Was Branding wirklich ist und wie man es schnell aufbaut

0:00So, let's start with the first one, what branding is. So, when I decided to build a brand, I looked at what many popular marketers said about it. Here are some popular definitions that I have removed the marketers from them. This is not throwing shade, so I'm just saying them. A brand is a person's gut feeling about a product, service, or organization. A brand is not what you say it is, it's what they say it is. A brand is a set of expectations, memories, stories, and relations to that taken together account for a customer's decision to choose one product or service over another.

0:29A brand is emotional shorthand for accumulated and assumed information. A brand is present when the value of what the product, service, or personality means to its audience is greater than what it does for the audience. A brand is a product, service, or concept that is publicly distinguished from other products, services, or concepts so they can be easily communicated and usually marketed. Branding is the process of creating and disseminating the brand name, its qualities, and personality. The promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design.

0:55If these sound vague and confusing, it's because they are. And I was just as confused as you when I was trying to figure this out. Because none of them told me what to do. And so, after looking at all these marketers' words, I think I pieced it together. At least enough that once I started thinking about it this way, in a different way that I'm about to share with you, my brand grew, and it grew fast. And the reason this is so important is that if you don't know what to do, nothing's going to change.

1:24Fundamentally, if you don't change your behavior, obviously nothing's going to change as a result. And so, I wanted to find this one term before we get going. Learn it. Who here came to learn? Raise your hands. Fantastic. All right, otherwise I'll just be talking to the wall. So, learning means same condition, new behavior. And so, if I wanted to teach someone a phone script, then after teaching you, the phone rings again, and you say the new script, you learned. Learning occurred.

1:53On the other hand, if I tried to teach you the script, and then the phone rings again, and then you change nothing, no learning occurred. You learned nothing. And that's why none of this stuff that these guys said helped me, because I didn't know what I could do. I didn't know what behavior I had to change as a result of this. So, I didn't know how to adapt. And so, here's how branding happens.

2:18Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. So, I'll say that again. Branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. So, let's use Coca-Cola, drinking it, and liking it as our example. The yum, aka the outcome, that's what people get, they pair that with drinking, the action, so they do to get it, with Coca-Cola, the product.

2:46So, the next time you want some yum, you're probably going to reach for a Coca-Cola, if that was paired for you successfully. And so, branding is a deliberate pairing of things through an outcome. That's it. But sometimes, businesses pair their stuff, pair their stuff with things that people don't like. That's bad branding. This leads to losses for the business.

3:11Now, some of you guys may have seen this. This is Dylan Mulvaney doing a collaboration with Bud Light. There's a lot of press around this advertisement. This advertisement was actually a great advertisement. And you might might think I'm crazy, but it was. Let me explain. It's just not the way you might think it was. This is a great advertisement because it let a lot of people know about their stuff. It let a lot of people know about the product, about Bud Light.

3:36By the way, if you're curious, that is the definition of advertising, not branding. Advertising is letting people know about your stuff. Branding is the pairing that occurs as a result. So, it was good advertising, but bad branding. Many customers hated this pairing. Lots of people found out, but a lot of people hated it. Good advertising, bad branding. And so, as a result of this bad branding, people not liking the pairing, fewer people bought the product.

4:04Which netted a loss for the business. And so, to fix this, Bud Light paired their product with stuff the audience liked. Like Shane Gillis, who is a man's man comedian, and the UFC, a man's man of sports, if you will. And sales began to recover. So, that's the 101 explanation of branding. Let's go on to 201.

4:29So, to go a little deeper, because the better you get at this, the more money you will make. Like, the more nuance you can understand in how to brand and build a brand for yourself, the more money you will make. I promise you that. And so, to some people, the Dylan Mulvaney Mulvaney pairing was actually good. In general, both good advertising and good branding. Hear me out. For others, it was bad, obviously. All pairings have positive and negative results, and that's because everyone's different. Everyone has different preferences.

4:59But, for a business, you can objectively see if a pairing was good or bad, whether it netted you more money. So, more people disliked the Dylan Mulvaney Mulvaney Mulvaney Tough Day Dylan Mulvaney pairing, so sales suffered, making it a bad pairing. So, this isn't opinion. They objectively made less money, and so, this pairing was a bad one for their ideal audience. Now, the 301 version of this is, is there a company or a product where the Dylan Mulvaney pairing could have been both good advertising and good branding, so that the majority of people would have bought? I think the answer is yes.

5:35It just doesn't necessarily mean it's Bud Light for conservative males as the primary audience. And on the other hand, some people love the new Gillis and UFC pairings, and some hated it. But, more of the audience that is their ideal customer liked it, saw it as good, and so the business netted sales result, and they made more money. Good branding. And so, for Budweiser, and I just want to call this out. This is specifically for Budweiser and their customer base.

