“The Profitable Marketing & Branding Manifesto”

How To Market & Brand Yourself, Your Product & Your Business

By Eben Pagan

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Marketing Is The Ultimate Leverage In A Growing BusinessNo other aspect of your business can consistently give you such high returns, so quickly, as an

improvement or breakthrough in your marketing. I’ve seen a new marketing campaign double a business overnight, and more. I’ve had many advertisements and marketing campaigns generate from 2-10 TIMES as many customers, spending the same amount of money, just by changing a headline, offer, design, or some combination of elements.

I’ve had opt-in pages generate double the conversion, by changing the design. I’ve had the profit of a product being sold double by changing the price and offer. I’ve had the response to advertisements increase by over ten times, or 1,000%, by changing the design and copy.

You will almost never get a 2-10 times multiplication in your results from another area of your business. In order to take advantage of this very powerful area of leverage, and use it to grow your business and make more profit, you must understand what marketing is, how it works, and how to do it.

What Is Marketing?Let’s begin with a few key distinctions. We’ll use a few general definitions for the purposes of this

report and lesson.

Marketing: Communication that gets paying customers.

Entrepreneur: A person who builds a profitable business.

Entrepreneurial Marketing: Communication that gets paying customers in order to build a growing, profitable business. Since marketing is a specific type or category of communication, let’s “drill down” into the meaning of communication, just to get a sharper focus...

Communication: Is about the successful transmission of meaning. The indicator that you’ve achieved successful communication (in the higher sense) - that the message has gotten across and has landed is:

1. Things become linked in the mind of the other person that weren’t linked before2. The emotion of surprise is triggered by this linking and insight3. Something new becomes possible that wasn’t before4. Behavior changes as a result5. The meaning of experience is changed permanently for the other person

If you haven’t accomplished these, then what you’ve done is not what I would call “communication.” It might be called “talking” or “saying something” or “trying to communicate”... but it’s not real, effective communication. The way we have defined a successful entrepreneur is through their results. In my definition, an entrepreneur is someone who builds a profitable business. No profitable business, and I have a hard time giving them my “seal of approval” of being a bonafide entrepreneur. They might be an aspiring entrepreneur, or they might be entrepreneurial in their thinking, but they’re not a “real” entrepreneur until they have the real-life experience of building a profitable business. Similarly, if you haven’t transmitted a message to the other person that really impacts them, motivates and inspires them to change, and gets them to do something, then you haven’t really achieved communication.

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The root of the word communication is “commune” - which evolved from words that mean to have dealings with, make common, to share. Communing is about sharing in community, and communication is about sharing knowledge in community. The root of the word marketing is “market.” A market is where there are people buying and selling from each other, and reaching agreement on prices. Marketing is taking the concept of the market and turning it into a verb. It’s almost like a contraction of market-make-ing... market-ing. Marketing, in a higher sense, is the process of doing what it takes to get people to come and do business with you, to come and make a market with you.

In Neuro-Linguistic Programming, they have what I think of as a mindset shift - and it’s one of my favorites. It goes like this:

“The meaning of a communication is the response that you get.”

To put it another way, this means that if you share information or knowledge with others, that there’s a highly effective way to decide what your communication actually “meant” to the receiver:

Watch the response they give you.

This flips normal thinking on its head, and puts the responsibility on the person sending the communication to make sure it lands. In the case of your marketing and branding, you’re the one sending the communication, so you have to start watching the response of your customers to know the meaning of what you’re saying!

There’s a trend in education toward the idea that the responsibility of making sure that a child understands the lesson is on the teacher, and that if the child doesn’t learn, then the teacher didn’t teach. It’s a similar mindset. I happen to like these ways of thinking about communication, as they really put the weight and responsibility of making sure that a message gets through... on the communicator.

Marketing - and the particularly powerful form of marketing called branding (which we’ll discuss in a moment) - is a type of communication that’s designed to get very specific results. The results we’re after is people coming and buying from you, and paying you for what you’re offering. In fact, you can know and measure the results of your marketing in a clear-cut way by actually measuring how many sales you make from each marketing communication that you use. I have been tracking, measuring and analyzing the marketing I do for over 15 years now, and my experience is that this is one of the most important things you can possibly do in your business.

If you engage in marketing without understanding these mindsets and definitions, and without making a strong personal commitment to master the skill of getting people to take the action of buying your product or service based on the impact of your marketing communications, then you’ll likely fail at the business you’re trying to build.

