Brand

Strategy 101: Your Logo Is

Irrelevant

The 3-Step Process to Build a Kick-Ass

Brand
Michael R. Drew

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What REAL people are saying about
“Brand Strategy 101: Your Logo Is
Irrelevant” after reading it. (All reviews
can be found on Amazon.com)
“Simple, Practical Steps To Effective Branding” February 7, 2013

I've been in business for over 28 years and there are many opinions on branding that
in addition to being confusing are unsuccessful. What I like best about this book is the
information is understandable with tremendous research behind it that proves the
process works! Einstein said, "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it
well enough."

I feel confident using the three-step process because it's simple, based on trends and
common sense and easy to understand and explain. Most business practices and
strategies never become that simple and that instills doubt in the mind of the business
person and I believe that alone can kill a business. The information in this book is
simple, practical, effective and confidence-building. I'm using it and have already
recommended it to others!

~K. Rudolph (San Diego, CA)

“Practical, insightful and easy to implement,” March 2, 2013

This was great! If you're looking for a comprehensive, jargon-free roadmap for
building your brand, then I highly recommend this. Not only is it written in a fun,
engaging style, I've learned some really useful insights that I'm incorporating into my
brand strategy for my own business. Worth a read :-)

~LeanneB

“Making Branding Clear in our current environment,” February 22, 2013

This ebook is a fabulous lead in to the Pendulum book. Short, easy read - that really
hit's it home on branding. A must for anyone attempting to get any sort of message
across - especially, writers, bloggers, business owner and thought leaders. It makes
branding clear in our current environment.

~SystemsGirl – Jenn Cockton (Canada)

“What Branding In The 21st Century Looks Like,” February 12, 2013

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If you are ready to differentiate your brand and be unique, this book is a must-read.
The author uses real-life examples of branding successes (and failures) drawing from
the big boys like Playboy, McDonald's, Coke and Walmart! Based on the teaching of
Roy H. Williams (also known as the Wizard of Ads) Michael uses historical and close
to precise future predications on how branding will "stick" in the minds of your
audience and customers in the 21st century's Twitter feed-Facebook Post social media
dominated world.

A good story telling read with examples and techniques for those who want to learn
about what works in branding and why. The concepts in this book will teach you how
to stand out from the crowd and more importantly "shows" you that brand creation
SHOULDN'T be a mind wrecking and tedious process. It's simple and easy to
understand and will leave you with a lot of "aha" moments that will propel you into
taking actions to look at your brand with a new set of lens so to speak, so your brand
always remains relevant.

~Loshini

“Branding New,” February 7, 2013

How to differentiate yourself in today's overloaded marketplace? Branding, whether

personal or professional. Most people don't really understand the concept of branding,
but Michael R. Drew apparently does. Here he's written an engaging book that takes
you through the process of branding, and what you need to know to become your own
brand, today, in today's society. He looks at what's important, what to avoid, how to
recognize what works (and how to avoid what doesn't). As a writer who's seeking to
have more of an impact in the marketplace, I myself found this a lively and easy-to-
follow guide. And I think this book will be a valuable tool for anyone seeking to
become better in business, or just become better known.

~R. Hughes (New York, NY United States)

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 Thanks!

Thank you for downloading this e-book.

Your input will help make the next version better. Please take a moment and review
this book on Amazon. Thank you so much!

Get more insights on why traditional marketing methods have stopped working.
Click on the link below to join the community on Facebook—topic of conversation?
Why the market has changed and what to do about it.
www.Facebook.com/PendulumInAction.

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6
Table Of Contents
Pendulum Preface
Introduction
What Branding Is Not
Sometimes It's the Stupid Stuff That Sticks
What Branding IS - the REAL Definition
Dogs, Bells and Branding
Three Steps to Creating Your Brand
Relationships are the Brand in a WE Cycle
What Problems Can You Solve?
Next Action Steps
About the Author
Based on the Teachings of Roy H. Williams, known as "The Wizard of Ads"
Disclaimer
Additional Resources to Get Results
Thanks!

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Pendulum Preface
Welcome to this series of books explaining aspects of the concepts that Roy H.
Williams and I uncovered in our book Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our
Present and Predict Our Future.

