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The Art of Branding for Authors
NOW that it is understood how to get discovered by the media, and how to structure your book launch sequence of events, it is time to consider how you are perceived by the public. The goal is to carve out a clear piece of “real estate” in the minds of the public, so when they hear your name, they know exactly what you represent.
The classic method of achieving this impression in the minds of the public is what marketers call Branding. In my career working with Fortune 500 companies, a team of people would spend close to a year conceptualizing a brand, designing it and rolling it out to the public. Authors often do not have the luxury of this kind of time, staff or the investment typically spent by big companies.
But, there is hope. Countless authors have clearly established their brand in the marketplace. How do they do it? This chapter distills the complexity of branding methodology into a process that you can implement without a team of experts in the art of branding.
So, let’s explore how to craft your brand message and set a plan to make your message stick.
Your WHY – The Essence of a Personal Brand
“WHY do you do what you do?” This question comes to you from the young man sitting next to you on a recent flight. Like yours, his seat back is comfortably angled 30 degrees back, and his tray table is in the down position. You’ve both settled in.
The two of you are on a first-class flight home from Dubai. Fate and a travel agent have thrown you together, and now you’re making chit-chat over strong coffee, colloquially known as Turkish coffee. It tastes good, and the caffeine/cardamom combo cuts through the morning fog of your mind. Last night’s dinner-and-drinks with your client quickly turned into dessert-and-one-too-many.
“I mean,” your seatmate continues, “what drives you to keep giving these keynote speeches?”
You’ve already swapped stories about the Zig Ziglar audios which you were surprised to learn were on his smartphone. His stories of singing Sinatra standards from a tiny stage where he gigged aboard a 120’ private yacht last week seem to have gone dry for the moment, along with the cucumber water in your glass. Still, the young singer seems bent on keeping the conversation going.
“It sounds like you could just retire right now,” he says, “and you wouldn’t have to put up with these long flights and grueling schedules. Is it really worth it to be a keynote speaker? I mean, why do you keep doing it?”
“Why indeed…” you parrot, adjusting your glasses with a thick hand. “Dubai to LA seems like a long haul this morning, I can tell you that,” you chuckle. “And I’ve got more of the same waiting for me at LAX—same hoopla, same glad-handing and photo ops. You know, I haven’t thought about that question in a long time.”
But his question is a good one, and you feel its heft in your mind like a gold ingot in the center of your palm—rare and worthy.
Your thoughts trail back a couple of days, back to the night you arrived in Dubai and the limo picked you up at the airport. Your client, the CEO, was already in the back seat, eager to be seen with you, arriving together at an exclusive gala at a towering hotel behind a velvet rope. The cameras and the crowds offered a heady glow of success.
That night was capped with too few hours of sleep in your suite on the concierge level, fruit and flowers in every room, scenting the air with their heavy perfume. You found a gift from the meeting planner thoughtfully left on the entry table—a silver monogrammed business card holder and a note of thanks. It was a nice touch, if a little impersonal. Back home, there was a closet in your office that was full of things like this— chachkies and souvenirs, corporate gifts from exotic ports of call where hoards had been swayed by the words you spoke.
But that’s not the reason. Why then?
Your mind drifts back to your early career when you stood on the platform in a meeting hall at a local winery for 30 minutes; the audience mesmerized while you shared your best stuff. That talk was the springboard for the words you said in Dubai yesterday, and it launched a thousand opportunities for you. The warm feeling in your heart of touching the hundreds of people in that winery hall—influencing their lives—was as sweet as wine itself. You would have done it for free, but the back-of-room sales you made after the talk were a nice bonus. A whole new world had opened up for you that day.
Now you search your memory for an even deeper answer, and a vague form takes shape. You were meeting with a publisher over a cocktail, who was an old colleague who’d worked with you on that start-up years ago. The experience is like a private joke you share between the two of you, like veterans of war.
“Say, I’m writing a book,” you told him casually, pulse racing. “Do you think you could give me some tips on how to make it successful…?”
Now the memory starts to flood back. You remember that you had been sweating this meeting for days, thinking your friend’s professional advice would kill your enthusiasm, afraid he would laugh at your naiveté or tell you that your ideas were too controversial. You feared that the unique and precious thing inside you—the song that only you could write—would be silenced before anyone heard it. You were afraid that taking a chance, confiding in your friend, meant that your dream must live or die at that moment. You were afraid of terminal rejection, afraid that you would depart this earth with your music still inside you, afraid to let go of that burning fire in your heart.
You were afraid.