To summarize, the point here is that marketing is about effective communication. And if you get your communication right, then your customers will make new mental connections, they’ll be surprised by the insight, their behavior will change into buying behavior, and the meaning of their life experience will change.

And here’s the next leap: The meaning of their life experience changes because after doing business with you, they will then associate your brand with the solution they wanted unconsciously, and think of your brand when they see similar situations in the future. And this is the beginning of effective branding...

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The “Professional Marketing Mindset”In our first report on Entrepreneurial Productivity, we read a quote from the authors of the book

Positioning. The idea was that we live in the world’s first over-communicated society. The “kicker” was that the book was written in 1980, and the level of “over-communication” has grown exponentially ever since. The book Positioning is about marketing. Specifically, it’s about a sophisticated approach to branding. The reason that they opened the book with this insight is to get the reader into a particular mindset: Successful branding that leads to business growth and high long-term profit requires effort, expertise and commitment.

The entire “marketing and merchandising” aspect of business - meaning the sales, marketing, public relations, financial investments and other efforts you make to attract new customers - is peculiar in business. I say this, because something happens when having conversations with others about marketing that doesn’t happen around any other important area of business. The peculiar thing I’m talking about is that everyone seems to think that they understand it. Everyone thinks that they’re a marketing genius.

If I come to you and ask: “What do you think of this new accounting procedure that my bookkeeper implemented?” or “What do you think of the code that my software programmer wrote?” you will probably say “I have no idea, I don’t have experience with bookkeeping or writing computer code” (unless you’ve been a bookkeeper or programmer, of course). This goes for most businesses and their internal processes.

But marketing is different. If I come to you and ask: “What do you think of this new logo that I had designed?” or “What do you think of this advertisement that we just wrote?” you will probably give an opinion on it. “I don’t like the colors” or “I think the picture is too big.” Marketing is peculiar in that I can ask just about anyone what they think of my marketing, and they’ll start telling me what they think, with casual confidence that their opinions will likely translate into improvements and more sales.

I think this happens for at least two reasons:

1. Most people are exposed to a LOT of marketing in their lives. Each of us is exposed to an average of thousands of marketing messages per day. We’re not exposed to thousands of lines of computer code, or thousands of bookkeeping entries, on average. This continual interaction with so many marketing messages gives us a familiarity, comfort and confidence that because we’ve seen so much of it, we understand the psychology and methods behind its design.

2. The second reason has to do with the function of marketing. Marketing is (ideally) designed to communicate with and persuade human beings to buy things. Most of it is put into formats that are easily understood by people. Because the average marketing logo, advertisement or design is far more easily understood than the average line of computer code or the average bookkeeping journal, we feel like we’re having a “normal conversation” when we comment on what we like or dislike about it.

This “illusion of familiarity” and the feeling of understanding mislead us into believing that we have mastery in an area that we don’t. If we want to create powerful marketing and branding - the kind that brings a growing stream of paying customers to us - then we must take the psychology and practice of marketing and branding seriously, and we must get the most cutting-edge knowledge that we can... and apply it. We can’t make the mistake of guessing, assuming that we understand it, and then investing time, effort, energy and money in marketing ideas that were destined for failure.

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In short, we must become professional marketers, and professional branders. As a word of encouragement: The investment I’ve made to learn what we’re calling professional marketing was one of the best investments I’ve made in my entire business career. It very well might be the single most valuable skill that I’ve learned - mostly because it has let me to the realization that a deep understanding of others leads to more valuable relationships - both personally and in business.

What Is Branding?There are a lot of different ideas about what branding is, and why we should do it. Most of these

ideas, in my experience, are based on what we think that companies are doing to brand themselves, rather than on what successful companies are actually doing. Branding has become a “sexy” word, along with the word “positioning.” The problem is that most people really don’t know what these two things are, or how to do them successfully in a business.

Humans tend to naturally want social status and fame. We want people to know who we are, and to look up to us. We are naturally attracted to anything that we think will make us more famous, get us more recognition, or make other people think that we’re cool and attractive. And it follows that most common ideas about branding and positioning can be boiled down to “ways to make other people think that you’re cool.”

