Here’s where the Founder as Marketer Fallacy comes into play: they also believe that you understand the intricacies of building a marketing strategy, or at the very least the importance of putting a formidable one into place. You convinced them to invest in your company, so it’s logical you know how to build an effective marketing strategy, right? Not necessarily. While successful founders are really good at selling their company vision, there’s a lot more to a startup marketing strategy than an investor pitch.

I’m going to focus on the bedrock of a successful marketing strategy, which is your company messaging and positioning. It’s imperative that you start with the foundational elements of your brand position. So let’s look at five essential factors for founders to keep in mind to build a successful marketing strategy.

The Mission In Your Messaging
Your company’s mission is very much intertwined with your overarching vision. It is meant to be visionary, in that it is the main motivation behind why you exist as an organization. Add in your unique selling proposition (USP) and this should effectively differentiate and separate your company from competitors while highlighting the value you bring to your sector. These are the basic components used to formulate your overarching messaging.

Keep It Simple
Have you ever been on the customer end of a sales pitch and started wondering, ‘what on earth is (s)he talking about? Am I missing something?” Chances are, the salesperson is using industry jargon that makes total sense speaking to colleagues in his specific market sector, but is so ‘inside’ it’s falling on deaf ears among clients like you.  One of the most glaring examples exists in adtech where so many acronyms are used, a column was invented to explain them to marketers. Here’s an example.

Your positioning should be simple to understand and follow this template:

Your Company is [what you are] that [what you do] and briefly [why you’re unique/what problem you solve].

Anything and everything you do as an organization and as individuals on the team needs to harken back to this basic positioning. Avoid salesy language filled with fluff and beware the echo chamber of messaging that was created and implemented in a vacuum.

Make it Transferable
While good storytelling is crucial to startup success, the underlying messaging needs to be transferable to every single member of your company. In the beginning, it might just be you and 2 other people, after funding, maybe a team of 10. If each person is communicating their own version of the pitch deck, your story is getting diluted no matter whether to their family or a vendor. And as the company scales, so does your problem.

Make sure that your messaging and positioning can easily be shared with all employees. And more importantly, that they understand it and use it.

Consistency as Mantra (See What I Did There)
In addition to language, your brand identity needs to be consistent as well. Wherever you go in the world, a Coca Cola is exactly the same visually. This helps to convey of both tangible and intangible brand attributes, as your mind adds to what it has already gleaned from previous encounters.

As I’m sure you know, repetition is a basic marketing tactic used to influence audience. Anyone witnessing the 2016 Presidential election can attest to this. So this is an easy one: Keep everything consistent and repeat. And repeat.

Nix the Negatives: Words Matter
When I present new messaging to a company, I always use this simple, yet very effective exercise.  I tell everyone:

“Whatever you do, don’t think about a pink elephant!”

I then ask them:

What are you thinking about?

Take a guess what they’re thinking about…a pink elephant of course.

The words we use have a powerful conscious and subconscious effect. Our brains are wired to ignore negatives. From a psychological perspective, you’re much better off saying what you want instead of the opposite. Take an example from real life; when you tell a child, “Don’t bother your sister,” you’ve just reinforced their desire to do it. So what do they end up continuing to do? Try using a positive statement such as, “Leave your sister alone,” and see what happens.

Now apply this information to your company materials, the way you talk to customers and prospects. You could be stepping on your own foot without being aware of it. Tell your customers what you want them to do or to know, instead of subconsciously reinforcing the opposite. Avoiding negatives in framing your messaging, marketing materials and conversations is fundamental to your marketing strategy.

Summary
Steer clear of the Founder as Marketer Fallacy by making sure you put in place strong company messaging and positioning as the bedrock of your overall marketing strategy. Get this right and you’ll be putting your best foot forward towards success in both marketing strategy and meeting your business objectives.

Need help with your messaging and positioning? Send an email and let’s discuss!