In Pendulum, we explored the shifts in society in over 3,000 years. We arrived at our
findings by sifting through historical events, literature, visual arts, politics, religion,
and by poring over works as disparate as the Bible, the Commentaries of Caesar, Le
Mort d'Arthur, England's "Magna Carta," America's Declaration of Independence and
the United States Constitution, "The Waste Land" and Gone with the Wind. We
listened to music from Bach to the Beatles to Beyoncé and beyond. We tried to figure
out why certain aspects of society seemed to resurface time and time again.

And you know what we discovered? That society shifts on an invisible pendulum
every 40 years or so. We move back and forth from what we call a ME Cycle – when
the emphasis is on individualism, hear-worship, larger-than-life egos, free expression
and a kind of egocentrism – to a WE Cycle – when people are more inclined to work
together for the common good, to prefer the truth to empty slogans, to crave for things
that are real, raw and relevant, to be spoken to as adults. (We're currently in a WE
Cycle, by the way, in case you hadn't noticed.)

We also found, that with the publication of Pendulum, that people were looking for
how they could apply its concepts to their life and business. That's why we created
these e-books: to help you see where Pendulum can work for you. To see where you
can put Pendulum into action.

Here, in this installment, we look at what a brand is, and what you can do to establish
and strengthen your brand. We look at the kind of marketing that people respond to
today, in our current society with its emphasis on shared values, and how something
can look wrong but be totally right for attracting customers.

Welcome to this e-book on putting Pendulum to use. Thanks for joining us.

—Michael R. Drew

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Introduction
Branding.

It's a buzzword thrown around in marketing circles, but what is branding, exactly?
And do you really need to pay attention to it?

Branding has different meanings, such as to mark by something (as with cattle) or to
make a mark by charring. But in marketing it's about differentiation and recognition.
My co-author Roy H. Williams defines branding as the sum total of all the things a
company says about itself—the things that pop into your customers’ minds when they
hear your name. We'll explore this concept a little more shortly.

Your brand needs to appeal to the values of the current generation. What matters most
of all with brand is what matters to the customer.

Understanding how to apply Pendulum concepts will help you translate successful
branding into a healthier bottom line in your business. In this e-book we’re going to
cover:

1. What branding isn’t

2. The three steps to create a brand
3. Why relationships are the glue to make your brand stick

If you’re a marketer or business owner, a blogger or a charity, you probably want to

bring in more revenue, attract more clients, keep more clients, ensure the future of
your business and get more referrals. And you’d probably like to do this while making
a name, a difference in the world or money for yourself or your organization.

Taking the time to build relationships and build your brand is an effective way to reach
all of those goals

Let’s get started!

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What Branding Is Not
Branding is one of those vague, nebulous terms used in marketing. Marketers tell
business owners they need to work on their branding or launch a branding campaign.
But most business owners understand branding about as well as they understand rocket
science.

The American Marketing Association (AMA) defines a brand as a "name, term, sign,
symbol or design, or a combination of them intended to identify the goods and
services of one seller or group of sellers and to differentiate them from those of other
sellers.”

But I would assert that branding is more than a logo, color combination or font. While
those ways of visually defining a company are important, they aren’t at the heart of
successful branding. Relationships are.

More so every day in our current WE Cycle. And marketing has to change to keep up
with what people expect today. Marketing strategies that worked well just a few years
ago aren’t as effective today. New publishing platforms, different sales strategies,
powerful tools and innovative software are being released all the time to adjust for this
shift in consumer behavior. And this shift is driven by the swing of the Pendulum.

Roy H. Williams and I developed our Pendulum theory in researching over 3,000
years of human history, cultural changes, literature, the arts, politics over three
millennia noting how social trends shifted and re-shifted, and "swung" on an invisible
pendulum from one way of looking at the world to another over the course of time.
Every 40 years, in fact – a period that has held up surprisingly well over the centuries.
Pendulum is a roadmap to understanding human behavior.

What Roy and I discovered in our research is that society’s values swing back and
forth between a civic minded WE Cycle where people are concerned with working
together for the good of the whole and an individualistic ME Cycle where people are
focused on individual expression and personal freedom. We're currently in a WE
Cycle, which began in 2003. We explain these concepts further in Pendulum: How
Past Generations Shape our Present and Predict Our Future.