This is problematic not just because it’s the wrong idea, but because it also prevents you from looking for the right idea. Remember, we’re focused on building entrepreneurial success here, which is defined as building a profitable business. And in the Accelerate methodologies, we’re also focused on shifting into high-growth mode. So we want both high growth and profit, so we can increase our income - and keep increasing it.

In the context of building a business that grows and makes profit, branding must be approached very differently than most people approach it. To understand why, let’s take a look at some of the most successful brands in history.

What The Branding Giants DoWe see ads from companies like Apple, Lexus, Coca Cola, FedEx, McDonalds and others - who run

multi-million dollar “conceptual” ads, and we think “that’s marketing.” They take out huge billboards and put a picture of their product on it, and their logo. They buy million dollar TV spots. They invest literally billions of dollars in their domination strategies.

Sounds like a good way to win the marketing game, right?

But it is actually the opposite of what a business that wants to put itself into high-growth mode should do. Remember when I said that we look at what big companies do to brand themselves, and we think we understand what they’re doing? Well, for the most part, they’re not doing what we think they’re doing.

Two Types Of BrandingLet’s draw a distinction here between two types of branding. The first type of branding strategy is

called “defensive branding” and the second type is called “direct branding.” And these aren’t just cute names. Understanding this distinction can make the difference between huge growth and financial

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returns and huge losses and financial ruin (not understanding this distinction costs businesses SO much).

In my view, large companies that spend billions of dollars on branding are spending most of it on defensive branding. They have achieved massive success with their products and services, and their branding strategy is to make sure that no one forgets them. It’s literally a strategy primarily designed to prevent loss of market share, not to grow it. A company like Apple or Microsoft or Google... or Starbucks or McDonalds or Lexus... is at the “top of the food chain” in the business world. They have achieved a level of success that maybe one in a million companies will ever achieve. Once you’re on the top, the only place to go is down, and there are a lot of others trying to push you off of the mountain.

Defensive branding is what you do when you have a billion dollar company, and you need to prevent yourself from losing market-share. When you’re that big, the game is to prevent others from getting into your mind-slot, not to get into the mind in the first place. Really getting this and seeing this motive and strategy behind the expensive branding campaigns that most large companies follow turns on a lightbulb that can really be valuable to you.

Defensive Branding vs. Direct BrandingThe other type of branding - and the one that I hope to convince you to become more interested in -

is called “direct branding.” It’s a strategy that combines highly effective direct marketing with intentional branding strategy - but in this case, it’s in service of growth - of gaining market share - and not trying to prevent losing market share.

Direct branding is something you do to support your action-oriented direct marketing. It’s not the main message, but a “supporting message” that you include along with your action-oriented marketing campaigns.

To really set this insight, a piece of advice that I give to entrepreneurs who are just getting started with marketing is: Do NOT do what big companies do with their marketing, but instead do what those companies did when they were small and wanted to grow rapidly.

Let’s take a company you have definitely heard of, and use it as a case-study example: FedEx. You might remember the days when FedEx was named “Federal Express.” When they first started, they had a tight, focused marketing campaign, based on a powerful “unique selling proposition.” You might remember it:

“When it Absolutely, Positively has to be there overnight.”

This was a key part of the marketing strategy that grew them to a billion dollar company. It’s a tight, focused, impactful marketing message that says everything it needs to say, without confusion. It’s one of my favorite marketing statements, period. It’s an example of powerful marketing that also makes permanent associations in the mind of the customer for the long-term. It’s direct branding.

What did they do once they got big and had a multi-billion dollar empire to manage and defend? They started what I would call a “defensive branding” strategy. They shortened their name (from the more official sounding “Federal Express” to the hip nickname that customers used: “FedEx.” And they changed their unique selling proposition, and evolved it over time into a more general tagline. Now their motto is:

“The world on time.”

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This is the kind of branding strategy that you typically see huge companies doing once they’ve “arrived” and are out of high-growth “entrepreneurial” mode. No one is going to remember “the world on time” when they need to send a package. It’s just not a memorable phrase. But it does make a statement: We’re the big guys, and we can afford to just be in front of you with our message. That’s a powerful branding strategy if you’ve got a billion-dollar company (FedEx is actually the largest air carrier in the world based on total weight carried - if you can believe that - so they’re way beyond the billion dollar level).

Using an image-based, defensive branding strategy costs a lot of money. And it’s just not the kind of thing that makes sense for a growing company that needs the money to do other things (including make the owner - YOU - more income).