6:03It's not that Shingyller to the UFC is magic in some way, or Dylan Mulvaney is unmagic in some way. But, for that specific audience, yes, the pairing mattered, and how much of the base liked it or disliked it. So, if you're anything like me, making money is the point. So, let's drive this home. If you meet a pairing of your thing and your customer, and you got to choose which outcome you had happen, so you have your product and they drink it.

6:32There's an outcome that happens afterwards, right? That pairs with it. On one hand, 75% like it and 25 hate it. Or on the other hand, 25% like it and 75% hate it, which would be the bottom example. Which would you choose? More money good, the big the big green one. Yes, of course. The top one. Because it would make you the most money. And so, to be clear, for the 201 level of understanding, branding always happens.

7:02Branding always occurs. But, our goal is good branding. And good branding is a deliberate pairing of our business with good outcomes for our ideal customers. And so, what you pair your business with determines two key things. One, who pays attention to your business, and two, whether they go towards your business, like the UFC example, or away from your business, like the Dylan Mulvaney example.

7:31And so, at the beginning of this, I said I was going to cover three things. The first thing I said is what is branding. But, now that we have gone through that, I want to re-say what I walked us through, which is what good branding is. Ideally, what we're shooting for. So, now that we covered that, let's talk about why it makes you money. Why good branding makes you money. Branding as I define it happens everywhere all the time. But, businesses use it for profit. So, let's look at some of the earliest uses of branding to figure out how we can use it. So, these are the first entrepreneurs who used branding to make money. Real quick, I'm going to show you the exact 10-stage roadmap from zero to 100 million plus that less than 1% of companies finish I've now done multiple times. And so, I can say with a lot of confidence that these are the stages as head count increases that you need to get through.

8:18And I broke each of these down by eight different functions of the business, what the constraint feels like, like what are the symptoms of it when you're going through it, and then what steps we actually took to graduate. And we've done this across software, physical products, uh service businesses, brick and mortar, all of this, and it works. And it's my gift to you. It's absolutely free. And so, the link's in the description, but you just go acquisition.com/roadmap. Just enter your info, and it'll spit it right back to you, all free.

8:45The earliest version of branding that we can think of, or at least that I can think of, happened on livestock. It was literally a brand. They'd heat up metal, they'd sear it into the side of a cattle, and they would get a lovely little logo. Maybe we'll have a Nike swoosh cow someday. And so, they literally burned these symbols into animals. And those symbols had a magical effect. So, let's say you're walking around and you see a cow with no brand. You say, "Hello, cow." The cow says, "Moo." Back.

9:10And it has nothing on it. This is just a cow. You might leave it alone. And that might be it. On the other hand, let's say the cow has a brand you recognize. Say it's your neighbor's. You might be like, "Hey, that's Bill's cow." Now, if you like Bill, you might grab the cow and pull him by the whatever you pull cows by, and probably return it to Bill.

9:35If you hate Bill, then the cow may stay lost in the wilderness forever and become lunch for your family for the next month or two in the form of delicious burgers. Moo. But either way, for better or for worse, the brand affected what you did. It affected your behavior. And so to take this to the 201 level, what if you see a branded cow, but you don't recognize the brand? You would be like, "Who this? I see a logo, but I don't know anything about it."

10:07Well, then you would treat it how you treat branded animals in general, in that you would just know that it belongs to someone. And so you would treat it the way that you would treat it as though it belonged to anybody else. And even if only a tiny bit, you would treat a wild cow different from a branded cow in general. So if you had one that was wild and you had one that you didn't recognize, but was branded, you would still probably treat them differently. So that just shows you the power of brand as a concept because it dictates a tie between that cow and a human being.

10:37Or some complex animal that can brand cows. And so these are all effects of brand in general. So that's how it affects what people do. And so now I want to get tactical on how to get how we translate that concept into getting them to buy. So let's say we pair our brand. So this is where we're getting really tactical and this is like, "Okay, if you don't have a brand, this is the step-by-step right now." So you have a weak brand and we say it's a weak brand because it's starting out. You don't have really a lot of associations. Fantastic.

11:03So now you want to pair it with people, experiences, other other stuff that your ideal customer likes. So in this instance, I'm using little Nike pairing with LeBron and Tiger, who are champions, world class, goats, etc. And so people who like sports and competition would see that probably as a positive pairing. AKA good stuff. And so if we do that pairing or we make that pairing, for the majority of people, branding will occur and so the brand grows.

