Jeff Standridge:
Hey guys, Jeff Standridge: here. Welcome to another episode of the Innovations Junkies Podcast.
Jeff Amerine:
Hey, this is Jeff Amerine:merine. What are we going to hit today?
Jeff Standridge:
Hey man, so we’ve been talking about just sales marketing, client acquisition, client retention. That’s kind of the overarching theme of these five or six weeks of episodes. We’ve touched on the psychology of sales success. We’ve touched on the art of influence and persuasion. Today we’re gonna be talking about brand messaging, your brand story and brand promise. You know, we talked back several weeks ago a lot about culture.
And culture is kind of, it’s everything in your business. It’s the internal representation of your shared beliefs, core values, attitudes, work processes, how you approach your work, how you approach your clients, whether you’re detail oriented or not very detail oriented, gunslingers are very meticulous, et cetera. And that’s kind of the internal representation. Well, it’s my belief that brand promise is almost all of those things as well, but they’re the external representation of those. It’s what you want your clients to say, or it’s the expectation you want them to have when they come into contact with you and your brand. Thoughts on that?
Jeff Amerine:
What they think they’re going to come away with, right? What they think they’re going to come away with. And it’s something that has to constantly be reinforced. So we went to, give me an example, but it’s just something where there can be a disconnect. We had one trip to a major retailer and I won’t name who it was, but I will say it’s not Walmart for Walmart listeners. Major retailer with an expectation that there would be a certain experience that we would have based on our perception of the brand promise.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right.
Jeff Amerine:
And on the first visit there, it wasn’t fulfilled at all. We were disappointed. People weren’t helpful. It just seemed cold and kind of abrasive. And we thought we may not go there again. Well, we had an occasion to go there again, a couple of days later, looking for a similar item. And the people that time definitely fulfilled the brand promise. They were attentive. They were knowledgeable. They were helpful. They, there was an empathy in the way they dealt with it. They were friendly. And it’s just what a difference that can make, right? That brand promise is really important in terms of what the customer journey will be like.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, and we encourage our clients when we’re helping them implement our strategic growth system, we encourage them to actually articulate that brand promise. And we ask them when they’re brainstorming as to what that brand promise ought to be, we ask them the question of what is it that you want your clients to say? One of the exercises is what do you want your clients saying when they walk away from an interaction with your business? Or what do you want them to expect when they come into contact with your brand or your business. And we use that as kind of the starting basis for that. It may end up becoming a marketing slogan or a tagline, but if you set out to create a marketing slogan or a tagline, you will ultimately miss the boat, in my experience, as it relates to actually creating a brand promise. Create a brand promise first, really home in on what those expectations are that you want your clients to walk away with.
And then if you can phrase it in something that’s catchy, that can be used as a marketing slogan, okay, great. But if you can’t, that’s not terrible either.
Jeff Amerine:
It requires effort, right? I mean, the whole point is it can’t be a 30 second discussion or something you do in kind of a, a trivialized way. You really need to work it through. And you might even need to test that brand promise with your customers to see if it resonates. Sometimes your perception of what your consumers or your customers want is way different than what they really want.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, yeah. You know, we’ve talked before about Walmart’s save money, live better. You know, that’s kind of that brand promise, so to speak, that they really put out there, save money, live better. You know, and then they’ve got, there’s another company that’s in the shaving space, the subscription shaving space, that kind of took that and developed their own spin on it. And it was Dollar Shave Club, where theirs is Shave Time, Shave Money. And it cracks me up. I think, or BMW Built for Driving Pleasure. The US Marines who are known for recruiting in underserved disadvantaged neighborhoods and from those populations and their brand promise to those are the few, the proud, the Marines.
Jeff Amerine:
Right? Yeah. And it’s timeless. I mean, that’s something that has been the brand promise to the Marines forever. And you never forget that the few and the proud. And then they build that up with things like Semper Fi, Always Faithful, very strong brand identity for the Marine Corps.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. You know, I worked with an automotive service company one time, um, you know, the tires and auto mechanics, and it was a pretty big, pretty big place. They were, they were seeing, gosh, I don’t know, 30 cars a day or something like that come through there. And, uh, and they actually came up with a, um, with a brand promise. And it was because the young owner, a young, uh, 30 year old, actually a little younger than 30 year old female, she and her husband actually acquired the place.
And she said, you know, I always go in to have my car worked on and I’m fearful that I’m going to be sold something that, uh, that I don’t ever, that I don’t really need, uh, and, and I’m not going to know any difference and I don’t want anybody to ever be concerned about that. I want people who come to us to know that we’re going to treat them like they’re a brother, they’re an uncle, they’re a mom, they’re a, they’re a, they’re a grandmother or whomever. And so, so we’ll treat you like family became their brand promise. And they use that to, to, to also permeate the internal culture of the organization. They used it both internally, they used it externally. And it became a really powerful thing. An insurance group, theirs was excellent people serving excellent, I’m sorry, excellent people delivering excellent service to excellent clients. And that gave them the forum culturally to sit down when someone really didn’t do their best and say, you know, you’re an excellent person, but that was not excellent service. That was not excellent work.