Why It’s Easy To Sell “Big Company Branding” To Entrepreneurs & Businesses That Really Don’t Need It

I used to work in the real estate and mortgage industry. That’s where I originally learned about direct marketing and sales. In the real estate industry, you get to see a dynamic that really brings the problem of using the wrong branding strategy home.

As you may have noticed, real estate agents tend to have personalities that, let’s say, do well with lots of attention. It’s common to see real estate agents placing “glamour shots” of themselves all over their advertisements, property signs, bus benches, and anywhere else they can creatively insert them into (if you’re a real estate agent, please take this with a wink - I mean well). There are several companies that serve the “image branding” needs of the real estate industry, often charging $10,000 or more to design a business card, brochure and website package for a real estate agent.

The sales pitch goes something like this: “You need to have your picture on EVERYTHING. Your customers want to see you, and see you looking your best. They’re making the biggest investment of their lives, and they want to work with someone who looks professional. Spend ten grand on one of our brochure packages, and your customers will instantly think you’re a pro because your business card will look great.”

Yes, I’m stylizing a little bit. But only a little bit. And this kind of sales pitch works “like gangbusters” - because we humans love it when people tell us that we need to put our picture on things, feature ourselves as the star, and look good for others. It’s an ego-sell, really.

Now, it’s easy to make fun of real estate agents, because “they” do silly things. But the reality is that most of us, when we’re planning our marketing, take a similar approach, even if we don’t spend ten grand on a design package. We’re still focused on what’s called “image marketing” - and not on action-generating direct response marketing.

Instead of getting caught up in the ego trip of image advertising and branding, and making the mistake of doing what big companies do (instead of doing what they did to get big in the first place)... it’s wise to follow a marketing strategy that’s specifically designed to shift your business into high-growth mode. You want to do what gets you the most customers, and while you’re at it get some branding value, too. That’s what the pros do.

The Best Marketing EVER?

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Instead of getting into the technicalities of response-based marketing, let’s go straight to the heart of the matter. I want to share with you what might be the two best marketing messages I’ve ever seen. Yes, ever. By looking at the psychology of these two examples, you’ll be able to see the path to making your marketing literally irresistible.

Example #1: The Aerogel insulation company sent a mountain climber up Mt. Everest wearing a pair of their new insulated socks. After the climb, they asked him how it went. He said “The only problem I had was that my feet were too hot.”

Example #2: Viagra - and I hope you know what that is - ran a series of television commercials as they grew into one of the most successful drugs in history. You’ve probably heard it. At the end of the commercials, they always issued a health warning in very serious pharmaceutical talk. It said: If your erection lasts more than four hours, call your doctor.

These are not just good marketing, or even great marketing. These achieve that level of psychological persuasion power that can only be described as impossible to resist. A guy climbs Mt. Everest and comes down to complain that his feet got too hot because the socks he was wearing worked too well...? Anyone that has feet that get cold, or wants to buy clothing to keep them warm will immediately say “those are the socks for me.” The warning says to call your doctor if your erection lasts more than four hours. Imagine that you’re a guy who hasn’t been able to perform sexually for months or years, and you hear that “warning.” There’s not much you could say that would get his attention faster or more “perfectly.”

Example #3: We already discussed FedEx. Their original unique selling proposition of “When it Absolutely, Positively has to be there overnight” is pretty stellar. I think it might qualify to make the list of best marketing ever. At the time they started this marketing campaign, the idea of overnight package delivery was brand-new. It was an option that people didn’t have before, and they had a big opportunity if they could get into the minds of their potential customers with an action-oriented message. And the words “Absolutely, Positively”... well, they absolutely, positively did it.

What Do These Three Messages Have In Common?Now let’s break down what these messages have in common - and particularly, what they have in

common that you can use to super-charge your marketing.

The first thing that they’ve done is to “zoom in” on a specific, human desire that a lot of people have. Next, they created a communication that broadcasts two unmistakable messages:

1. Our product gets you the result that you want2. It works, definitely

And notice how each of them does it in a way that doesn’t sound like “ego” or like it’s all about the company that’s promoting the product. They keep the focus on the customer and the customer’s need. There’s no interruption of the customer’s realization that they need to get the product or service, so they can get the result they want.

Even More Sophisticated Marketing

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Even though these might be the best marketing, ever, marketing still gets even more sophisticated. We don’t have the time to go into a treatment of all aspects of powerful marketing, but this is so interesting that I’m just going to mention it.

