Denise Wakeman: Hi, this is Denise Wakeman of the Blog Squad.
Patsi Krakoff: And this is Patsi Krakoff.
Denise: And you're listening to "Blogging and Beyond," the show about how to leverage the Internet to Attract, Sell and Profit. For the next 30 minutes, we're going to bring you the best expert information on how to use the Internet to build your business. During our show today, we're talking about personal branding and branding to grow your business. We're speaking with Liz Goodgold about the importance of branding for solo business owners, authors, and speakers.
Patsi: That's right, Denise. And I can hardly wait to hear what Liz has to say about this topic of branding. You know, I met Liz on the tennis courts and I know what a powerful forehand she has.
Patsi: So, I'm just now getting to know her professionally and I have a feeling she's very powerful there too.
Denise: Well, that's my sense from reading her stuff, so why don't you go ahead and introduce Liz.
Patsi: Absolutely. Liz Goodgold is CEO of the Nuancing Group, a brand consulting firm that helps both consumer and business to business companies understand the nuances of naming and branding. For two years, Liz was the branding columnist for Entrepreneur Magazine and is now a contributing editor.
Liz is best known as the creator of the DUH! Marketing Awards. Each month she highlights a major marketing snafu, and shares her insights on the valuable lessons to be learned. She then counterpoints with a how to do it right marketing effort that earns praise and a Ta Da! Award.
Patsi: Liz is the author of "Duh Marketing: 99 Monstrous Missteps That You Can Use To Learn, Laugh, and Grow Your Business." And Liz shares her "Lizdom" in her book that has indeed made her a media darling. Welcome, Liz.
Liz Goodgold: Nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Patsi: Well, we're very excited to have you here. Let's start at the top. First of all, what is DUH marketing and why is your book entitled DUH Marketing?
Liz: Well, "duh" is what people say when they finally get it. I don't think that I necessarily speak intelligent, fabulous words, but I do have the ability to break it down with lots of examples, so that even complicated topics people go, "Duh, I get it. It's so easy." And that's my goal when it always comes to marketing. You don't have to be a scientist. You just have to learn a little bit about the tools to use so that you can be a success.
Patsi: That makes sense. And today we're going to talk a little bit about branding, and especially for the small business owner, or the entrepreneur, the independent professional. I always thought that branding was something that the big guys did‑‑people like Nike and Coca Cola.
Liz: Well, you're exactly right. And, in fact, those are the guys who have such enormous budgets. They decide they want to advertise on the Super Bowl‑‑$84,000 per second‑‑they go off and do it. But the real question is what do we do as small business owners? And to me, I think we have so many options right in front of us if we stop thinking that we have to do it exactly like the big boys. Instead you want to do what I call R&D‑‑Rip‑off and Duplicate.
Liz: You want to do a little bit what the big boys do, but make it, spin it so that it truly is your brand.
Patsi: That sounds like fun.
Denise: OK, so how does a small business do that?
Liz: Well, you have to start at the beginning. When you talk about an enormous company, let's take a brand like Harry Potter, and as you folks are well aware, there are literally thousands of websites devoted to Harry Potter. There are some folks who have taken to writing additional stories about the character. There are folks who do nothing but blog about the upcoming movie. But the point is a brand is something that we care about.
I finally bought myself a Mercedes. And to me that is not a car, that is a brand. And I know it's a brand because of the German engineering, because I think about all the concepts, because I think about that song "Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes‑Benz."
Liz: This is when you have moved from the generic to the specific you are brand. It's when you care about it. It's when you go out of your way and say, "Oh my gosh, put on the brakes. We have got to go to In‑N‑Out Burger because you care deeply about having an In‑N‑Out burger verses oh well, here's a hamburger shop.
Denise: Right.
Patsi: Right.
Liz: It's the preferred brand. So what you want to do, especially if you're a small business or an author or a speaker, is to figure out how do I take what's really my strong points and exacerbate them so people say, "Oh my gosh, I care about that person" enough that that becomes the brand. Chicago
So, let's take something easy for example. A good girlfriend of mine in
Denise: Right.