Recommended reading:

Words That Change Minds
Shelle Rose Charvet

Willful Blindness: Why We Ignore the Obvious at Our Peril
Margaret Heffernan

Precognitive was chosen as one of two winners by the jury of the BBVA Open Talent 2016 edition.  Of the thousands of competitors, the 20 finalists competed in the final of USA and rest of the world edition.

BBVA has held the worldwide Open Talent competition for eight years, looking for innovative technology to invest in that protects the Banking and FinTech industries. As one of the winners, six total from three regions, Precognitive received €30,000 ($33,705 USD) and a spot in their two-week immersion and interaction program in Mexico City and Madrid to grow their startup business.

For more information about Precognitive, visit the Precognitive site.

Recommended reading:

Virtually Human: The Promise and the Peril of Digital Immortality
Martine Rothblatt

Brain waves can be used to detect potentially harmful personal information
Science Daily

When most of us think of a musician as a brand, likely candidates to pop up in your mind are Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Madonna, or Justin Bieber. These are inherently mainstream pop stars, known throughout the world, not only for their music but also for their somewhat controversial personal lives.

Even if you think you’ve never heard of Nick Cave, chances are you’ve encountered his work…whether watching Shrek, Harry Potter, True Blood, or The X-Files where his songs have added texture to the visuals; or watching movies like Lawless or The Proposition, both screenplays which were written in part by him. You won’t read about him in the tabloids, or catch him twerking with a young Miley Cyrus type any time soon, although he does have a penchant for featuring her in compromising positions in his songs and literature.

So where does Nick Cave fit in, and why am I writing this? It’s because his brand’s unique attributes keep him relevant, consistent, and engaging. Nick Cave is defined by his constant reinvention of himself and his music. He is never standing still, always defying himself to deliver a truly unique and evolved experience with each new recording released. Brands need to sustain relevance in the marketplace, but how do they also remain consistent in a constantly shifting environment? Sounds like a bit of an oxymoron, doesn’t it.

While Mr. Cave’s music is continuously evolving, the basic tenets of his ‘brand’ remain consistent. He utilizes a litany of sarcasm, humor, and vivid, sometimes gruesome imagery, tied to mostly heartfelt, genuine sentiments that articulate his unique perspective of this world. When a Nick Cave fan encounters a new song, it is almost like entering one of Joshua Foer’s ‘memory palaces’, as the themes, style and tone have been consistent throughout his career, and I believe this is one of the major reasons why his fan base is so loyal. I’m oversimplifying his brand aura here, but hopefully you get the point.

Another example of an artist as a brand is Prince, who briefly changed his name to an unpronounceable symbol while ‘enslaved’ in a bad record deal. While the name change did affect sales negatively for a while, his fans mostly remained loyal. His upcoming new album release is being greeted with much fan fervor.

So what am I trying to teach all the brands out there? Be memorable by making a lasting impression that resonates with your target audience. This is what successful marketing is all about, whether you’re a musician or an entrepreneur. Create positive, memorable, unique experiences that can’t help but remind people of your company. So when your basic products and/or services need to pivot (which ultimately, they will trust me), your customers and prospects will continue to relate positively and strongly to your brand.

What brands would you evangelize and why? Let us know.

Photo credit: Nikolitsa Boutieros
www.divinelightphotography.net

*Nick Cave the singer known for Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds, Grinderman, and The Birthday Party, not Nick Cave, the Missouri-born sculptor, dancer and performance artist.

Recommended Reading:
Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything
by Joshua Foer

Recommended Viewing:
20,000 Days on Earth

Recently, I experienced what I like to call customer servitude, the exact opposite of what a user should confront when interacting with a brand. I want to throw up my hands and run screaming in the opposite direction of this company. And yet I can’t, they’re one of the last bastions of what I deem a monopoly in this country.

I’m punch drunk from my interactions with this company, which I won’t recount here. I will share that I’d spent multiple hours trying to undo the company’s own mishandling of my account, which has lasted over a period of months and is still unresolved.

