Branding

Use All The Advertising You Want

Garth Beyer

Or save that money to make sure you can keep your business afloat and add value to your product while you reach out to the users and establish relationships. Start conversations. Send emails. Make contacts. Show up.

Instead of paying for ad space in Denver, drive there.

Instead of paying for ad space in the Silicon Bayou News, contact a reporter, share your story and establish a relationship. Your story is advertising enough. (right?)

Instead of paying for ad space where your target audience hangs, go hang there yourself.

Instead of paying for ad space between television shows, go create an incredible (sharable!) YouTube video.

Advertising is great fun when you have the money to try remarkable things with it, but when you don’t, money is better spent adding value to the experience, to the story than it is trying to show the experience to people with an ad.

After all, if you have to pay for a product to be in someone’s face to get their attention, is your product really worth it? A lot of people are beginning to wonder the same thing.

 

Stay Positive & Experience Speaks For Itself And People Are Happy To Relay The Message

The Truman Set

The Truman Set

Garth Beyer

Harry's GQ Magazine Ad

Harry’s is a brand of men’s shaving products. I’ve had a browser tab open with a Harry’s product (the Truman Set) for nearly a week. I want it. I think it will be something worth talking about. And I’ve had the same big brand razor for at least 4 years. I’m tired of it.

Yet, each time I open my laptop and see the Truman Set, I wonder why I haven’t committed to the purchase. I’ve been asking myself over and over, “What’s missing?”

I think I figured it out.

When you look at the Truman Set you see the handle, two razors, and cream. Harry’s, who tells an exceptionally beautiful story with their products (and advertising!) falls short on putting some of that humanity into the product package. There’s a missing emotional, personal, human factor in the product package.

Perhaps a card verifying the integrity of the product signed by Andy Katz-Mayfield and Jeff Raider? Perhaps a 5-tips guide to shaving written by them? Perhaps a coffee packet or Simply Orange coupon or a unique spoon to get people to share pictures of them owning their AM?

It’s hard to create a flawless product. It’s harder sometimes to remember to add a little humanity to it… sort of the opposite of flawless.

 

Stay Positive & Add Some Surprise To Every Gift

To add a bit of humanity to this post, I’ll have you know each time I refreshed my home page to edit this post, Harry’s advertisement came up on it suggesting I “Shave goodbye to my old razor.” I think I will. 

The First To Introduce

Garth Beyer

It feels good when someone tells a friend about a particular product or service and then notes that you were the first to introduce them to that product or service.

Businesses have a grand opportunity right now to leverage word-of-mouth marketing like this. Think of your business as the friend who was the first to introduce them and instead of to a product or service, to a definition, a way of doing something a certain way, a style.

Think what your customers Google and go to YouTube for, then create that content for them. YouTube is great for “How Tos,” but if they don’t need to leave your page to figure something out, you and them both win not only in that they stay on your page, but they will refer to you later.

Lands’ End does this by having a link to definitions of terms they use. Now when I’m out shopping with a friend and they touch a pair of pants saying “Wow, this fabric feels pretty high quality,” I can say, “Yea, those are chinos. It’s a twill fabric made 100 percent of cotton.”

“How do you know that?”

“I read it on Lands’ End’s website.”

This tactic is proficiently used by writers. Just about every writer’s website I’ve been to, no matter what they write on, they always have a blog post about “how to be a writer,” just in hopes to have some reader somewhere share a writing tip with someone else, referring to where they heard of the tip.

Of course, this isn’t exactly a tactic directly for making profits off your product or service, it’s more of a tactic for branding and getting your name out there. For some reason, though, there typically ends up being some type of correlation between your profit amount and the number of people who know about you.

 

Stay Positive & Do You Really Need Proof?

The Problem With Free Work

Garth Beyer

I’m working with a group to write  and create a new marketing/branding/insert-buzzword-here strategy for a 2 billion dollar a year profiting business. I don’t have an issue sharing the biggest problem with working with this client because my group is doing it for free.

The problem with free services like what my group is doing is you may – and it’s very likely you do – care more about the success of your effort than the client does. From your perspective of having nothing to lose, you can push boundaries, dance on the edge of remarkable and generally roll with any interesting idea you come up with.

From the client’s perspective, if they have nothing to lose, then why waste their time digging up extra information for you, loaning a few of their products to you or giving you a trial of their service.

I’ll show a perfect example below (spelling mistakes kept) from an email I sent to the client asking questions my group needed to know the answers to so we can reestablish the brand. Two takeaways. First, if they were memorable answers, you would be able to guess the brand, but I bet you can’t. Second, the client has given us nothing more to work from.