Patsi: Gee Denise, does that remind you of anyone we know?
Denise: Yeah, it does actually‑‑the Blog Squad. Whenever we meet in public, or at conferences, or we're speaking we wear black suits with bright pink blouses.
Liz: See, and I think it's great. And sometimes I'll hear, "Oh, well, gosh Liz, that's really sort of corny." But if you think about it, let's look at Larry King. Every single time Larry King is on the air, and let me ask you ladies, what is he wearing?
Patsi: Red suspenders.
Liz: Suspenders every single time. And in fact, that sort of becomes his brand. It would be also as if Shakira stopped shaking her hips, or Crystal Gail cut her hair, or, we knew what happened when, Sylvester Stallone tries his hand at comedy. You have to know what you're good at, what you should do, and what you should never do.
Denise: Right. Well, a brand can be visual as well as emotional, right?
Liz: Always. And so if you keep on the same theme, a small business owner, I can't use the Super Bowl as an advertising vehicle. I urge all of my clients to use the power of voicemail as if it is their own radio commercial. Think about it.
Patsi: That's a clever idea.
Liz: You have all of that airtime and it's really of no value to say, "Hey it's Liz, I'm out. Leave a message."
Denise: Right.
Patsi: Sure.
Liz: This is your chance to really imbue that message with at least a little bit of personality. "Hey, it's Liz, author of DUH! Marketing. Leave a message. I'm duh-lighted you called." See? You give them a little bit of information, so even... And I've had so much fun with this.
I finally had my landlord, for example, when I was renting my office space, say, "I'm coming to one of your speeches, Liz. I have heard that message 20 times, and I finally understand what you do, and I'm finally going to go to a talk of yours."
Denise: Right.
Liz: You get the word out because so many of us not only use, and we'll talk about the web, but the phone is a great communication tool.
Patsi: That's true.
Liz: So what you have to do is figure out how to harness the power of the telephone.
Patsi: I just wrote that "Note to self: change voicemail message."
Liz: So tell us little bit about you, this is the blog squad. Find out how we can we help you in your business?
Patsi: Can you back up for a second?
Liz: Sure.
Patsi: It was R&D and "R" was to rip off, what was the "D" again?
Liz: The "D" is "duplicate."
Patsi: Duplicate.
Liz: So what I try to do is figure out what are the big boys doing with tremendous success and then how can you take that idea and make it appropriate for small business. So let's look at some examples.
Right now, and obviously last night, with Jordin Sparks winning "American Idol," the hottest thing going on is contests, reality television or what sometimes folks would call 'user generated content', right, people themselves write it.
So let's say you're going, "Right, but that's really great for them," or maybe you can write their award winning song and you get to appear with Justin Timberlake on the Grammy's. Well, what kind of small business deal?
Well, what if my clients, I encourage them to do, was to also have an online contest, which is what do you do with your "reacher". This "reacher" is a thing, if you've never seen it, so it picks up trash as a dumb or fair or it picks up disgusting things you never wanted to touch in a restaurant. It's like two little thongs and it picks that up. So the concept was really simple. What do you do with your reacher, and that's a contest.
Let's say you have, you're an owner or a supplier of cubicles for offices. You can have a phenomenal contest on 'submit the ugliest, most disgusting cubicle and we'll do an extreme makeover', and at the same time you're highlighting your expertise and your brand that you are the experts when it comes to creating efficient, organized offices and cubicles.
Patsi: Sure, those are great ideas.
Liz: So all of this in effect when you look at it and that's what I know we all love as a whole idea of a viral campaign. It's so contagious, you want to catch it.
Well let's say I also want to do like another small business. All of these, create your own commercial, right? This is exactly what happened in this past Super Bowl.
Patsi: Right, right.
Liz: But the readers sort of kicked off that part of advertising. Rate the commercial and we'll put it on the Super Bowl. Well you could encourage your customers to do the same thing. Create a two minute spot and give them rules because some people have learned the hard way that if you don't tell people the rules, you unfortunately feel as if you have to air when they do nothing but rag on your brand.