You can take marketing and product design to levels that most people cannot even imagine. In one of Clotaire Rapaille’s books, he tells the story about being hired by one of America’s biggest auto makers to help them sell more of their vehicles. He looked into the reasons why people buy different types of cars and trucks, and discovered something interesting...

When someone buys an SUV, they are being driven by a very primal, hidden psychological motive, that he discovered by putting people into darkened rooms and regressing them to childhood memories. The motive is DOMINATION. Someone buying an SUV wants to dominate the road, and be seen as the dominant animal - to be feared and avoided. Here’s where it gets interesting: Rapaille then helped the company, Dodge, design their trucks so that looked like the jaws of large apex predator animals. His reasoning was that big predators have large jaws and jaw muscles, and this was one of the defining features that made them so fearsome. And if you look at some of their trucks from the period when he was working with them, you can see it.

Is this science? I don’t know. Is it interesting? You bet. Their SUV sales apparently took off when he was working with them. I give you this example to get across just how sophisticated you can get with your marketing, and also to communicate the importance of taking your marketing education seriously. I’ve invested a lot of years studying marketing, and I credit this study with my ability to generate the kinds of traffic, sales and growth that I do with my businesses. It really works to know your marketing.

So how can you find your own “big jaw muscles” or your “socks that make your feet hot on Mt. Everest” in your product and marketing? Here’s how...

The Irresistible EggTo get to the heart of the process of discovering the “hot button” that will motivate your customers

to buy from you, tell their friends, and come back to buy more, we have to take a slight detour into animal behavior. I tend to believe that humans are sort-of like “mammals with computers plugged into our brains” - in other words, we have the “full complement” of instincts and drives that came to us from our evolutionary ancestors. Looking at the “genetic” drives in other animal species reveals some powerful lessons that we can then use in our marketing strategies.

Scientists that study animal behavior are called “ethologists” - and they have noticed some fascinating things in their observations and experiments. One of the founders of ethology, Konrad Lorenz, happens to be one of my favorite authors. He won a nobel prize with a couple of other ethologists, wrote a bunch of books, and lived a life of adventure and controversy (in other words, he was super interesting). Konrad Lorenz would do things like take a goose egg, let the goose hatch and look up to see him there - instead of its mother. He learned that the gosling would “imprint” on him as its “mother goose” - and then follow him around, permanently attached in a baby-parent relationship.

But that was just the beginning. Lorenz and one of his research associates (who won the Nobel Prize with him), did experiments to see just how automatic animal behavior can be. They would put animals in all sorts of unnatural situations, typically by artificially exaggerating or reducing some aspect of the way they look - and then watch what happens. They would find a violent species of fish that has red bellies, then make fake models of the fish with bellies that had a lot more red on them than the real fish - and

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then watch as real fish attacked their models, even though they really didn’t look like a real fish. The extra red pattern threw them into a rage that they couldn’t control.

Lorenz was famous for working with geese and other birds. In one set of experiments, they made a fake goose egg that was much bigger than a normal goose egg, with exaggerated spots painted on it. When a real goose saw the giant fake egg, guess what it did? The giant egg was so captivating, that the goose ignored its own eggs and tried to sit on top of the giant fake egg. The giant egg was literally IRRESISTIBLE.

Ethologists use phrases like “fixed action patterns” and “innate releasing mechanisms” - which are technical terms for the automatic, instinctive responses that animals have in response to certain things in their environment. A white round egg makes a goose automatically try to roll it into its nest. But if it’s a GIANT round egg, the goose abandons its own eggs, and tries to climb on top. I can just imagine the look on the goose’s face when it sees that giant egg. It must feel like a kid that comes home to find a 3-foot tall chocolate cake on the kitchen table.

But the ethologists kept going and learned something interesting: If they isolate and test individual aspects of the stimulus, they often find these features that make the animal respond more and more powerfully. Ethologists have a name for these types of features, they call them “Supernormal Stimuli” - and they are very powerful. These supernormal stimuli release automatic, irresistible action patterns.

It’s tragic when I see an entrepreneur who has gone to years of trouble creating a great, high-quality product - one that delivers the result that customers want - only then to go on and use “logic” marketing to try to sell it. Irresistible eggs aren’t irresistible because they make logical arguments. They are irresistible because of the instinctive response in the goose. Don’t make and market a product that’s a good logical choice. Make and market a product that triggers the “gotta have it” response.