Things and ideas changes as time goes by. But do you know what doesn’t change?

People.

Well, people do change, but it’s a very predictable change. If you know what makes
them tick at any moment in the present or in the future, you’ll know how to engage
them.

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Roy has spent the last 40 years in advertising and marketing. He’s learned a few things
along the way. Here’s what he says about branding:

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Mountains and Molehills
How much do your name, logo and color scheme really matter?

A schmuck falls off the balcony on the 30th floor.

A putz is the guy he lands on.

A putz is passively stupid; ridiculously unlucky.

Could a company succeed with a name like Putzmeister?

Could a company win if its logo was indistinctive and boring and literally gray?

Putzmeister was founded by Karl Schlecht in 1958. Today it employs 3,900 people that
produce more than $ 1.5 billion in annual sales in 154 countries on 5 continents, name
and logo and color be damned.

$1.5 billion, by the way, is fifteen hundred times a thousand, times a thousand. Fifteen
hundred million.

Just sayin'.

Wal-Mart may have the dumbest name in the history of the world. "My name is Walton,
so I'll call the store Wal-Mart." Really? And yet he became so rich that just six of his
descendants are worth more today than the combined net worth of 30 percent of our
nation. That's right, a tiny company begun in 1962 with an idiotic name and a drab
logo and an unimaginative color scheme became the most successful retail empire in
the history of the world in less than 30 years.

And they never bothered to change the name or the logo.

I meet Chicken Little advertising people every day who squeal, "the sky is falling" over
names and colors and logos.

Color is a language. It definitely matters. A little.

Shape is a language. It can contradict or reinforce your choice of colors. Shape

matters. A little.

Product and company names are words that carry conscious and unconscious
associations. They absolutely matter.

But what matters most of all is what matters to the customer.

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Customers who buy from your competitors aren't choosing your competitors because
they have better logos. Customers care about things like products and procedures and
policies that might affect them. They care about your offers and assurances. They care
about the experience you create for them. Logos? Not so much.

Will your prospective customers be glad they chose you? Yes? How are you
communicating this? What do you offer as evidence? Testimonials are suspect. Bold
promises sound like advertising-speak. What are you doing to give your prospective
customer real confidence that choosing you is the right thing to do?

You need a consultant because you have a blind spot.

(If you knew what this was, they wouldn't call it a blind spot.)

You're on the inside, looking out. It's hard to read the label when you're inside the
bottle. Your consultant is on the outside, looking in.

If your marketing people talk a lot about colors and logos and layouts, you're dealing
with graphic artists posing as marketing consultants.

So if branding isn’t your logo or color palette, what is it?

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What Branding Really Is - The Real
Defintion
Branding is much more than your logo. Stripped of all the marketing lingo, branding is
pretty simple: Your brand is all the associations that come to mind when your potential
customers see or hear your name. In order to place yourself securely in the minds of
your customers, you must build relationships, and do this by speaking to the needs of
your audience. This is branding.

Playboy is a perfect example of creating a brand that spoke to the values of its
generation back in the 1950s and the 1960s.

Playboy made its debut in 1953 with a scantily clad Marilyn Monroe on the cover of
issue number one. Society gasped, embarrassed—never suspecting that “free love”
would be the mantra of its heroes in just a few more years.

Playboy was a brilliant execution of branding. Hugh Hefner was an Alpha in

Literature (according to our Pendulum findings, Alphas are the people in a generation
who anticipate the changes just ahead, before their time). He had his pulse on the
values of the emerging generation in 1953. He built a legendary brand through his
intuition and attention to detail. Hefner created an icon.

The mission of Playboy was exclusivity, sophistication and taste. Built around the
larger than life personality of Mr. Hefner, Playboy showed the Me Generation that it
could have it all. The magazine became celebrated as much for its sexy photos as for
its in-depth interviews with musicians and artists such as Miles Davis, The Beatles and
Bob Dylan.

While doing the research for Pendulum, we uncovered many examples of perfectly
timed branding. Playboy was just one of the many examples.