Denise: You're thinking of what, Chrysler or Ford?
Liz: Exactly, that's exactly where I am going. So give it really good parameters and you could actually encourage your own clients to create a 30‑second, minute, 2‑minute video as to why they think your software, your accounting firm, your television supplier is the best.
You are calling upon your own customers and they in turn can tell someone else. Oh my god, this is a great opportunity for you and it starts to build.
Patsi: It's really a great way to unleash the creativity of some of your customers and my husband did that in his job and got some tremendous video clips that were submitted.
Liz: Oh because we all know that testimonials work. The testimonials work when a few things happen. One, is they have to be relevant and two, they really have to have some sort of attribution so that they can relate to it.
In other words, they have to say, Cindy Swayne, 44 years old, small business owner in a certain city. If it's just a first name without a city and age or any sort of marking information, I don't believe it. I would think that you created it on your own computer.
And so I think it's for the next level you can see that, "Whoa, this can be an amazing tool to use on the web to build your brand."
Patsi: Yeah, especially with all the audio and the video capabilities now‑a‑days that some people on the Internet do have, is making it easier for people to participate like that. Great. Liz, you often advise clients to avoid the vanilla, what do you mean by that?
Liz: Well, I think when you look at all of the messages that we are bombarded with everyday, if you are going to really find a way to stand out from the sea of similarity, you can't be plain. You can't be vanilla.
I think it's really similar to what Robert Frost once said, "Freedom lies in being bold. You have to be ready and prepared to take bold steps if you want to stand out", and if you look at some big companies, you can then see how it might work for a small company.
So for example, let's take 7‑Up. 7‑Up took a very, very bold step when it was trying to figure out how to shore up their market share that they were losing to Mountain Dew, and in my book Mountain Dew, they do a phenomenal job of branding. It's Dew the dew, it's extreme, it's buoyant, highly caffeinated, it's great.
Well, 7‑up wasn't doing that. So 7‑up finally created a campaign just for teenage boys and it said this, '7‑Up, up yours'. Well I hope to goodness that us ladies are offended. We're supposed to be offended because we're not their target market. They took that bold step because everything that we hate, a teenager or boy is going to love. If they get to piss off their parents, it's a great day.
So that's what I mean and you know, as a small business owner, to say, "Well, you know everybody in my industry does it this way", wrong. If you truly are going to make an impact, at some point you're going to do what I call very polarizing step. Some people are going to love you and some people are going to hate you.
Patsi: Well, let's talk a little bit about professionals. If you are a speaker or an author, isn't that a little different to create a brand name?
Liz: Well, you have to work on many things. I have a girlfriend for example, who just does brilliant voice over work and she has a very, very common name. I mean Jill Jones. Well, as you can see, thanks to the web, if you cannot be Googled and found on the web, you're nothing.
But she really couldn't build her brand as Jill Jones but aha, she could build it as the "billion dollar voice" and the billiondollarvoice.com. So you have to figure out if you truly can be Googled, what else can you do.
There's another speaker by the name of Rick Buts. I mean if I had the name "Buts" it wouldn't work for me but what he did is he turned lemons and some lemonade by having his entire brand as helping you kick the buts out of life "but I should have done it," "but I should have over thought about it," "but I could have," "but I would have," "but I didn't," and he uses it that way.
So I think it's really important when you are the brand as in the case of a speaker, just figure out how you can brand yourself if you can't brand your own name. It might have to be a description and that's OK, because we actually know from research that more people will remember a book's title or descriptor than the person's name.
Denise: OK, well we need to take a quick break here and I think that is a good place to do it. I think I am going to come back to that thought Liz. So we just want to remind you that you're listening to "Blogging and Beyond" with the Blog Squad. I am Denise Wakeman and my partner is Patsi Krakoff. Today we're talking with Liz Goodgold of duhmarketing.com. She is the author of "Duh Marketing: 99 Monstrous Missteps You Can Use to Learn, Laugh and Grow Your Business."