What is the result that your customers really want? What would your product or service need to offer that would be an irresistible egg for your customers, and make them want to buy it right now?

The “Marketing Magnifying Glass”I use a technique when I’m designing marketing that I like to call the “Marketing Magnifying Glass.” I

use this name for the approach, because it points to a counter-intuitive move that you have to make when designing powerful marketing.

As we learned in our first report and video on productivity, the things that motivate us most are usually small “trigger features” - you saw my vision board of goals, and the features that most motivate me about these goals. Hopefully, you did the exercise and you’ve identified the highly motivating features of your own goals.

This is the approach we want to take when looking for the things that motivate our customers most, as well. A great example comes from the health and fitness industry. More and more people are gaining weight than ever before. If you were a weight-loss guru, you could approach the marketing of your knowledge on one of a few different levels:

1) You could zoom way out, and market yourself as a “health” guru

2)You could zoom in a little more, and market yourself as a weight-loss guru

3)You could zoom in even more, and market yourself as a fat-loss guru

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Charts from inspiredtosave.com

4)You could zoom in even further, and market yourself as a belly-fat-loss guru

Notice how each of the examples above is more specific. It narrows the niche or specific customer that might be attracted. But paradoxically, with each successive zoom in, the appeal grows dramatically. If I am looking to lose weight, I don’t want a health expert, I want someone who can help me get rid of 20 pounds of ugly belly fat, and fast.

We humans tend to want things that are specific, narrow, and zoomed in. But when we go to market our products and services, the “intuitive” thing to do is to zoom OUT, and to try to capture more customers by marketing our product as a more broad solution. This, of course, is a mistake. People tend to buy specific solutions to specific desires, not general solutions.

What we’re really after here is to discover the super-normal stimulus that your customer is using to decide what to buy, and then to feature that in all of our marketing and communication with customers. And when we’re using a magnifying glass, we keep getting more and more specific, until we hit the nail right on the head.

A friend of mine told me an interesting story about Ferrari cars. I had one for awhile, and I can tell you from experience that it’s quite a thrill to drive. The part I found interesting was that apparently Enzo Ferrari paid careful attention to what really pushed customer hot buttons, and he realized that the motors in the cars were a key driver of the decision to purchase a Ferrari. If you’ve ever looked at the motor in a Ferrari, you can see that a lot of attention is paid to the styling and design. Of course, they are also very powerful and responsive. Some of the Ferrari models even feature a window over the motor, so you can look into the motor compartment directly without having to open the hood (I had one of these, and it really ups the “cool factor”).

So notice what’s happening here (other than me bragging): We’re zooming in. From car to motor to being able to see the motor directly, because it’s such a hot-button motivator. Next, Ferrari realized that it was more than just the power and looks of the motor, it was actually all about the sound of the motor. My friend told me that Ferrari believed that about 50% of the “game” when it came to building motors was the way they sounded. If you happen to like Ferraris, then you know what I’m talking about. They have a unique “voice” coming from the motor, and it’s a sound that creates thrills in the heart of the average car lover. Notice again: Zooming in. From car to motor to being able to see the motor... to now the sound of the motor. And also notice that at the most zoomed in level, it’s now accounting for 50% of the value.

I can remember when the iPhone first came out. It looked like just another phone, but then I saw Steve Jobs doing a demo with it, and two things grabbed me by the credit card: First, it had the ability to merge two calls that didn’t start out that way. Awesome. Then, it would scroll through a list of contacts with just a flick of the finger, and stop if you “grabbed” the scrolling page. It was like there was gravity and inertia inside of it. Those two features got me. So I paid the premium price to get it. Now, were those two features really worth paying twice what ever other phone cost? No way. I hardly used them. But they were just so cool that I had to have it.

Take a moment and consider the thing about your product or service that really triggers the “buying behavior” in your customers. Is it possible to take out your marketing magnifying glass, and zoom in even further, to discover a part of that part, that might even be more motivating?

Finding A “Brand Hot Button”

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This approach isn’t just about adding more features to your product or service. This is about finding the “emotional hot button” of your prospective customer, then aligning all of your marketing, product design and branding strategy around that one element.

