A client (accidentally) told me one day that they didn’t know the breadth of our services or the depth of our people. It wasn’t their fault. It was mine. I let my marketing guns down by not promoting and educating, while focusing on the work at hand. Their accidental admission was my wake-up call. I had put our new Train of Thought site development on hold several times. Big mistake.

I’ve always told clients if you stop marketing, your business will absolutely drop off. And it’s true. Even if you are so busy you can’t imagine bringing on another client, you must continue marketing, even if only a little bit. You have to keeping educating the clients you have, and continue reaching those you hope to one day land.

That one interaction lit a fire under my tail. After all, we began the project in May, 2010! I’m stoked to announce the new Train of Thought site has finally launched. Is it everything we’d hoped? Resoundingly, yes.

This is the first site we’ve had that accurately describes who we are, what we do, the depth and breadth of our work, speaks in the tone we actually use (minus any occasional expletives), and shows large work samples complete with strategy or background details. In short, it’s completely true to our brand.

As a person who is usually looking for a better way, I’m pleased to say I am completely happy with the site. You can read about our goals and accomplishments with it here. I hope you will poke around, read the branding blog, check out our portfolio, and generally find the site useful.

In school, we are taught how to form and structure complete sentences with intelligence and meaning. Beyond complete sentences, we learn to write purposeful paragraphs that start with a statement, are proven in the middle, and we end with a cap summary which ties the whole thing up, making sure to reinforce our original point. The point of such paragraphs is to teach. Incomplete sentences do not make points, nor do they teach.

I’m unsure who started this undermining of intelligent writing, but what has happened since is downright disturbing. One by one, companies are copying each other. Originality has been replaced by plain and simple copying. It is no longer possible to differentiate between marketing copy written for Wal-Mart, Target, JC Penny or Macy’s.

This homogenization signals a fundamental shift away from belief in their own brands. If everyone sounds the same, the value of the brands is quite literally zero. If you encounter the same messages from Macy’s as you do from Wal-Mart, why pay the higher price? So you can feel the warm-vibe environs of a cooler building for forty-five minutes? Hardly. And Target’s website could be Wal-Mart’s—they’re essentially the same. Big brands have lost their way. They appear to no longer know who they are or what they stand for.

Short homogenized sentences do not increase absorption. They fail to make brand-to-people connections with any sense of purpose. Short sentences produce nothing more than short-term sales.

Forget brand loyalty. Embrace one sale. For the entire family. In spring. In every place. Go now.

But that’s not the wrong kind of wow I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the kind of wow that’s really more ‘Ouch’ than wow. Ouch wow is when you utterly fail to support what you sell, which is perhaps okay for short term sales, but will inevitably damage your brand (if you care).

An example of Ouch wow
I had a need to put up a quick website in one day, and rather than bother my fully scheduled development team, I decided to use a stock theme (whoops). I found the one I wanted, forked over my dough, built the site, got down to one final detail that I could not crack, and SNAP! I can’t launch.

I emailed the developer off the demo page, and got a response within ten minutes. Awesome! Oh but wait. His response (not an autoresponder) was that I should email him from the form on the theme purchase page, which I did within one minute. Then… cricket silence. Not a word. No support whatsoever.

So I found the developer’s Twitter, read a few posts, and (Ouch wow) the guy is not someone I would want to do business with. He’s actually tweeted that he hates it when theme buyers request support! He’s sold tens of thousands of dollars in themes, and he’s leveling complaints about supporting his own work. Wow! (the wrong kind).

Now I have to go bother one of my real developers. Or switch stock themes. This is why we do custom themed websites. Clean code, great support, no hassles (that, and our customers don’t want to look just like their competitors).

Avoid ‘ouch wow’. Love your customers. It’s smart marketing.

Funny thing is, each time this has happened, the businessperson tried to negotiate on price (bigly, like 50% or more discount big), then wound up going with another buddy deal after I refused to give them one.

Could I give them a deal? Sure, I could (not 50%), but that would only serve to set us both up to fail, and I have no interest in failure. They shouldn’t either (but they often do). After all, they came to me because they found out that ‘getting a deal’ netted them less than what they wanted.

I’m rarely given the opportunity to ask people if they are being honest with themselves when they go for the next buddy deal. Then again, I already know the answer and they probably do too, deep down inside.

Buddy deals are great when it’s a long-time friends equation, but when it’s that person you met at a networking party once and exchanged cards with, there’s no ‘buddy’ in the deal. Seeking a deal there is essentially trying to put one over on the person being asked. Perhaps worse, however, is the fact that the person doing the asking isn’t being honest with themselves, which undermines the foundations of both their marketing and their brand.

If you are satisfying customers, you are keeping your brand reputation healthy. If you are fighting with customers because of something you did (like over-billing), you are damaging your brand, and very likely losing business.

Keeping a healthy brand reputation intact costs far less than attempting to repair a damaged brand. One involves maintaining good practices, while the other goes much deeper, usually involving rooting out an infected company policy, followed by employee training, apologizing to customers, a PR campaign, a website overhaul, and a new advertising campaign. See how that adds up?

Big is your dream or vision.

