Brand Autopsy

The Wall Street Journal recently ran a profile on Restoration Hardware and its reemergence as a great brand. Much of the article centered around the design and management style of Gary Friedman, Restoration Hardware ceo and chairman.

“Great brands don’t chase customers, customers chase great brands.” - Gary Friedman

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The above quote was pulled from Gary explaining how Restoration Hardware, during the recession, resisted playing the low-price value game and instead, doubled-down its efforts to improve the company’s identity and uniqueness. Gary went on to say, “In bad economic times, quality becomes even more important, uniqueness becomes even more important—people need to be inspired to buy something.”

Gary’s right.

Just like people need to be inspired to talk about brands... people also need to be inspired to buy something from brands.

What are you doing to inspire customers to buy something?

At the 2011 WOMMA School of WOM Conference, Geno Church and I gave a presentation titled, “Bringing SEXY Back to Offline Word of Mouth.” It was less a presentation and more a RANT about the importance of not losing focus on real world marketing ideas that can spark customer-driven conversations.

Unfortunately, it’s become decidedly unsexy to talk about anything word of mouth marketing-related that doesn’t involve Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, or scores of other social media thingamajigs.

Geno and I went true school by sharing strategies and ideas for how businesses can spark conversations with customers all day every day in the offline REAL world. (For all those social media experts and practitioners who steadfastly contend social media solves every marketing problem, keep in perspective that 93% of retail sales in America happen offline.)

The following 425 words express some of the key points I made during my 15-minute RANT at the school of WOM. (These words first appeared in a recent CrackerJack Marketer newsletter. Missed it? Rectify it.)

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Touchpoints as Talking Points

The best word of mouth isn’t a marketing tactic. It isn’t a tweet, a status update, a viral video, or anything else you can find or do on a social media website. The best word of mouth isn’t a publicity stunt or anything done to get some buzz for a day. The best word of mouth is how a business does business not just one day, but every day it is in business.

The word BUZZ needs to be eliminated from our vocabulary. Buzz is exclamation point marketing. It’s a one hit wonder. It’s one and done. Big bang one day, nothing the next day. Too many marketers are relying on the Big Bang Theory to get people talking.

And too many marketers are living for The DOT and not The LINE.

The DOT being a “One Day Big Bang” approach to getting people talking. The LINE being an “All Day Every Day” way to becoming a talkable brand.

The average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 business is 14,600 days and the average life span of a small business is 3,100 days. Clearly, a business is not in business for just one day; it is in business for a series of days — a line.

As marketers, it’s our responsibility to give consumers reasons to talk about brands, products, and services not just for one day... but rather, for a series of days.

To create a talkable brand, we must earn opinions from customers at every touchpoint. Anything a customer can see, hear, touch, taste, and smell is a touchpoint. Customer touchpoints are EVERYWHERE which means word of mouth opportunities are everywhere.

For example, any restaurant that uses a “Please Wait To Be Seated” sign from a restaurant supply catalog has given up on being talkable. This sign is one of the first customer touchpoints someone will experience inside a restaurant. It’s the perfect opportunity to showcase a company’s unique personality by creating a custom sign that expresses the uniqueness of the restaurant.

Starbucks has long practiced the idea of giving people reasons to talk by earning opinions from customers at every touchpoint. One of the simplest ways Starbucks earns opinions from customers is by deliberating calling their drink sizes Short, Tall, Grande, and Venti. The easiest (and least talkable) decision would be to use Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large as their drink sizes. But there’s nothing interesting in the mundane.

The most talkable brands take common customer touchpoints and make them uncommon... uncommonly talkable. What touchpoints can your business make interesting to get customers interested?

Here’s another lesson about delivering standout presentations from stand-up comics as first seen in HBO’s TALKING FUNNY television show.

Highly successful presenters, like highly successful comics, deeply understand how to affect an audience. The more successful a presenter becomes, they more they know how to say the right things in the right ways to make a connection with their audience.

I’ve seen some very polished presenters make a connection with their audience but the presenter isn’t connected to their own material. In other words, the presenter doesn’t believe in their material but because they understand how to tell a story on-stage, the audience is still affected in a positive way.

These polished presenters make a fabulous living. Give them a topic. Give them stage time. Give them an audience. And, watch them go. They are highly skilled and highly compensated communicators. But have they lost something?

Ricky Gervais touched upon this issue in TALKING FUNNY when he shared, “It’s not just being funny. It’s being proud of your stuff and doing things that other people couldn’t do.”

For presenters, it’s important to be proud of your material. It’s also important to craft your presentation point-of-view that is distinctly you. But it’s most important for you, as a presenter, to speak on topics you are uniquely qualified to talk about.

If you aren’t uniquely qualified to talk about a topic, I urge you to refer someone you know who is qualified to talk about that topic.

From time to time I get asked to give a presentation on an issue/subject I’m not passionate about. These are topics that aren’t important to me but they are important to someone else. Thus, I refer someone who is proud of their unique point-of-view on a topic and who can deliver a killer presentation.

You might be able to positively affect an audience talking about something that isn’t important to you. However, I’m certain someone else you know would be better suited to give that presentation. Consider spreading some love and refer someone you know who could deliver a standout presentation on a topic you aren’t passionate about.

We continue sharing presentation lessons from comedians. These lessons were discussed during HBO’s TALKING FUNNY roundtable conversation between master comics Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, and Louis C.K.

To develop his comedy act, Louis CK would, “Take my closing bit and open with it. Because then I had to follow my strongest bit.”

That’s smart advice for anyone presenting anything. If you’re giving a presentation, lead with your best material. If you’re pitching a client, lead with your best work and best rationale. If you’re debating someone, lead with your best argument.

By leading with your best material, you will challenge yourself to make sure the rest of your presentation can compare to your strong opening. If the rest of your material can’t compare to your opening bit, then you need to rework and rethink your presentation points.

I can relate to this advice. For my Bigness of Smallness presentation, I lead with my best stuff. Early on, I struggled to make sure everything else that followed my opener was strong enough to keep the audience’s attention. After a few years and continuous honing, my follow-up material has become strong enough to work alongside my opening bit.

Back to conversation from TALKING FUNNY... when Louis C.K. told the others he developed his act by moving his strong close to the opener in order to challenge himself, Jerry Seinfeld said, “You see, that’s how he got good.”

You wanna get good at presenting just like Louis C.K. got good at stand-up comedy?

Try opening with your strongest material and then challenge yourself to develop material worthy of following your great opening bit.