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Podcast Episode #52 – Marty Neumeier on Branding and Differentiation
Marty Neumeier defines a brand as the gut feeling customers have about your business. And, “When enough individuals arrive at the same gut feeling, a company can be said to have a brand.” Do a brand is not a product or service, it is how you use that product or service to delight customers and build trust. In this episode of Power to the Small Business, we speak with best-selling author Marty Neumeier on finding your radical differentiation and eliminating your brand gap so that you can delight your customers.
Guest: Marty Neumeier, Liquid Agency, San Jose, California
Length: 26 minutes
You can also download the mp3 file here: Download Power to the Small Business #52 (for personal use only)
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Show Notes:
FILLING IN YOUR BRAND GAP
Use Nuemeier’s three little questions to differentiate. Marty cautions that you demand unambiguous answers. He says in The Brand Gap, that “Unless you have compelling answers to all three questions, meaning that customers find them irresistible, you haven’t got a brand.”
- Who are you?
- What do you do?
- Why does it matter?
Ultimately, what you are trying to do is create trust between you and your customers so that they don’t have to think too hard about their choices. They just automatically pick yours. Trust is a result of your reliability and the delight you give customers. The more choices people have the more you need to work on the delight portion of the formula. Neumeier says that “We make our decisions very intuitively, even though we try to be rational. But the human brain is just not powerful enough to make complex decisions rationally. So in the end we rely on trust.”
The Trust Formula: T = R + D (Trust = Reliability + Delight)
Selected quotes from Marty Neumeier on the show:
ON WHAT A BRAND IS
“A brand isn’t what you say it is, it’s what they say it is. It’s a customer’s gut feeling about your business or product. You don’t actually do the branding. They do the branding working with the materials and experiences you give them.”
“Branding is…adding value. It’s getting people to buy more stuff, for more money, for more years, at a higher price.”
ON FINDING YOUR RADICAL DIFFERENTIATION
“We have to figure out how not to do that thing that feels right. Because if we do that thing that feels right, it’s going to be the same as what everybody else is offering. So there’s no difference between our offerings. Then the only difference is price.”
“Your differentiation should be very exaggerated. …Since you’re inside the business, everything that’s different between your business and a competitor’s seems more different to you. But from the outside, they may not see that difference as very big at all.”
ON ADDING TO, AND SUBTRACTING THINGS FROM, YOUR BUSINESS
“If, in adding something to your business, it brings you into competition with one of your competitors who’s stronger at that: don’t do it.”
Show Links:
Marty Neumeier – Liquid Agency
Marty’s Books:
– The Brand Gap: How to Bridge the Distance Between Business Strategy
– Zag: The Number One Strategy of High-Performance Brands
– The Designful Company: How to build a culture of nonstop innovation
– Inovation ToolKit
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