Influential Voices of Authority What The Pros Say About Branding – Episode 170
Branding is crucial to the success of your podcast. More importantly, it is critical for your own personal success. Have you defined your brand?
There are some major voices on the subject. I have found ideas from four of my favorite branding experts.
Interestingly, all four have a similar theme … purpose.
Gary Vaynerchuk
Focus on yourself.
"My game is about me knowing myself." He only focuses on his content and his audience. He regularly reviews user comments and analyzes important distribution metrics.
Too often we pay attention to what other people are doing and we forget to play our own game. Instead of worrying about others, Vaynerchuk recommended creating more content, engaging your audience and testing your ads.
Simon Sinek
If Apple were like everyone else, a marketing message from them may sound like this: "We make great computers. They are beautifully designed, simple to use and user friendly. What to buy one?"
Here's how Apple actually communicates: "Everything we do we believe in challenging the status quo, we believe in thinking differently. The way we challenge the status quo is by making our products beautifully designed, simple to use, and user friendly. We just happen to make great computers. What to buy one?"
Start with why.
Seth Godin
The brand is a story. But, it's a story about you, not about the brand.
Every brand has a story. That's how it goes from being a logo and a name to a brand. The story includes expectations and history and promises and social cues and emotions. The story makes us say we "love Google" or "love Harley" … but what do we really love?
We love ourselves.
We love the memory we have of how that brand made us feel once.
More than ever, we express ourselves with what we buy and how we use what we buy. Extensions of our personality, totems of our selves, reminders of who we are or would like to be.
Great marketers don't make stuff. They make meaning.
B.J. Bueno
From The Power of Cult Branding – 7 Golden Rules of Cult Branding
Apple is the embodiment of a Cult Brand: a company that commands fanatical loyalty from its customers. Apple's loyal customers—a group we'll call Brand Lovers— overwhelmingly tend to choose Apple products exclusively.
Apple's appeal is certainly not attributable to low prices; that's not it at all. Instead, Apple is offering their customers something else, something so compelling and irresistible that makes their customers overlook sporadically uneven performance and higher prices.
That's the power of Cult Branding. And Apple's not the only one using the power of Cult Branding.
Simply put, Cult Brands always give back. They never forget that the relationship needs to be mutually beneficial. Brand Lovers need to get just as much (or even more) out of the relationship than the Cult Brand does.
With this in mind, the leaders of Cult Brands are adamant about continually finding new ways to show love and appreciation for the passion and devotion of their customers. Unlike faceless corporations, Cult Brands are humble and personable. They never take their customers for granted. They look for tangible ways to say thank you.
The Books
These are four of my favorite authors on the subject of branding. If you have a chance, grab any of these books. I think you'll enjoy the read and find them useful.
B.J. Bueno – The Power of Cult Branding
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