Al Ries and Jack Trout, in their books, share the case study of Heinz Ketchup. It’s somewhat hard to imagine a company that makes ketchup being one of the dominant and successful companies on the world scene. I mean, ketchup?

But just about everyone knows Heinz Ketchup. Somehow, they have cornered the ketchup market, and are making unimaginable amounts of money doing it. How did they do it? Well, first they went out and found out what people want in a ketchup. After taking out their marketing magnifying glass and looking at every conceivable thing you could desire in a ketchup, they discovered that there was a “defining element” that people used to decide how good their ketchup was: THICKNESS. If the ketchup is thick, then it’s the good stuff. Runny ketchup is the enemy of all things yummy, in the minds of most ketchup buyers, it seems.

So what did Heinz do with this information? They built the entire brand around it. For years, they ran television commercials (that you may have seen), featuring people holding the ketchup bottle upside down and trying to get the ketchup to come out. They would shake it, hold it, talk to it, but nothing worked to get the ketchup out. Most people thought this was just cute “image” advertising. But it was actually highly sophisticated psychological strategy. They zoomed in, figured out what triggered the “gotta have it” response in customers, then aligned their entire product and marketing strategy around it. They’ve done this with other products, as well.

Interestingly, I just read that Warren Buffet’s Berkshire Hathaway, along with a partner, purchased the Heinz company. Any guesses how much they paid? How about $28 Billion. With a B. I suspect that their marketing savvy had something to do with it!

When I’m working with an entrepreneur on their marketing, I’m always looking to understand both the emotional need that their customers have, as well as the “trigger feature” that causes a customer to immediately want to buy the product. When I was teaching and creating a lot of marketing for my dating advice business, I discovered a motivator that was like one of these hot buttons for men. It was approaching a woman and starting a conversation without being rejected. It hit a deep, primal, emotional hot button that grabbed attention and drew it to my product. When I talked about it in my newsletters and marketing, men bought my products. It was (and still is) amazing.

Once you discover the emotional hot button of your customers, it’s time to use it as the major theme of all your branding. For FedEx (then Federal Express), it was OVERNIGHT. For Heinz ketchup, it was THICKNESS. What is it for your product and your customers? And how can you use this emotional hot-button as a brand hot button to organize all of your marketing message around?

Humanize Your Product & MarketingAre you familiar with the term “anthropomorphize?” It essentially means to assign human traits and

qualities to things, creatures and ideas that aren’t human. We do it when we talk to animals as if they were humans, see faces in automobile grilles, and name tropical storms after people.

I think that we like to anthropomorphize because it’s easy to imagine what it’s like to be human. After all, we are human, and have the experience of being human every day. It’s not easy to imagine what it’s like to be a dog, or a bat, or a lizard, or a pizza. None of us has ever been a dog, bat, lizard, or pizza, so

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we don’t have any frame of reference or experience structures to draw from. It’s a lot easier to just pretend that these things are human, and talk about them that way.

If you turn this idea “inside out” you get an interesting insight about marketing. Because it’s a lot easier for people to understand things in human terms, you can make a very ninja marketing move by imagining that your product or service is a person, and then asking yourself what it would say to a customer if it could talk to them about what it does.

It’s important to make your product and message something that people can relate to, emotionally. We don’t want to make the mistake of putting on our sterile, academic, scientific demeanor and tone when telling customers about our product.

Talking in the tone your product would use if it was a person, telling the story of how your product or service came to be, describing its qualities using emotional language, and explaining the “intention” of your product - all are powerful ways to communicate about it in a way that is “native” to understand as a customer. Humans are going to be buying it from you, and they need things put into their terms if you want them to give you their hard-earned money in exchange for what you’re offering.

Instead of saying “this new phone has a lithium battery with 1.21 gigawatts of power” you might say “this new phone wants to make calls all day, and you can spend up to 100 hours listening to music or 20 hours talking on it with every charge.” Notice how I’m putting things into terms that make sense to a human, “natively.”

Who Creates The Best Brand Names?

You may have noticed how many new hot sauce types have been coming on the market. I hear that hot sauce is one of the fastest growing food categories in the world. I know that I like a good hot sauce!

I have really enjoyed looking at the creative names of these hot sauce brands as they come out. For some reason, people who make hot sauce, in my opinion, really GET branding and naming. They intuitively create brand names that connect on a human level.

