis
•Product
•Packaging
•Pricing
•Branding
•Marketing communication (including advertising)
•Distribution
•Promotion
•Publicity
•Media relations
•Industry analyst relations
•Signing
•Merchandising
•Cause-related marketing
•Event marketing
•Trade shows
•Sales support
•Web sites
•Customer relationship marketing, including data base marketing and direct marketing
•Viral marketing
•Guerilla marketing (pictured)

A marketing plan should promise specific revenue or market share increases in return for specific levels of funding for particular marketing strategies and tactics.

The marketing function can be organized by brand, customer, customer need segment, product category, functional sub-discipline (such as advertising, promotion, etc.) or some combination of these.

Advertising is paid for marketing communication.  It is a marketing sub-discipline as noted above.  Advertising’s major benefit is to increase awareness.  It also communicates the brand’s (or product’s) relevant point(s) of difference and can achieve other ends, depending upon the objective.  For many consumer product categories, it can actually elicit a sale.  For most business to business categories, it can only increase awareness and preference and put the brand in the consideration set.

A brand is the personification of an organization or its products and services.  Brands are designed to build relationships and emotional connection with customers.  Brands are also the source of promises to customers.  They should promise relevant differentiated benefits.  So, branding is the process of creating an identity for an organization or its products and services for the purpose of creating relationships with customers and making promises to customers.  Branding is a sub-discipline of marketing, but given its increasing role at an organizational level (organizational branding versus product-specific branding) and the resulting need to manifest the brand promise at each point of customer contact, branding should influence virtually every activity in the organization.  Branding is the source of (1) customer goodwill and (2) a significant portion of the financial value of a company.

There is increasing evidence and consensus that strong brands deliver the following business benefits:

•Decreased price sensitivity
•Increased consumer loyalty
•(For manufacturers) increased bargaining power with retailers
•Independence from a particular product category
•Increased flexibility for future growth (through extension)
•Increased ability to hire and retain talented employees
•Increased ability to focus the organization’s activities & resources
•Increased market share
•Increased stock price
•Increased shareholder value

In summary, marketing is a broad set of activities designed to generate and increase sales (in the short-medium- and long-term).  Branding is designed to increase sales and market share in the long-term by establishing relationships with customers. Both rely on advertising as a very powerful tool.

Q. Small businesses don’t have budgets like P & G to invest in their brands. How can they apply branding concepts to their business?

A. The two most important branding concepts that a small business must focus on are awareness and relevant differentiation. You can offer the best products in the world with the best service at the best overall value, but if no one is aware of you, you will go out of business. Awareness is the cornerstone of strong brands. Second, people choose brands that are different in relevant and compelling ways. Relevant differentiation today is a leading edge indicator of market share and profitability tomorrow.  What can your brand do better than any other brand in its category? Better yet, what can it deliver that no other brand in its category can?

Arriving at the most compelling relevant points of difference is a strategic exercise informed by an intimate knowledge of your customers, their needs, their wants, their anxieties, their hopes and their fears.  Ideally, you want to choose a benefit that meets these three criteria: (1) it is extraordinarily important to your customers, (2) your organization delivers against it very well and (3) no other competitors are addressing it. Once you have decided upon the unique benefits your brand intends to promise to its customers, you should translate those promised benefits into a tag line, which should always appear with your brand’s logo.

You can build awareness in a wide variety of ways: through advertising, publicity, insignia merchandise (polo shirts, ball caps, jackets, etc.), workshops, presentations, articles, newsletters, signing, sponsorships, legendary service that creates buzz, customer referral programs, product sampling, branding your vehicles, network marketing, co-marketing with complimentary products, being a guest on local radio and television shows, getting involved in civic organizations, joining and networking in professional associations, writing a column for a local paper, writing a book, etc.

One other important consideration is to always and consistently display your brand’s logo, tag line and URL (web site address) at all brand-related customer touch points, from letterhead, business cards and e-mail messages to company vehicles, building signing and employee uniforms.  The following factors affect brand identity recognition and recall:

•Frequency of use
•Consistency of use
•Distinctive symbols, shapes and colors
•Use of mnemonic devices (memory encoders)
•Size
•Background clutter

Most organizations don’t have to spend a fortune nor do they need to place ads in large national magazines or on TV to reach their target audiences.  It is imperative to know who the primary decision maker is, what motivates him or her, where he or she goes to get information on your product category and the messages to which he or she is most likely to respond.  Then get those messages to him or her as efficiently as possible through the sources on which he or she relies for information.  For instance, when I was vice president of marketing at Element K (an e-learning company), we discovered through research that our target customers primarily got their information from two industry magazines, two trade shows and two industry experts.  We focused 80+ % of our marketing efforts and dollars in getting our messages out through those few information sources.