But we also noticed how tricky timing can be. Today's values have shifted away from
Playboy. Playboy may have ushered in an era of frankness and fun, but it failed to
keep current with a generation that wanted follow-through on the magazine's promises
of communication, transparency, product reliability and conversation. Playboy's
marketing failed to catch this wave of the current We Generation. This failure to
capture the attention of consumers today has been hard on Playboy’s business, costing
its value as a company to decline 80% over the last 10 years.

If you want to stay relevant then you need to be true to the customers of today. You
must understand them, speak to them, engage with them. Those who buy from your
competition are not choosing the competition because it has a better logo. What it has
is better understanding of their needs.

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Customers care about things that might affect them. They care about things that matter
to them. Do you know what matters to customers today? What are you doing to give
your prospective customer real confidence that choosing you is the right thing to do?

Whether you try to come up with an idea for your new book, a new flavor of cupcake
for your gourmet cupcake shop or a new wellness program for your patients in your
chiropractic office, you need to know your customer and speak to the customer in a
way the customer can respond to in today's terms.

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Dogs, Bells and Branding
Successful branding ultimately depends on your ability to speak to your customers in
their own language about what matters most to them. In our current WE Cycle, a
successful brand leaves hype behind and speaks to the need for community and
working together.

There’s more to branding than a group of marketers brainstorming over coffee and
coordinating colors with a graphic designer. Branding has a valid scientific
background. Consider Ivan Pavlov and his salivating canines.

Pavlov won the Nobel Prize for Physiology in 1904 for his work on branding. Most
people would never connect Pavlov’s experiment with marketing. Pavlov himself
likely had no idea the direction his investigation would take him. But the curious
connection between a physical response and mental associations gave the world a new
understanding of consumer behavior.

Pavlov was investigating the gastric function of dogs by analyzing their saliva.
Imagine that. And he noticed they were salivating before he actually gave them their
food.

Pavlov found this “psychic secretion” intriguing because salivating is an automatic

reflex in dogs. Fascinated by this reflex, Pavlov immediately abandoned his original
experiment involving gastric functions and redirected his focus to long-term
physiological processes. The new study entailed:

1. Ringing a bell.
2. Rubbing meat paste on the dogs’ tongues.
3. Observing the dogs to see if their canine brains formed an associative memory
between the bell and paste.

Sure enough, it didn’t take long before the dogs would drool at the ding of the bell.
Their brains quickly learned to anticipate tasting the meat paste when they heard the
bell.

It’s important to note that Pavlov chose meat paste because meat is something that
always matters to dogs. A bowl of limes would not have produced the same reaction
because dogs simply don’t care about limes.

It’s the same thing with your audience. You need to know what it really cares about.
Don't market limes if it craves steak.

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You can create the best product or offer
the greatest service, but if it doesn’t
speak to what matters to the heart of
your audience, it is going to pass it
by for something that does matter.

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Three Steps to Creating Your Brand
What does your audience care about? Does your business focus on important values
of your audience?

Keep in mind that society’s values—values that directly affect consumer behavior—
shift every 40 years from what my co-author Roy H. Williams and I refer to as a ME
Cycle where people value self-expression and the power of the individual and a WE
Cycle, where it’s all about the community and collaboration.

Hugh Hefner and Playboy spoke to the values of an audience that craved individual
expression, it wanted to look good and feel good now. Playboy’s early mission was
“exclusivity, sophistication and taste.” While Playboy’s iconic logo is those bunny
ears, its brand was the association it created in its audience’s minds. In 1953 Playboy
set out to be the voice of emerging generation of youth, rejecting the previous
generation’s conformity, self-denial and self-sacrifice.

Playboy was wildly successful throughout the ME Cycle, but as the world moved into
its current WE Cycle in 2003, Playboy failed to note the change in society's values. Its
branding still speaks to the values of a ME Cycle, and as a result its bottom line has
suffered greatly because Playboy no longer matches its products to what its audience
cares about.

Make sure your business speaks to the values of your audience. Once you’ve got this
critical piece of the puzzle in place, it’s time to incorporate these three fundamental
elements of branding into your marketing repertoire:

1. frequency,

2. consistency, and

3. anchoring.

Do this and you're well on your way to becoming the one people think of first and feel
best about when they need what you offer.

Let’s look in detail at the three steps of creating a brand.

Step 1: Frequency
Frequency is all about repetition. Pavlov rang that bell and distributed the meat paste
day after day after day. He didn’t take a day off every now and again just to test his
dogs’ memories.

