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Brand awareness is a critical piece of the business building puzzle. Potential customers need to know who you are, what your business does and, perhaps most importantly, why you are the better choice for their needs. If what people are thinking and saying about your business isn’t a good description of why it’s special, you could have a real problem. This article, the second in a series about branding, focuses on creating strong, memorable consumer perceptions and beliefs about your product or service.

Developing brand awareness is a process that starts with an empty slate. No one knows who you are or what your company does. If they see you in a list of similar companies or find your product on the shelf, people have no idea why they should choose you over your competition. It takes a lot of very hard work to sell your product or services. In order to make a sale, you have to beg, give a discount or give an incentive.

Obviously one of your biggest marketing issues is finding a way to stand out and be remembered. Plus, you have to give consumers a reason to purchase your product or buy your service. So you start shouting your name and selling message from the highest rooftop or plaster it all over the internet and build up brand name recognition, but that’s not all there is to awareness. It does little good to have a product that everyone remembers but no one thinks they need. No matter how many times people hear what you have to say, it doesn’t matter unless they believe it, remember it and buy it.
The truth is, your branding is not about what you say, it’s about what other people say. What consumers think when they see your product on a shelf or find your ad listing can make or break your business. The only message that really counts is the one that comes to their minds on an unprompted basis.

In the first article in this series on branding, we laid out the five stages a product or company goes through to create a strong and powerful brand persona. Brand awareness is the second stage and, once established, it must be reinforced by everything you do. Some brands are known by color (Coca Cola red), others by a design or logo (the Nike swoosh) and still others by an iconic sound or phrase (you’ve got mail). Even a person can come to stand for your brand, just as Steve Jobs wearing a black turtleneck did for Apple.

It’s clear that building meaningful brand awareness is hard work and takes a great deal of time and effort, but it must be done. Once you’ve established a great reputation you have to protect it and keep it. Everything that gets said about your company must reinforce the good things for which it is known. You must consistently deliver on the thing that makes you different. Good associations can be lost in an instant. A friendly brand with bad customer service is no longer friendly, it’s a nightmare. A company known for high-quality products that rushes something to market without finding and fixing all the bugs has scarred its reputation badly.

Building a powerful brand with strong customer loyalty translates into great success for any size company. This article, the last in a series about the five stages of branding, talks about the extraordinary benefits that come from having customers so happy with a brand that they actively advocate for its products or services. The Apple story illustrates the ways in which a company can motivate its customers to be its greatest cheerleaders.

In this series we’ve examined the five stages of branding from unknown to superstar. Once a company or product reaches the fourth level, known as brand insistence, it has an extremely loyal customer base whose members will go out of their way to buy that particular brand. Basically, the company is guaranteed every penny these customers spend on that kind of product.

It might seem difficult to beat brand insistence, but there is a fifth and most desirable stage known as brand advocacy. Most companies can only aspire to this level of customer satisfaction in which a product or line of products is so highly regarded by its users that those users can’t wait to tell the world about how wonderful the company is. Think of them as uber-fans. They need little or no prompting to jump into a conversation with a friend, family member or complete stranger to promote their favorite brand.

The beauty of brand advocacy is that it does five major things for a company:

1. Provides visibility
2. Delivers free advertising and public relations
3. Affords credibility
4. Provides pre-sold prospective customers
5. Makes the owners very, very rich.

So what does a company have to do to create brand advocates? Apple provides the textbook case study in that its customers are extraordinarily committed to singing the company’s praises whenever they can. No self-respecting Mac user would even consider buying a PC and each and every one of them will happily tell a PC person what a mistake it is not to own a Mac. Mac advocates come armed with a list of what’s right about Mac and wrong about PCs.

Apple advocates love everything about Apple. They believe the company stands for great quality and innovation. The love they feel isn’t limited to the products, they are into the entire Apple experience. All the company’s branding elements reinforce these customer perceptions —white Macs, white stores with smart and friendly technicians, wonderful customer service , products that are always the first of their kind, plenty of bells and whistles and hundreds and hundreds of apps. Plus, Apple understands what these techno-savvy customers want and it fulfills their needs, then launches a newer model that does the job even better than the first model did.

Also, once an Apple customer always an Apple customer. Mac users never switch to PCs and will stand in line overnight to be one of the first to own a new Apple product. These uber-fans put up with glitches in first generation products, long periods of out-of-stock items and are likely to pay full price most, if not all, of the time. Since all the Apple products synch with one another, customers can create their own Apple world; there is never a need to go outside the franchise. Advocates consider Steve Jobs a personal idol, are proud of being Apple groupies and can’t imagine being any other way.

Co-founder of Apple Computers, Steve Jobs passed away yesterday after losing his ongoing battle with pancreatic cancer.

I have always loved his revolutionary products and have been an advocate for Apple for many years. He has forever changed the way we consume information and embrace technology. We often discuss marketing, branding and product launches; Steve Jobs has set a bar that we can only hope to aspire too.

In his own words he expresses his philosophy of death elegantly:

“No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.” – Steve Jobs

The world has lost one of the great visionaries in history. Yet he continues on as in inspiration to all of us that seek innovation, perfection and success. Our condolences to his family and the folks at Apple Corporation, and all who admired him.

Raymond Aaron

Today’s economy presents many financial opportunities. Many people will disagree with that statement, but to the trained eye, a recession is a virtual gold mine. Finding a financial coach or a mentor can be a way to double your income.

Let’s use your children as an example. If your daughter was interested in gymnastics, you would go out and find a gymnastics program in which she could get the best training available. She would be coached and mentored in a way that would foster her abilities and shape her gymnastics career.

What if your son was a blossoming baseball player? You would certainly find the best baseball coach in your area, and give your son an opportunity to learn and grow as a baseball player. If both of your children had a high aptitude for math, you would find a tutor, or a math magnet program that would nurture their abilities in math.

The point is, no matter what activity your child chooses, you feel obligated to find an expert in that field to work with your child and give them the opportunity to excel at it. You inherently want the best for your children, and recognize the need to give them an environment that provides the best opportunities in whatever they enjoy doing.

Now let’s talk about you and your desires for a moment. Most of us have a career or profession. We all like to consider ourselves to be good at what we do for a living. What we chose as a career many moons ago is a part of who we are in some ways. So what about the areas of our lives in which we are not experts? What do we do for ourselves in those areas?

Take finance for instance. When we have questions about a mortgage, or an investment, most of us will do some research and make the financial decisions that make sense to us. We may seek casual advice from our banker, or a neighbor who knows a little about what we are asking, but for the most part, we make decisions on our own.

When we buy a car, we will research the model of the car we want, shop prices at different dealers, and so on, until we make a decision on what we believe is the best deal, and then we buy the car. Again, we choose to make decisions in areas that we are not experts in based on limited knowledge of the industry we are dealing in.

This is a common contradiction that all of us share. We make financial decisions, buying decisions, career choices and so on, based on information that makes sense to us. Unfortunately, if we do not happen to be experts in any of those areas, we often make decisions that have adverse affects on our financial health.

In other words, we could and should seek out power mentors to coach us through life decisions that can affect our financial well being. These mentors can be found almost anywhere. They can be neighbors, family members or friends who have expertise in the areas that we do not.

By choosing this method of collective decision making, we are positioning ourselves to double our income.

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