60+ clients Wide range of B2B categories Business types Capital equipment Engineered components Contract manufacturing Business services Technology Process and industrial Supporting marketing and sales
Don’t get me wrong. Price will always be part of the equation. I am not here to tell you that you don’t need to think about competitive pricing. But I am here to say that it does not have to mean everything. In fact, if you work to position your company correctly, it can become less and less important all the time. So, why listen to this today? If you’re tired of running a price race to the bottom… If you know you offer more value than you currently charge customers for… Then there is no better day than today to listen to this, because today we will cover the basics of how you can position your business as a unique value provider — one that can rise above “price-only” selling .
Before we talk about why it all starts with the brand can anyone give me a definition the word “Brand”
Your brand is not: Your name Your logo Your tagline Your messages Your belief of who you are
The reason I say getting beyond “Price-only” selling starts with the brand is because this “gut feeling” is where almost all buying decisions are made. Customers use logic and reason to rationalize decisions, but the actual decision happens much less rationally. In the past decade, we can actually see this in Functional MRI studies done while subjects are asked to make choices. The area that light up on the scans are old brain areas. But marketers have known this more anecdotally for 100 years. I won’t even use the obvious examples of Starbucks ($5.00 coffee is not rational it is a feeling), Apple (Does that laptop really do the job 4x better, because it costs 4 x as much), or Coca Cola (Whose brand is estimated to be $70 Billion, over 60% of its total market capitalization). Because you could dismiss them as being marketing powerhouses who spend millions for that ROI. No, I will make my point with Morton Salt. When is the last time you saw a Morton Salt advertisement? Is Morton Salt anything more than NaCl? And yet it has overcome the LOGIC of price comparison for a century.
That Old Brain, where the brand lives, understands: Contrast, Simplicity, and Selfishness. It is lizard brain remember. So lets translate that into Marketing Terms. For the brand to mean anything in the minds of your customers it have be: Differentiated. Simple. And Resonant.
Nothing switches decision-making as strongly to the old brain and away from logical price comparison like differentiation. People may buy a less tasty apple if the price right compared to a more tasty apple. But people buy a kiwi because they like a kiwi, not primarily by how it is priced against other fruit.
Simplicity is more critical every day. Your customers are bombarded with information all day long. In work and at home. And yet humans can still only retain about 3-7 distinct bits of information at a time. They will only hear (let alone remember) a small percentage of the thousands of marketing messages around them each day. Only the simplest ideas have a hope of sticking in the old brain.
Resonance… Patrick Renvoise, author of Nueromarkeing, tells a story about how he once convinced a homeless man to change his cardboard sign asking for help. Rather than a description of the man’s needs, the new sign simply said “what if YOU were hungry?” He went to dinner and when he came back from the restaurant, the man had been given $60 over a two hour span. He usually averaged 2-10 dollars over that time. Anecdote? Yes. Extreme? Yes. But it does illustrate what many marketing studies have shown to be true: The most valuable brands will be the ones that customers can relate to personally, not with abstract logic, but with survival instinct.
Sealy is the world’s leading manufacturer of mattresses by consumer preference, market share, and sales revenue Global Hospitality is a $120 million division of total $1.6 bil. Client since 2002, Agency of record since August 2008 Integrated program across a range of services Messaging focused on sleep experience or the technical design of the bed – retail feel No orientation towards the broader concepts of, and benefits to, the hospitality industry Marketing materials inconsistent both graphically and in messaging copy Lack of internal and channel partner consistency (key selling points and presentation)
New logo to represent new name. That’s just what we’ve done so far, there’s more to come. Pass to andy…
Developed look and introductory copy, and confirmed its accuracy, began working on materials, most of which are in binder. Corporate brochure
Brand won’t only appear in printed materials, also other places Such as advertising, comarketing
Monogram series Same look has been applied to specialty, collection 7, convertible collection and foundations and eventually to all
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