Is it stopping us? No. Is it holding us back from doing the best we can do. Definitely.

 

Stay Positive & Read On (founder’s name and business’s name altered)

 

Q1. Can you elaborate on Benjamin Gray’s statement that Le Croy makes customers feel “a little like coming home”?

Benjamin Gray just wanted to treat our customers like family and make them feel that Le Croy was a place for them to depend on for quality apparel.

Q2. What do you think is the “extra mile” you go for customers?

We make sure their products are top quality, we answer their calls, emails and social messages, if they have an issue we try to resolve it as quickly as possible, and sometimes we find someone that is not expecting to hear from us and surpise/delight them with new product or special items to say thank you.

Q3. Who are some influential people who wear your brand? Who in pop culture would you consider partnering with?

I don’t have the answer to this one today.

Q4. Can you list some causes your brand supports?

insert link to website

Q5. What are you currently doing with the email addresses you have of customers. Just a newsletter? Can you tell us more how you decide how often to send out an email regarding sales?

We send email daily, segmented by Men’s, Women’s, Kid’s and School Uniform. Home is a secondary message on many emails. We focus majority of contacts on driving sales for the business. Highlighting products that are relevant for the time period. We share promotions when they exist, we usually have 2-3 promotions a week.

Q6. What does wearing Le Croy clothes make people feel?

Clothes that make me look great, good quality, preppy dependable style, ties to nautical.

Q7. Why should the consumers care about Le Croy?

Releavnt styles, quality and great value.

Q8. What is the purpose of Le Croy’s PR Twitter account?

Le Croy has two Twitter account, one is the PR handle. The PR handle is to share news about Le Croy and events that Le Croy is participating in.

Q9. Lastly, we would like to know how each pair of insert company’s jeans is constructed. If you can tell us what materials you use? How the materials are acquired? Where the jeans are sewn together? As well as the creative process in designing the jeans?

I do not have this answer at this time

*To give the benefit of the doubt here. Perhaps this business is transitioning into a new economy layout and doesn’t have answers to the new untraditional marketing strategy basics. Regardless, telling us so would make it much easier to help them than acting like their brand is concrete and perfect.

**What do you think Le Croy could have done better to give us what we need to develop the best marketing strategy for them? What critiques do you have for my group and I? Share your input in the comments section below.

Will They Know

Garth Beyer

If you never spend a dime on native advertising, will they know what you offer?

If you never spend a dime on designing the perfect newsletter, Facebook advertising or any other marketing strategy, will people know about you and what your brand stands up for.

Perfect marketing is about the essentials, and the essentials is not to have an account on every social media platform, but to be uplifting, to do at least one thing for one person a day (free of charge), to be remarkable – that is, to be doing things that people can’t help but talk about.

The essentials don’t require a pocket full of dimes, they only require that you care.

 

Stay Positive & If You Care, They Will Know

Ship Yourself

Garth Beyer

You’re not just being watched, you’re being branded.

Before you ship a product, why not ship yourself? Create a personal page. Think of it as an ad for yourself that conveys important information about you, demonstrates your creative ability, conveys unique elements of your personality and professional skills.

Scrap the résumé, scrap your VC, scrap your cover letter.

 

Stay Positive & Sell You, Not Just What You Can Do

More Than Just A Roll

Garth Beyer

There’s something special about business and branding that I’ve always loved. It’s the pinnacle moment when a business goes from profiting from just one product or one rote service, to offering other products or services. Let me break it down for you.

Business 1 only sells product X. Product X is incredible, it’s what business 1 is known for. Business 1’s brand is completely based on product X. People are obsessed with product X.

Business 1 can certainly continue selling product X without seeing a deficit. There’s no need to change, no need to add anything, no need to appeal to a larger market. But, they decide to. (My favorite part about PR is promoting this transition.) Now Business 1 sells product Y and Z based off of product X.Airwick-Cinnabon

What if I told you Business 1 is Cinnabon, product X is the Cinnabon roll and now product Y and Z are Cinnabon air freshener and Cinnabon Vodka.

In one of my most popular blog posts, I wrote about offering variety; it is better to create original products than more flavors of one. Cinnabon has done just that by creating new products rather than creating different flavored Cinnabon rolls.

I tip my hat to Cinnabon. Kat Cole knows what she’s doing. However, I’m still upset that I can’t order orange juice with my Cinnabon anymore. I guess I’ll survive.

 
Stay Positive & There’s More To Variety Than Just Flavor

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