You can find information about Liz Goodgold and her "Lizdom" at www.duhmarketing.com and you can get information about the Blog Squad at www.blogsquad.biz.
If you have a question for Liz today, you can call into 718‑508‑9559 or you can send an instant message via Skype to "dwakeman." Now, back to "Blogging and Beyond" and our conversation with Liz Goodgold about small business and professional branding. Patsi?
Patsi: Well, thanks for that, Denise. So, Liz, we were talking about branding for independent speakers and authors and other professionals. You gave some great examples. Any others?
Liz: Yes. I think it's really important to think about not what your product is today, but what all your products are going to look like, and create what I call 'naming architecture.'
Let me explain. Naming architecture is just really a way to make sure that each brand, product, or service that you offer relates to the other. So, we take a really easy example: we might find a book called "Chicken Soup." So, we know the first soup is called "Chicken Soup for the Soul." Then, we had "Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul." Then, we had "Chicken Soup for the Chicken's Soul," right?
Liz: We know that all of those books are part of that family of brands. With me so far?
Denise: Yes.
Patsi: Sure.
Liz: So, the same thing: PepsiCo with its Frito Lay, right? You have Cheetos, Doritos, Tostitos, Myitos; if it's got an ‑itos, I am going to eat them and we know that it comes from Frito Lay. Great type branding. If you go into the book store under my favorite section of mystery, you could find Sue Grafton. "A" is for Alibi, "B" is for Burglar, "C" is for Court.
So, you can see by creating a brand like that, no one else can invade her mind share or her territory. No one else can write a book called 'T' is for Terror without people saying, "Duh, that's obviously a Sue Grafton book."
Denise: Right.
Liz: So, I encourage authors, and even owners, if they start naming their services. Like I do a tax audit, or I do this sort of thing, or I offer this sort of consulting as a lawyer on intellectual property to make sure all of these services, these products, relate. So that any time someone hears either your name or the product name, they say, "Oh, I know exactly the origin of the goods." And that's the essence of great branding.
Denise: And that sort of goes with the whole thing of, you need to have a clear sense of the focus of your business. Whether it be a speaking business, or you're an author, or you're any kind of consultant, or professional, you need to have a real clear focus about what you're doing, so that you're not going off in all different directions and creating lots of different brands that get confusing.
Liz: Right. And I think sometimes we hear this, and I certainly do, from speakers. And one book is called something, and the second book has no relationship whatsoever. Well, if your first book lays a foundation, you certainly want to build upon it for the second book.
Denise: Sure.
Liz: And that's what happens when you think about naming, not just for today, but with the vision of where you want to go. What you don't want to have happen is what happened to Boston Chicken. Right? Boston Chicken existed, 18 months later, "Well, duh, I think we'll offer turkey."
Well, they have to change the name from Boston Chicken to Boston Market.
Patsi: Oh, I didn't know that.
Liz: They didn't have enough vision to recognize where they were going to go. The name was too limiting at the get go.
Patsi: Right.
Liz: So, when you're looking at how you brand yourself and your business, you also want to figure out that it has to be big enough to grow, but small enough so that you can still resonate within your niche.
Patsi: Yeah. How is it any different for women when it comes to branding? Are there any special considerations for women, rather than for men?
Liz: Well, I try to look at a lot of things. We, as women, do things a little bit differently. So, for example, we know that women are information gatherers. Most of us know this. In other words, a man wants a shirt. He walks into Bloomingdale's, he finds a blue shirt, he pays for it, he's done. You and I go into Bloomingdale's, we pull 22 blue shirts off the rack, and we're going to try all 22 of them on.
Well, with that theory, that means when I'm speaking to a woman about my services or doing a speech for them, I give them lots of information and a lot of time to let it marinate. It's not as if I cut to the quick, or cut to the chase. I'm like, "Let me send you this. Listen to this on my website. Go do this."
If it's a man, I'm like, "Seven reasons to hire me: boom, boom, boom, boom, boom."