Q. Your book describes color theory. Can you explain a little about how color is used for effective branding?

A. First, color is one of the most important components in creating brand identity.  The purpose of a brand identity system is to encode a brand in people’s memory and retrieve it from their memory.  In a visual system, the two most powerful components are the consistent recognizable shapes and colors.  (Scents and sounds are more powerful than visuals as understood by Cinnebon and Harley-Davidson.)  It is best if these shapes and colors are distinctive (at least within the product category).  Second, color can have a significant affect on people’s perception of a product or brand.  For instance, burgundy and forest green are perceived to be upscale while an orange label or package indicates an inexpensive item.  Third, colors can actually have an affect on a person’s state of mind and cognitive ability as demonstrated by numerous research studies.  For instance, pink has been shown to increase a person’s appetite and calm prison inmates.  Finally, if your brand is sold outside of North America, be aware that colors can have different symbolic meanings (not all positive) in different countries and cultures.

Q. One of your chapters is entitled “Nontraditional Marketing Approaches That Work.” Can you share the top three approaches?

A. Proactive publicity is a must.  Always search for ways to get your brand in the news.  The news media is more likely to cover your story if the story:
•Ties into what people are talking about today
•Adds to discussions on current “hot” issues or topics
•References prominent people, places or things
•Has visual impact
•Is dramatic
•Is unexpected, controversial or outrageous
•Directly impacts a publication’s readership
•Has “human interest”
•Educates or entertains a publication’s readers
•Has a “local” angle
•Ties into a holiday or special occasion
•Represents a significant milestone or a major honor

Develop strong relationships with writers and editors of publications read by your target customers.

Free online newsletters are a highly effective form of marketing. They keep your brand fresh in your customers (and potential customers) minds, establish your brand’s expertise and credibility, reinforce your brand’s identity and promise and help to build emotional connection and loyalty with your customers and potential customers.  The newsletters are very inexpensive to create and cost virtually nothing to publish.  Because of the low cost, you can afford to send them to non-respondents indefinitely.  Be sure to provide fresh, useful content in each issue.  You can use the newsletter to lead people to your web site or specific offers based upon their interest in a topic or product (through hypertext links).

Finally, membership organizations can create customer loyalty and increased sales. Examples include Harley-Davidson’s Harley Owner’s Group (HOG), Hallmark Keepsake Ornament Collectors Club and Pond’s Institute. But this can also take the form of customer advisory boards, expert councils, product launch parties, customer seminars and other forums.  Even frequency programs can begin to feel like membership programs to customers if they contain relationship-building elements.

Q. What part does public relations play in branding?

A. Public relations is one of the most powerful brand building techniques.  News coverage, articles and reviews are more believable than advertising and much less expensive.  PR frequently results in more brand-promoting copy than an ad and articles are much more likely to be read than ads.  The following brands built their businesses with little or no advertising: Body Shop, Compaq, Gateway, Haagen-Dazs, Harley-Davidson, Hotmail, ICQ, Starbucks, Trivial Pursuit and Wal-Mart.  Many of these brands were built with PR.  PR is the most powerful marketing tool for smaller and newer businesses.

Q. Please feel free to offer any additional insights on how branding can help a small-business owner protect and strengthen her market position.

A. The Blake Project has identified the following five factors to be drivers of customer brand insistence (across all industries and product categories):

•Awareness
•Accessibility
•Value
•Relevant differentiation
•Emotional connection

Focus on increasing these five factors for your brand, and your brand will succeed.

Following are the other most important factors in building strong brands:

•Brand management initiatives require senior management support.  The CEO must be the chief brand champion.
•The corporate culture must reinforce the intended brand promise and personality.
•Market the brand to your employees as much as to your customers.  If your employees don’t know what your brand stands for, neither will your customers.  The goal should be to make each and every employee a brand champion.
•Front line employees are the most important and powerful brand positioning proof points.  Hire, train and manage them well to ensure their delivery against your brand’s promise.

Some of the most powerful brands in the world evoke emotions, create sensory experiences and stand for something.

Does your brand achieve any or all of the following:

•Make people feel more in control?
•Is it nostalgic of something from their childhood?
•Does it make them feel warm and safe?
•Does it offer a sensual experience?
•Does it make them feel smart or frugal or important when they use it?
•Does it help them play out unfulfilled fantasies?
•Does it make them feel as though they have become the people that they had always wanted to be?
•Does it make them feel more connected to the group they most admire?

Often, the most successful new brands break through the marketplace clutter via one or more of the following:

•Breakthrough ideas
•Redefining their categories
•Out-of-the-box marketing tactics
•Strong differentiation
•Thought leadership
•Taking bold stands
•The element of surprise
•Radical product or package design

I wish you great success with your branding efforts. May you unleash your brand’s power and transform your organization through branding!

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