You couldn’t bear the thought that your passion for these concepts was yours alone. You had to get the word out. It was your mission. You simply must tell others, because you knew that they could be changed if only they knew about the key that you had discovered for yourself. You knew that their lives would be better, easier and more provident if you could just reach them—if you could share the gems that you had come by through years of trial and error, of love and blood and sweat. You could shorten their learning curve, and you could help others by making their lives easier. You could change a piece of their world if you could just reach them with the message in your book.
And then it happened, the thing you couldn’t have expected, though you’d dreamt of it often enough—your friend said yes.
“Sure,” he smiled, “I’ll help you publish it too, if you’d like. You might want to think about writing a talk to go along with that manuscript of yours. These things work best in tandem.”
Now the memory fades as the flight attendant brushes past you, gliding down the aisle. The young man in the seat next to you sweeps the shock of hair from his eyes and searches your face. The hum of the jet drones on, like a bass note in the dance of your life. “Why wouldn’t you want to put down roots, or retire early and get off this merry-go-round?” the young man says. “I mean, what makes you want to trek the planet and say the things you do?”
In the back of your mind, you hear a Ziglar quote which comes back to your mind like a distant memory, “You will get everything in life you want, if you will just help enough other people get what they want.”
And suddenly, in a flash, you connect with your reason why, that driving force that silently compels you to push forward… serving others.
It’s funny how you can be talking to someone, and they seem to understand what you’re saying. They smile and nod; even interject a comment here or there.
But are they really getting you? Once the conversation is over, it’s like it never happened.
Maybe a few days later the subject comes up again. You hash it out one more time, and this time it seems like you’re getting through.
But no. It’s not that they’re obstinate. It’s just that any new idea requires repeated exposure to become internalized. That is how the brain works.
Studies show that people need to hear an idea seven times before it sinks in.
Think about that the next time you ask your teenager to take out the garbage. You don’t have to hound them until you’re “blue in the face.” Just tighten up your repetitions, and you’ll compress the amount of time it takes to drive your point home. After a while, it becomes automatic, and you don’t have to mention it again. Well… maybe a couple more times.
This brings us to the all-important topic of exposures in marketing campaigns, and what I call the Rule of Seven. When you can leverage this rule, the seven exposures get your audience to “see the light” and make a purchase.
It sounds simple—and it is—but it’s not without technique. Let’s cover a few simple rules that you can apply to your book or new product launch to drive sales and create evangelists.
Sales Lessons from the Marketing World
Did you ever notice product displays when you go to a retail store or mall? The brand jumps out at you every time you walk by.
By your third pass, you stop and notice that the featured widget might actually be something you could use to solve a problem or engage a desire. In fact, the product could be tremendously effective. It might even change your life. But the first time you passed by, it didn’t even register.
During my Fortune 500 marketing career, I was responsible for rolling-out a retail kiosk for a brand-new kind of service. It was a revolutionary product, and our Marketing team had a pretty robust ad budget to support the US launch. Amazingly enough, our Sales team was successful in putting this display in 20,000 retail locations across North America. Failure was not an option.
You would think that with all those locations and gobs of money for advertising, all we had to do was wait for the checks to come rolling in. But the fundamentals of consumer awareness apply across the board. We used the Rule of Seven to drive messaging home and make sales.
Using the One-To-Many Approach… Seven Times!
When you are planning your next social media effort or ad campaign, there are a few principles to consider. You can use them when deciding how many ad exposures it will take to reach your audience effectively. It still takes seven repetitions to generate awareness of a brand, a book or service, but you can do it much more efficiently.
In our campaign to drive sales in those 20,000 retail locations, we focused on messaging that went from one-to-many. We carefully planned a series of messages reaching millions of “influencers,” called Early Adopters. The Early Adopters in this industry embraced new ideas and technologies earlier than most, and we knew they would evangelize our product for us.
The structure of the marketing campaign for this product was built around the Rule of Seven. Here is how the campaign was structured to reach the magic number of exposures:
1 Trial coupons in Free Standing Inserts (FSI’s) in leading newspapers
2 Direct mail campaign
3 Print flyers, delivered by a partner company
4 In-store advertising in grocery stores, where most people shop 2.3 times (on average) each week
5 Television commercials
6 On-kiosk advertising in major retail locations such as WalMart, Target, and Costco
7 Sponsorship at a series of sporting events
Each one of these venues invited multiple exposures and drove home the message to generate awareness, familiarity and ultimately, trial. This marketing philosophy can be applied and works for new product launches, and can even be effective for a book launch campaign.
As you plan your next marketing campaign, remember the Rule of Seven. How can you plan your book launch campaign to leverage the Rule of Seven used by professional marketing teams?
Here is a sample idea of how to create 7 repetitions of the message around your book that does not require the multimillion dollar budgets of professional marketers.
1 Plan a daily series of social media posts. If you can schedule 3-months of daily posts, you will earn top marks in your class!