Liz: Because that's what men want, right? To cut to the chase. The other difference is that women are more willing to admit they know what they don't know. They're ready to say, "You know, I really never understood what a blog was, anyway."
Men give you that goofy smile and they start nodding their head. They don't have any clearer idea than we do, but they pretend they do. And that, of course, turns out to be the great joke why a man drives around lost because he won't ask for directions, and we as women, will say, "Just tell me how to get there."
Denise: Right.
Liz: It's a very, very different way. And, so I take a lot of the information about how women learn and how men learn and apply it to how I write emails, how I write proposals, and even how I give speeches. Because we really are, in many ways, different animals.
Denise: So, as far as a woman branding her business versus a man branding his business, what we would you say the distinctions are?
Liz: Well, I really believe in the power of the elevator pitch. In the old days, we used to say, "You have 30 seconds in which you are trapped in the elevator with your best client. Lucky, if you're trapped with Bill Gates, you're trapped with Steven Spielberg."
Now, we all have ADD and you have seven seconds. So, when I work with women on this, I like to do things that are either a little bit clever or they give you such a ? that you want to say, "Tell me more."
Let me give you some examples. I have another colleague of mine who sells clothing. And she just simply says when she does her elevator speech, "If your clothes aren't becoming to you, you should be coming to me."
Patsy: That's cute.
Liz: Women are going to look at that, and go, "Of course. We get it." I have another colleague who does automobile repair. And every time she's at an event, she says, "Oh, perhaps we've met before by accident. I'm in the automobile repair business."
Denise: They're going for the puns.
Liz: You know, but it works. Here's a man, for example. This is such a man thing, but it's true. He loves it. He loves to stand up and say, "I hold up banks, buildings, gymnasiums. I'm in the strut business, and let me strut my stuff." [laughs]
It's a typical guy, but you recognize that women will let people play a little bit more. We allow ourselves to go into the whimsical. And, again, men are a little bit more just "cut to the chase, tell me what you do. I don't need all this other stuff around it."
Denise: Right.
Liz: So, again, when it comes to branding, you want to think about it. When I created the Nuancing Group, for example, the whole idea was "Nuancing from the Nuances."
Denise: Right.
Liz: One of the things that I really paid a lot of attention to was to a really subtle form of linguistics. I wanted to make sure that you have the word "nuancing," which has the "s" sound, which is considered feminine by the way.
Denise: Oh, OK.
Liz: If think about it, if you ever go down to health and beauty aisle at Target or CVS Pharmacy and you start looking, all the products for women have an abundance of S's‑ Herbal Essence, Suave, Secret. They're all, because it's sort of the stylized view, ha, of a woman's body and they come out as this Soft and Sensuous and Skin So Soft sort of thing.
Men on the other hand, go down the automobile aisle and you get DieHard. You get what's called plosive sounds. So what I was looking for was to make sure that since I had a soft sound, I paired it with a hard guttural sound, group versus associates because then it would have reaffirmed a feminine sound to it.
So that to me is a very subtle way but it's something that you want to think about. If you're just appealing to women, you will pick your names and your words very differently than if you're going towards either a mixed audience or a male only audience.
Denise: Right.
Liz: There's a lot to be said going towards men and making these hard, staccato sounds boom, boom, boom, boom, boom!
Denise: Oh this is fascinating because everything you're talking about, of course in my head, I'm applying to The Blog Squad. So there's the S in Squad, but also the naming architecture and all our blogging products. And although we have gotten a little off track with a few things too so if you just keep applying everything you're saying to us. It's interesting to hear that and standing out and taking bold steps and being whimsical. There we are The Blog Squad.
Patsi: You have to. I was just going to say it's so important. There are so many times when I'm talking to a consultant, especially in the consultant world because their services are sometimes difficult or complex to understand, and sometimes they name their businesses abstract names. And you just want to go, "Huh? What's this that you actually do?
Liz: What I often caution and I actually advocate that folks do is if you had to pick a complicated name, oh you can't change the name, OK? That's not an uncommon predicament. Oh I have so much brand equity. I'm not changing the company name. Aha, what you can do is change the tagline.