The latest incident sent me into a ping pong match between live in-store representatives, phone assistance, chat, and email. It took interactions with over ten people over a period of two weeks to finally find one representative that actually helped me and didn’t send me off to yet another department. And I was so grateful…that’s the rub. I found the needle in the haystack that was actually willing to put the customer first and fix the situation personally.

This company has an advantage at the moment because of its size and comprehensive customer base. But as innovation continues to rapidly advance forward, companies that can’t figure out how critical great customer service is will be left in the dust. 

Why are people flocking to new services like Uber? Because the customer comes first: from the initial service through the entire experience. The ease of use and pleasant experience leaves a lasting impression that sears in customer loyalty and ignites positive word of mouth.

The customer servitude model exists for now, but hopefully, it will go the way of the dinosaurs sooner rather than later.

Have a customer servitude saga? Share it.

Recommended Reading:
Customers Included: How to Transform Products, Companies, and the World – With a Single Step
Mark Hurst and Phil Terry

There is a voluminous amount of research that supports the fact that people remember stories better than facts or statements. A story activates the language processing parts of our brains, as well as other areas that would be involved if we were actually experiencing the events being told to us. The more interaction with various parts of our brains, the more likely we are to remember, process, and deem the information credible.

Your brand story doesn’t have to be complicated; in fact, it should be relatively simple, and therefore easier to process and hence more memorable. It should be personal in that you want it to resonate with your audience, and help to form a connection to your company with every single person.

So, what’s your brand story?

Recommended reading:

The Seven Deadly Sins of Startup Storytelling

The room was packed to the brim and felt to me more like waiting for an underground concert than a psychology professor’s lecture. I’m happy to report that scientists are now seemingly cool, which facilitates their findings being recognized and shared, and hopefully will inform and assist people from all walks of life, instead of just mainly academics.

Below are two of Dr. Bloom’s findings, and how the information can be applied to the positioning of your personal and/or company brand.

Morality Matters
Dr. Bloom’s research at Yale has revealed that babies are able to judge the good and bad of other’s actions, feel empathy and compassion, as well as possess a rudimentary sense of justice. While the research shows that these traits are hard wired, he also illustrated how they are culturally evolved and some of the implications. He cited our societal changes in viewpoint on slavery and same sex marriages as examples of these shifts in perceptions.

From a brand perspective, morality should extend to cogent actions and behaviors, but not take on a societal slant. For example, no one complained that Chic-fil-A wasn’t open on Sundays because of the company’s Christian owner’s beliefs. But when he spoke out against same sex marriage, it caused a significant uproar and multiple boycotts that lingered in the press for quite a long time.

Do No Evil
Dr. Bloom also related a rather startling story about a British woman who threw a cat into the garbage can ‘just for fun’. She was publicly shamed and harassed as a result of the sharing of the video of her cruel deed on social media. We as humans have an inherent sense of moral judgment and social media now can cause it to swell into punitive action, as it did in the case of this woman, who ended up receiving death threats for her actions.
As a company, I would recommend always wearing the white hats in every situation, as it will always trump the opposite. Google’s “Do No Evil” moniker lasted for quite a long time, but when it shifted to combining user data between all of its properties, that slogan turned into a bullet point in Ten Things We Know to be True: You can make money without doing evil.
I was shocked that there wasn’t more outrage over the decision, but believe that the Google brand had built up so much good equity in the minds of users that they didn’t really care so much about the potential big brother-esque usage of their data.

In summary, as Dr. Bloom articulated, we have choices in how we live our lives. The same goes for how we operate our companies and position our brands. Be good, and as Google would say, “Do No Evil,” even if you decide to *yikes*
make money through advertising.

Have a morality example with your brand? Share it.

Recommended Reading:
Just Babies: The Origins of Good and Evil
By Paul Bloom

Recommended Viewing:
Introduction to Moralities of Everyday Life