2 Send regularly scheduled emails.
3 Schedule a series of speaking events.
4 Hand-out bookmarks promoting your book at live events.
5 Clearly establish the profile of your target readers, and reach them via an advertising campaign online (Google ads, Facebook ads, Amazon ads, etc.).
6 Schedule bookstore signing tour.
7 Ask the local media for a radio or TV appearance.
Your patience in generating seven repetitions will prove that 7 just might be your lucky number!
Where could your business, your speaking business or book sales go if you released all your limitations? With the right company brand or personal brand behind your business endeavors, you can break through untold barriers and realize your professional dreams.
What exactly is branding? Your branding is the way people perceive you and your mission—whether it’s your company, your personal career branding at work or even your private objectives. Branding distills your ideology into a series of elements that together create the look-and-feel of an ideal.
Branding is the practice of using your business name, logo, slogans, color choices and other assets in your marketing communications so that consumers can easily recognize you. In short, it’s your image.
Your brand communicates the qualities, ideas, emotions (if you’re good) and user experience that your products present to the marketplace. Using these assets in all of your business communications will reinforce your brand with every consumer touch.
The largest and most successful companies in the world all use these strategies to build their brand equity into billions of dollars. The industry giants of yesterday and today—Google, Apple, Tide, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Kodak, Nike, Ford, Disney, Kellogg’s, and many more—all successfully built their brand to household name recognition. Having worked professionally with 6 of these mega-brands personally, there are things we can learn from these best of class brands.
Consumers know these brands by heart and trust the products enough to purchase them without debate. The safety, quality and dependability of the product is assumed—even expected.
Of Rutted Roads and Grizzly Bears
My career began working for one of these mega-brands—Kodak—and it literally changed the way I perceive my place in the world. At the time, the Kodak brand was the 4th most valuable brand in the world, with a value on the balance sheet in the billions of dollars. This brand association also has had a deep and lasting effect on my career success. By associating with a major household name, my employers, clients and colleagues look at me a little differently. Some of the brand’s magic dust brushed off on me, and it influenced the success in my early business career.
Early in my career, I landed one of the largest Sales territories a young guy in Sales could hope for. It was also in one of the most remote areas on the planet. My job was to sell Kodak film throughout the State of Alaska. It may sound prestigious to have a territory that is a third of the land mass of the United States, but before you get overly impressed, I’d like to put this data point into perspective.
Alaska is not an easy place to promote a brand. First, there are more bears in Alaska than people. Second, half the state’s population lives in one city, Anchorage, and Alaska is the largest State in the USA—in fact, the State is one-third the size of what Alaskans call the “Lower 48.” You just can’t drive across it in a day. In fact, most parts of the state are undrivable. One of the most popular modes of transportation is the float plane. Even these hardy vehicles have trouble reaching vast expanses in the rugged wilderness, largely because there’s just nowhere to land.
Let me put it this way: As a Kodak man, I had a lot of muddy ground to cover in my shiny loafers, and my wide yellow tie was a little hard to miss among the fireweed on the tundra. Even the herds of caribou would roll their eyes when they saw me coming.
I’ll never forget the time when a sales call took me to a gold mine located some half a day’s drive from the big city where I lived. I thought someone at the home office had made a typo on my sales sheet—either that or they were playing a practical joke. I mean, who sells Kodak film in Hope, Alaska? I couldn’t image a gold mine wanting anything to do with my goods.
The road to the mine was a dirt track, now awash in runoff from the spring breakup. The farther away I got from the main highway, the more I was sure there’d been some kind of mistake as my Chevy Celebrity bounced through the potholes.
It was more than 15 rutted miles after I left the pavement before I saw another soul. You can imagine my relief when I turned a corner to find this replica of an old western town—a fly-in tourist attraction, a relic from the days of the Klondike catering to Japanese tourists who wanted a wilderness experience. I wandered into the only open building I could find, a tavern populated with a few old salts that smelled of smoke, bacon and Jack Daniels.
Yet even in the farthest, most remote corners of the world, the Kodak brand was recognized, and I was welcomed to pull-up a stump at the table for a hot cup of coffee in a tin cup. After talking to the bearded mountain man at the end of the table, it seemed that tourists to this gold panning paradise preferred Kodak film over Fuji film… all I had to do was show up and write the order.
Branding does more than creating recognition. It builds trust and loyalty among the consumers in your market, allowing you to penetrate future markets with new product offerings more successfully—no matter how remote they are. Successful branding carries awareness and trust, even in a land populated with more bears than people.
So, as you think through the marketing efforts for your book or speaking business, pay attention to your brand. You’ll discover many unintended benefits by crafting a message that will stick in the minds of your audience.
