Ep 219: Building a Brand from Day 1 Pt. 1

I want to talk about branding today. It’s so important and I get so many questions about it.

The one question I get a lot is, “Should I buy this brand?” or they want to know how much a brand is worth.

I don’t think you go out and buy a brand unless you go buy a franchise, because that’s what a franchise is. You’re buying a pre-existing identity that typically has credibility and is recognizable.

So if you’re going to buy a brand go by a franchise. That’s free advice.

Let’s get into brand right now.

What is a Brand?

I think if we establish the pillars of a brand, then you’ll understand what I’m talking about a little better.

 

A Brand is Visual

So a brand is an identifying symbol, mark, logo, name, word, tagline, or slogan that companies use to distinguish their products from others. It’s how a company lets you know how to identify their products. For example, when you walk down the aisle in the cereal aisle, you know the difference between the cereals. Special K has a very identifiable logo. Not hard to miss. So does Cheerios. When you go down the tooth-paste aisle. It’s very easy to see Colgate, right? And then it’s very easy to see Crest. You know what their logo is, what their name is.

You know color schemes that companies have. You know what Coca-Cola’s is and you know what Pepsi’s is. This is kind of what a brand is. It’s just identifiers. The first-way companies typically do that as they work with their brand identity. This is just kind of visual stuff. This is their trademark, this is their color schemes.

That’s how you noticed it. So typically companies will start with their logo and tagline and things like that, but how did this all come about branding in general? Well, cattle ranchers. They branded their cattle so that if they got mixed up with their neighbors’ cattle, they could see whose is whose. 

What is a brand? It’s a way of identifying one company from another.

There are two pillars to a brand. The first one is visual. That is the first way of knowing what a brand is.

 

A Brand Has Perception

It’s your reputation. It’s an awareness. It’s an image. It’s nothing you can touch and it’s nothing you can see. It’s the way that people can identify your company, next to your competition. It’s what separates products from being commodities. For example, if you go down the produce aisle, as a general rule, apples are pretty much apples except for the size difference, they’re pretty much the same. 

I mean at my age I still can’t tell you one milk company’s name. I reach it right in, I grab my 1% milk and pull it out.

So that’s a commodity. There’s no branding. There’s no differentiation between the same products. There’s no brand.

 

A brand is built on those two pillars. And again, you want to build a brand because you want customers to identify your company over your competition. Very simple.

I like what Donald Trump says about branding.

If your business is not a brand, it is a commodity.

—Donald Trump

 

The Rolex Difference

We’re going to talk about what commodity is commodities like an Apple cucumber.

You want to start branding from day one. You want to build a brand. If you don’t brand your product and/or your services, you can only compete on price.

Example: commodities are basically price-driven.

If you want to look to at cucumbers, all things being even, you take the one that was least expensive.

That’s why there’s people that shop at Whole Foods are willing to pay whatever for a cucumber and then there’s the 99% of the rest of the world who are not willing to pay for that because they view a lot of the stuff there as commodities. I went there one time and bought a $40 salad.

I think I’ve been back there once.

What I like about building a brand is, you’re going to make a sale, even before people start shopping. If your reputation is so good, they want your product and/or services.

I have a Rolex. The truth is, I wear it like three hours a yea. I wear a Wal-mart sports watch most of the time, and then an Apple watch. But I have a Rolex, and I can tell you, it’s worth the money. When you go into a jewelry store to look at a Rolex, you don’t look at any other watches. You go shopping for a Rolex. Let me explain the difference.

You have to watch shopping, which is when you go into a typical department store, and you’re looking through normal watches like Citizens and Timex and Bulava. That’s called “watch shopping.

Then you have Rolex shopping.

Do you see the difference? That’s why you build a brand.

There’s a difference when I go shopping for a car. My employees will go shopping, they don’t really know necessarily what they’re going to buy. They’ve narrowed it down to a couple of brands but more than anything, it’s kind of price-driven and based on a couple types of vehicles they might like.

When I go shopping for a car, I pretty much know I’m going for a certain brand.

They won me over with their marketing years ago. That brand to me has tremendous value to me. As somebody who now owns a few BMWs, they’re worth every penny.

My point is, is that I’m sold on that brand. So I go shopping for a BMW. When people ask me about cars, I effortlessly brag about a BMW.

That’s why you build a brand. The second I could afford something more it was an easy decision to make. I’m sold on it. If you build a brand correctly, you’ve made the sale before people start shopping. That’s called effective marketing.

In one of our companies, we have eight divisions and one of my responsibilities is in marketing. I say to my partners is if I do my job correctly, the sale is waiting for you all. In other words, when our sales team goes to give an estimate, we already have the sale. There’s only one thing that they’re asking themselves is Can they afford the price we gave them?

And in our marketing, we’ve already prepared them that we’re probably going to be on the higher end because all our marketing is built around the brand image that we have created. I’m going to get into that in part two.

Why do you build a brand because you want to differentiate yourself from your competition? If you do it really well, people are going to buy from you without you having to do so much. They already kind of made the decision.

They’ve seen your mark and they like your company. They like your product. You’ve created a perception and awareness in their mind already. Reputation image. They already kinda have a thought process about your company already. So again, that’s why you want to build a brand. And I meet people all the time and they tell me that they advertise, and I go well.

I believe if you want to have an effective start-up, and even if you’re 10 years into the process, maybe you need to re-brand.

In part two, I’m going to teach you how you actually build a brand. If every time you have to go sell something to a customer, you have to establish credibility and reputation and all that. That’s a lengthy sales process. Do you want your branding to accomplish that before you ever meet these soon-to-be customers? If you do it really well, your existing customers are going to tell everybody about you, about your brand, and save you time and marketing dollars in the process.