Big is unconcerned with size.

Big is branding with integrity.

Big is your passion.

Big is marketing with honesty.

Possibilities are big.

Creating is big.

Thinking is big.

Acting is the bigger next step.

What are you dreaming/creating/thinking/doing?

Here’s an example: ING recently added me to their email marketing list. I have never contacted that bank, yet they have begun marketing to me with some of the least appealing email marketing pieces I’ve ever seen. The bottom actually says, “Replies to this email end up in a black hole. If you need to reach us, email us at sales@ingdirect.com.” Translation: ‘We at ING don’t care about you. Go away. Oh, but give us your money. And our sales department is rude.’

There is no more surefire way to damage a brand than to insult consumers. ING (or any company who messages in this way) will have an incredibly hard time gaining the privilege of having my business. There is no excuse for treating prospective customers with disrespect. With the startlingly bad reputation most banks now have, every one of them needs to show a new level of respect to their existing and prospective customers. When companies market in the way that ING is doing, the message they send is that people are commodity. People naturally respond, in kind, by regarding banks as commodity. (That’s called lost opportunity. If you are going to spend the time, energy and money to market your business, do it well.)

Consumers act as mirrors. If they don’t know you, they usually respond with the same level of respect you showed them. If you are rude to them, they are rude to you. If you are kind to them, they are kind to you. If you are respectful, and show that you value them in a meaningful way, they are much more likely to offer you that all-valuable positive response, and just maybe bestow you with the honor of earning their trust and giving you their business.

I finally emerged, triumphant, a little angry, with a broader perspective, more compassion, and ultimately a different person. The anger eventually subsided.

When I started writing this blog I wanted to share experiences about virtually all of the services I regularly perform for clients. Then I wrote some reviews and observations, and wrote more about general business, until finally the focus on branding and marketing was all but gone.

When I finally regained my full health, I began writing again, but with a whole new level of focus. At some point late last year, it occurred to me that I didn’t need to write about every business experience. I no longer had a desire to write critiques of lectures and other people’s work. There’s plenty of that out there already. I wanted to write something profoundly positive that would help people learn and grow.

Yesterday, I launched a new blog aimed at inspiring people to think differently about their brands. It’s called Branding Revolution.

I’ll be writing about small business branding, personal branding, brand development, how to find meaning in your brand, how your brand fits into your marketing, and a whole lot more. Every post will be focused squarely on brands and the process of branding. Current posts include a series on how to find a great graphic designer, personal branding, and more.

Branding can be the most boring of topics if you think of it only in terms of business branding. For instance, a house-mom (or dad) would have little interest in branding. But personal branding is a whole different beast. Personal branding is, well, personal. It opens the doors to the experiences that shape us as people. When you start opening those doors and seeing what is behind them, it’s pretty fascinating stuff. It can be profound and life-changing.

If you can’t tell, I’m super excited about Branding Revolution. I hope you will come over to the new blog to learn and share your experiences.

Just as a brand is a constantly developing and evolving entity, so too is Branding Revolution. I will be chronicling the development of my own personal brand as an example. If you would like to be featured in a similar capacity, shoot me an email and tell me a bit about your story.

I’ll still be posting articles here on KellyHobkirk.com too, yet this site is going to undergo a major redesign soon. The focus will narrow for sure. Keep your eyes peeled.

Thanks for reading.

Lately, it seems that every phone call I make to a customer service department at nearly any company, from those known for their stellar customer service, to those not so known for it, is answered by someone whose number one priority it is to assert just how right they are.

It doesn’t matter what I have called about because 99% of the time, they aren’t listening. All they seem to want to do upon answering the call is let me know that they are right. Their opinion is the only one that matters. Have a question? We don’t care. We’re not here to answer your questions. We’re here to be right. Is our product defective? Don’t care about that either as long as we’re right. 

If everyone was perfect, it would be a pretty boring world. We learn from our mistakes. A mistake is a small form of failure. Failure rocks because it teaches us how to succeed. “Why do we fall down? So we can learn how to pick ourselves back up.” (- Batman Begins, 2005)

All of this rightness begs the question: If every company is always right, who does that leave to be wrong?

It leaves only the customer to be wrong. How do you think that makes customers feel?

Put yourself in your customers’ shoes
Think about it for a second. You’ve just given your hard-earned money to a company. You’ve got a question or a problem, so you call customer service, and the first thing they tell you is that you’re wrong or your question is irrelevant. How does that make you feel?

This kind of rightness can only lead to resentment and a damaged brand. The good news is that always being right presents opportunities for competitive companies to steal away business. People do business with people they relate to. People make mistakes. Companies make mistakes. When they can admit it, they go well together. When companies claim to be perfect, humans can no longer relate to them, and they move on to someone else.

When companies claim to always be right as a flawed tactic for eliminating liability or due to an over-inflated ego, they are really losing customer loyalty by alienating people and creating a disconnect that damages their brand reputation.

Whether you are building a personal brand or protecting a corporate brand, you must learn to relate to your customers, admit your shortcomings, and embrace your failures. Only after doing these can you realize your greatest possible success.

My call to businesses great and small: Go out and fail today!