Here are some of my personal favorite hot sauce brand names:

Defcon Hot Sauce

Toad Sweat

Bee Sting

Scorned Woman

Bull Snort

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Hog’s Breath

Slap Ya Mama

Ass Kickin’

Let’s Contrast This With The World’s Worst Branders...I’ve noticed that there’s another category of businesses that seem to have exactly the opposite

sensibility when it comes to naming their businesses and products: COMPUTER SUPPLY AND REPAIR. Forgive me for being critical (although this is quite fun), but have you ever heard a good name for a computer supply or repair company? A quick search of my local area turned up these business names...

Comp R Us

A.R.K. Solvers Inc.

HCAS Technologies

Gillware Inc. Data Recovery

Techs In A Sec

Now, do any of those names touch you on a deep, emotional level and make you feel like you must buy what they’re selling? Not exactly. They should get creative, like one of the local heating and air conditioning companies that runs billboards in Miami, where I live. The billboards look like this:

OK, maybe that’s a little bit edgy for most businesses, but you get the point. It’s impossible to see this billboard without having an emotional response.

If your brand name doesn’t trigger an emotional response, then it’s just more noise in the radar system of the people looking at it.

Let’s Summarize What We Learned & Take ActionNow it’s time to do a couple of exercises to help find the high-leverage marketing and branding

opportunities in your business. Before we do, let’s do a quick review. We learned a few new definitions:

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Marketing: Communication that gets paying customers.

Entrepreneur: A person who builds a profitable business.

Entrepreneurial Marketing: Communication that gets paying customers in order to build a growing, profitable business. Since marketing is a specific type or category of communication, let’s “drill down” into the meaning of communication, just to get a sharper focus...

We also learned a mindset from Neuro-Linguistic Programming:

“The meaning of a communication is the response that you get.”

We learned what professional marketers do, and we learned a distinction about two different types of branding strategies - “Defensive Branding” and “Direct Branding” - and why you should only use the defensive form if you’re a massive company with a big budget.

We also learned to “zoom in” on the aspect of our product that really motivates our customer with our marketing magnifying glass, then to feature it in our product, so we create an “Irresistible Egg” that triggers buying behavior. Finally, we learned to humanize our marketing communication, so that it touches people on an emotional level. If you can use these methods consistently in your marketing, they will help you attract a lot more paying customers - and help you grow your business, profit and income.

Go Do The Exercises & Watch The VideoI’ve created a series of exercises to walk you through what you learned in this video, and apply what

you’ve learned to your own marketing and branding. Just go back to the page where you downloaded this video and get them. In the video, I walk you through the exercises and also give you more tips for improving your marketing in order to get more customers and grow your business.

Submit Your Exercises & Win A ComputerWe’re having a contest to keep things fun, and give you a chance to win an awesome computer.

We’re giving away one MacBook Pro, one MacBook Air, and one iPad Mini for EACH of these lessons. So do your exercises, and submit your insights with a link in a Facebook comment or Tweet, and I’m going to personally pick the ones that I like best and give away some great computer gear.

IMPORTANT: Get On The Accelerate “Early List”If you’re really serious about learning how to shift your business into high-growth mode, I’ve set up a

page where you can get on my “early bird” list and be the first to get more free business-growth lessons from me - along with first access to information and registration for my Accelerate training. I’m also having a live introductory webinar that will only be available if you’re on this early list. All you have to do is go to:

AccelerateEarly.com

...and put your name on the list. Now it’s time to go download your exercises, watch the video, and submit your work and for a chance to win a MacBook Pro, Air or iPad Mini. Here’s the link back to the

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page with the video and exercises, so you have it handy...

Accelerate.SplashThat.com

Use this material to create powerful marketing and branding messages, and I’ll see you in the next lesson and video!

-EBENP.S. The Accelerate Business Growth Summit is going to feature my personal teachers and mentors, along with some of the top minds in the world on building a fast-growing, profitable business. We will be opening for registration on Monday, May 20th for the program, and I’ll be offering a special package if you’re one of the first to register. If you want to take your business and your profit to the next level, then I highly recommend that you get on my “early list” - so you have first access to the program - and first access to the special bonuses that I’ll be offering if you register on the first day. Again, you can get on my early list for free by just going to:

AccelerateEarly.com

...and putting yourself on the list. So download your exercises, make a social comment to share your homework with your followers - and submit it to our contest - and then make sure to get on the early list. I’ll talk to you again in a few days with more high-growth business training.

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