It also gave them the opportunity to sit down with a client and say, listen, we like to talk about, we provide you with excellent people delivering excellent service to you. If you can’t treat them excellently, then you’re going to have to go, you’re going to have to go do, do your, get your insurance quotes somewhere else. You know, we’ll give you one, we’ll give you one scratch, but after that, you berate our team members anymore. You’re not going to be working here or you’re not going to be, we’re not going to be serving you, so to speak.
Jeff Amerine:
That’s an integral part of the culture, right? It’s an integral part of the culture that defines who you fire, who you hire. And the same thing on the customer side. It’s that binding point between your internal team and the external customer for sure.
Jeff Standridge:
It really is.
Jeff Standridge:
That’s right. And even Innovation Junkie, Startup Junkie, Conductor, our enterprise is results driven tools, connections and recommendations. That’s really what we’re trying to do with folks. Actually, I misphrased it. Insights, tools and connections. I was in the ballpark. But that’s what we want our clients, every interaction when we sit down, whether it’s a training scenario.
Jeff Amerine:
You were in the same ballpark.
Jeff Standridge:
Whether it’s a podcast episode, whether it’s a one-on-one coaching, consulting, or mentoring, we want them to walk away with results-driven insights, tools, and or connections. And it’s not uncommon. They walk away with components of all three of those.
Jeff Amerine:
You can gauge how well you’re doing with that brand promise based on things like your net promoter score. That’s a simple question about, would you recommend that someone else works with this group? Then the anecdotal stories or testimonials or even your Google reviews, that’ll give a pretty clear view in most cases, how well you’re doing in fulfilling that brand promise.
Jeff Standridge:
Yeah, or a key performance indicator of what percent of your revenue is coming from referrals. Or, you know, and same thing on the recruitment side, what percent of your new applicants are coming from referrals or your new employees are coming from referrals.
Jeff Amerine:
A great brand promise starts with being able to master the art of storytelling. How can small business owners or anybody really that’s trying to have a fantastic business with a strong brand promise, how do they do that? Well,
Jeff Standridge:
Well, I think one of the best ways they do that is they find those customer experiences that they’ve created for someone like you, you just talked about a few moments ago and they retell that story over and over and over. They begin to tell it among their employees. They begin to tell, and it becomes part of the corporate folklore, so to speak. It becomes a cultural bulkhead, so to speak, within the organization. But I think you have to just be intentional about it.
You’ve got to know that, you’ve got to know that, and you have to take advantage of those situations where you have really gone above and beyond, and you have changed the life of an individual or of a customer, and they’ve come back around to tell you about it. You’ve got to capture that, you’ve got to tell it, you’ve got to retell it, you’ve got to tell it again.
Jeff Amerine:
Right. And it’s not only in that instance, the things sometimes people forget is they think, well, sales tool, marketing tool, brand image tool, it’s all external facing. Not true. Having those success stories written about how you fulfilled your brand promise, that’s as empowering to your own team as it is to the external customers. It will reinforce the reason why you work there and why you feel good about what you’re doing.
Jeff Standridge:
Absolutely. Yeah. And sometimes in the absence of those, maybe you’re a relatively new business, maybe you’ve never really started, you’ve never really put any focus on having channels of feedback with your customers. And so you really don’t have any of those. It’s okay to craft some aspirational stories, I believe, and start becoming a storyteller and begin telling those aspirational stories where, where folks can begin to identify themselves in those stories and then they start providing that feedback back to you. Hey, me too, right? I experienced the same thing. And you can begin to build that cache of stories, if you will, from even starting from a point of aspiration.
Jeff Amerine:
No doubt about it. And the idea of committing to it and having a cadence associated with sort of sharing the good news, I think is an important part of it. No doubt about it.
Jeff Standridge:
No, I completely agree. Well, next week we’re going to talk a little more about client acquisition. We started off with kind of the psychology of selling. Now we’re going to talk a little bit more about the mechanics of client acquisition. And then in a couple of weeks, we’ll also talk about the art and science of client retention as well, both vitally important. You can get new clients every single day, but if you’re losing them, through a hole in the bucket, you got a problem there. So we’re going to have a couple of episodes over the next couple of weeks talking about client acquisition, client retention.
Jeff Amerine:
That sounds great. I can’t wait. See you next time.
Jeff Standridge:
All right. This has been another episode of the Innovation Junkies Podcast. Thank you for joining.