Denise: Right. OK.
Liz: And taglines aren't slogans. Taglines are part of the brand. They should explain your positioning, your natural point of difference and they should be with you in the company for 15 years or more. And it could be anything from Target, "Expect more. Pay less." And that works because it has opposites and opposites really work hard as taglines.
There's one that I love, it's for an online store. It's Camera World and it says "Camera World for negative people." That's funny!
Denise: Yeah. That's clever.
Liz: It's very clever. So sometimes what you can do, if you have a really tough name is figure out how do I put a tagline to it so the second part works.
Patsi: It's sort of as in the side way, what is the optimal length for a tagline? Everything you've mentioned is pretty short?
Liz: Short definitely works and if again, you go back to the theory that we have short attention spans, I'm sure you remember the days. We used to have domains. Barnesandandnoble.com? No way, they had to buy BN.com.
Denise: Right.
Liz: Remember it used to be Monster Board? Oh too many letters, it's Monster.com.
Patsi: Yeah. Well Federal Express is FedEx now.
Liz: Exactly, so you really have to keep that in mind that people are going to shorten it, so short is usually better.
Patsi: Right.
Liz: The other thing I like to keep in mind is putting it in the present tense. So instead of, bringing you from here to there, connecting you with the world, picking up your package, delivering the world, everything in the present tense.
So you want to figure out how if it really explains. I was working with a girlfriend yesterday who has a company called Inertia Publishing, which is probably really appropriate for a lot of the listeners here. And she helps you get it done, gets over the inertia. And I finally said, "Maybe what the real secret is, moving you from expert to author."
Denise: Oh good.
Liz: And so you can see, I mean if you remember, oh, your old English right? Present progressive is the "ing" moving you forward, moving. Anything that has that sort of a cadence tends to do well. You can also use the opposites. You can do shorts. You can also use juxtapositions.
Denise: Right, OK.
Liz: So that works. Anything that goes, "Whoa! I didn't expect that." I really like Taco Bell's from a few years ago, "Think outside the bun."
Denise: Right, right.
Liz: Because you know darn well, we are right down the path of going, "Think outside the box." And they go, "Oh." They throw you for a little curve ball and therefore it stands out better as " Think outside the bun, " than if it ever were think outside the box, which is so...
Denise: Overused.
Liz: Thinking outside the box, you don't think outside the box.
Denise: Right, right.
Liz: You have to put that in writing.
Denise: Well you know, we're coming to the end of our time here and I think we can have a whole discussion on taglines here. I never realized all the detail that could go into the tagline but...
Patsi: Perhaps even a teleseminar on creating effective taglines for your business.
Liz: Yeah. There you go. This is critical! And I think if people understand your business, then they can refer business to you which is really the holy grail of a small business.
Denise: Right, right.
Liz: We're not advertising. We need someone to talk about us. It's like the Bonnie Raitt, "Let's give them something to talk about."
Denise: Right. Excellent.
Patsi: Liz, this has really been informative and we want to thank you for taking the time. But before we wrap up, Denise has a couple of important announcements.
Denise: OK. I'd like to let our listeners to know that next week on "Blogging and Beyond" we're interviewing Michael Stelzner of WhitePaperSource.com and WritingWhitePapers.com about, da, da, da, da, you guessed it: white papers and how to use them to generate leads for your business. New York
So tune in on May 31st at Pacific for the show. We'll actually be in
Liz: It was a sheer delight, That you very much.
Patsi: I also want to remind our listeners that Liz puts out an excellent marketing newsletter once a month and you can subscribe to that at her site www.duhmarketing.com. She highlights really stupid marketing mistakes for people and also tells you what they could have done better and also highlights a few people that get it right.
Denise: OK. You've been listening to "Blogging and Beyond" on BlogTalkRadio. You can always get the latest information about this show at our blog at www.bloggingandbeyond.com . Remember the time is now…
Patsi: The time is now to attract, sell, and profit! Blog on.
Denise: Blog on!
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