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A day off can be detrimental to your progress when you’re working on building your
brand in the minds of your audience. You’re building relationships: getting people to
know, like and trust you. If you disappear during the beginning stages of that
relationship, your audience will quickly forget about you.

Find creative ways to “ring that bell” and keep getting in front of people on a regular,
frequent basis. Consider an online newsletter, arranging interviews on TV and the
radio, setting up an Internet blog where you can have daily interaction with
prospective and current customers and clients. Dig through your connections. I’m sure
you know some people who’d be happy to interview you.

Step 2: Consistency
Consistency requires that you deliver a valued experience to your audience. Pavlov
rang the same bell before every feeding, with the same tone. He didn’t alter sounds.
Nor did he vary what came after the bell. He wanted those dogs to recognize the sound
of that bell and to associate it immediately with one thing, the taste of meat. In the
same way you want people to associate your name and your company with a particular
prized experience every time they think of that value.

Get consistent in your marketing campaigns to create your brand personality. This will
be your “meat paste,” so to speak, to trigger your audience’s associations of you and
your company. Put together a memorable style guide to give your campaigns a sense
of “connectedness.”

Make ads distinctive to stand apart from your competitors. Two good words on which
to build your style guide are “always” and “never.” Decide what things will always be
in your ads and what will never be in your ads. A tight style guide makes your
company feel reliable in the mind of your customer.

Once you’ve got consistency in your style guide, it’s time to get consistency in getting
in front of your audience on a regular basis.

Does your business offer new management techniques? Then offer to speak at no
charge at local business college and community colleges. Then keep using the
keywords and phrases that encapsulate your insightful business concepts. If you have a
logo, make sure you consistently display it whenever and wherever you can.

Seth Godin, author of more than a dozen bestsellers, including Purple Cow and
Permission Marketing, understands the importance of frequency and consistency in a
book marketing and public relations campaign. He practices these through following
these seven steps:

1. Permission marketing. This is a process by which marketers ask permission

before sending ads to prospects. Godin pioneered the practice in 1995 with the
founding of Yoyodyne, the Web’s first direct mail and promotions company (it

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 used contests, online games, and scavenger hunts to market companies to
participating users). He sold it to Yahoo! three years later.
2. Editorial content. Godin was a long-time contributing editor to the popular Fast
Company magazine.
3. Blogging. Seth's Blog is one of the most-frequented blogs.
4. Public speaking. Successful Meetings magazine named Godin one of the top 21
speakers of the 21st century. Words used to describe his lectures include "visual,"
"personal," and "dynamic."
5. Community-building. His latest company, Squidoo.com, ranked among the top
125 sites in the U.S. (by traffic) by Quantcast, allows people to build a page
about any topic that inspires them. The site raises money for charity and pays
royalties to its million-plus members.
6. E-books. Godin took a step to publish all his books electronically, then worked
with Amazon on his own imprint, Domino, which published 12 books. Recently,
Godin ended that project – since as he said in a blog, it was a "project" and he is
always looking for more and different opportunities.
7. Continuous improvement. Godin is always on the lookout for more ideas, more
business opportunities and more engagement with his community.

Step 3: Anchoring
Anchoring, the third and final piece of the branding puzzle, poses the greatest
challenge. Anchoring involves creating an association between your business and
something already valued and rooted firmly in the audience’s heart and mind. Hugh
Hefner offered exclusivity, sophistication and taste because individual expression was
important to the burgeoning Me Generation as people yearned to shrug off self-
sacrifice and self-denial. Pavlov chose meat paste because meat already exists as an
important matter in the heart of a dog. This is anchoring at its finest. As Seth Godin
puts it, “Create something they want to talk about and make it easy for them to do so.”

First, you must determine that something that thousands of people value and are
interested in—part of branding and building your platform (we’ll cover this more in
the next section).

As you learn how to stimulate the attention, interest and desire of your audience, the
way you market your message will link and anchor your values to your business.

Your audience will begin to get familiar with you and your business as you continue to
build trust and intimacy in your relationship. You’ll become the trusted resource that
comes to mind first when their itch needs to be scratched. Are you speaking to their
needs? Or are you just irritating the dogs?

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