11:31And so the question then follows, what's the benefit of a strong brand versus a weak brand? And so the the the weak brand is before the pairing, the stronger brand is after the pairing. So a strong brand turns commoditized products like a $5 white t-shirt plus the strong brand into a premium product, a higher value brand name product. And premium products with a strong brand then get customers to want to pair themselves with the product so that they can associate the outcome themselves with the outcome the brand delivers.

12:08Which they do with their money. So how do they make that association? They give money, they get the shirt, the association happens based on what they've seen where that logo has been elsewhere. And so then they go from I want to be a winner to exchanging money and saying now I am a winner or I feel like a winner. That's how this works. And so this means that if the ideal customer likes sports, winning, and competition, etc., then they're more likely to buy stuff from a brand paired with those things.

12:35So let's lay it all out. Weak brand paired with stuff customers like creates a strong brand. Strong brand gets put onto a winning product, transforms a generic to winning product. Then the customers want to associate with that winning product, so they buy the product, and they put money into your bank account in order to do it. And so as long as you net a positive between what it cost you to associate with Tiger and LeBron and how many t-shirts you can sell as a result, you make money.

13:09And so here are some steps in words for those of you who are more word people. You start with a brand that means nothing. You have a logo, just like the cow that the other person didn't recognize. People know that it is a brand, they just don't know what that brand means yet. So it means nothing right now. Then you pair that brand with something or someone that your customers ideally like. Third, your brand starts to mean the thing customer likes to them.

13:34Then, they want to associate themselves with that thing they like or get more of it. But, they can't buy that thing. But, they can buy a tiny sliver of that association. So, they buy the shirt with the logo that means that thing to them. And so, they get the shirt, you get the money, and it all happened because you deliberately paired it with something they like. And this happens everywhere. So, Dolce & Gabbana, classic example. They paired with Kim Kardashian. They made a line specifically for her. And so, for a lady who wants to associate with fame, beauty, wealth, that would be a pairing that makes sense. And so, that lady who wants other people to associate her with fame, high class, money, luxury, wealth, will then buy Dolce & Gabbana and be like, "I'm just like Kim." Now, she might not say that directly because she might just associate with the values, but the transference still happens.

14:30And so, when someone looks at two products that on the surface are generically the same. You've got two t-shirts. One that has a weak brand or no brand, and the other that has the strong brand, the person that has the strong brand, they're going to be more likely to buy and pay more for And this happens because they actually buy the elements that we've deliberately paired with the brand which they identify with.

14:56And at this point of building a brand, you do this to change customer behavior. And that is to say, that is the point of building a brand, to change customer behavior in your favor when they see it with a product. And so, this is a quote from Warren Buffett that I like a lot, kind of signifying some of the elements of the benefits of brand. He said, "The single most important decision in evaluating business is pricing power. If you've got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you've got a very good business.

15:23And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10%, then you've got a terrible business. And so, if we have an unbranded t-shirt for $5, and we say, "You know what? We think we have a strong enough brand that we can raise the price." And then, boom, we can raise the price and still not lose that many sales, but we in this case, 12x the price. Good branding drives that premium pricing. Good branding also improves advertising. So, with the generic brand, if you're marketing this white t-shirt, you might get half a percent of people. There are many white t-shirts.

15:56There are many like it. This one is mine. Just kidding. So, the point for those of you got the reference. Um so, if you have a 0.5% click-through rate on something that's generic, there's nothing special about it. On the flip side, if you have a Nike brand t-shirt, same identical t-shirt, and it has the swoosh, then you might get six times as many people to click and buy at a higher price. See how these things stack together? That is why these brands exist for such a long period of time and make so much money.

16:24So, they get cheaper customers, they get higher returns, and they have better response rates in advertising. And on top of that, if if as if that weren't enough, good branding also drives customer loyalty. AKA, they buy more stuff more times. And so, like the Apple example I gave earlier, once you buy one Apple product, you tend to buy more and you tend to keep buying them. And so, this also, a good brand, also protects your business from competitors stealing that customer in the future.

16:52And so, as I promised in the beginning, who's seeing how this all this stuff allows you to one, be able to charge 10 times or more than your competition, two, get higher returns in advertising so you can scale that much more, that much faster, and then three, get people to keep buying for life, compounding your money-making skills for good. Okay. Which is why building a brand will make you lots of money.

17:16It's also why brands outperform commodities in every single industry. And give a lasting competitive advantage that to be fair is theirs to lose. So, here's another quote from Uncle Warren. It takes 20 years to build a reputation and 5 minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently. If you're a business owner and you are not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling road map, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so, we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so, no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so, I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconstruct the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out. On the thank you page, you can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.