Category: Market

Not every business is, or should be, humble. Lots of brands are about power and attention, and that’s okay. But if you have a brand which values humility, marketing can be a real challenge.

It’s natural to want to highlight your strengths, or at least, highlight what you think your customers might perceive as strengths. I’ve found that this approach often feels unauthentic, pitchy, and too “keyword” verbose.

Instead, be honest. Write as though you were talking to a very close friend, whom you want to recruit. Show them your best aspects, but keep it real.

How else can you talk about yourself, without talking about yourself?

I’ve always said that a logo can make or break a business.

More specifically: finding a visual identity which deeply resonates with your audience can help your product immensely. By contrast, if your visual identity is jarring to your audience, it can seriously set you back.

A piece of advice given by Seth Godin is that logos are “just a placeholder, a label waiting to earn some meaning”. He stresses that your brand is what matters – and he’s right. However, where he and I disagree is on how much influence the visual representation of your brand has.

There’s a reason that companies like Apple and Nike spent tens of thousands of dollars on their logo. To the lay person, a swoosh or a half-eaten apple may seem simple, but a lot of research and iteration goes into fine-tuning their reverberative quality.

The work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Max Braun may seem simple, but it takes a lot of talent and experience to boil something down to its barest essential. As Clare Boothe Luce is famous for saying, Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.

A layperson could never architect a building as simple as Farnsworth House. A bootstrapping entrepreneur could never design a logo as effective as Starbucks.

What is your area of expertise? If you were to outsource your visual identity, where could your talent and experience be focused?

Dean Owen is the entrepreneur behind a new luxury dog apparel business: Owen & Edwin.

Dean was having a hard time converting his online following. He noticed that his audience loved the idea of his product, but were hesitating to pay the premium price tag associated with his luxury dog coats.

This is a common problem. When a new product launches, especially in a higher price bracket, there’s often market hesitation.

One tempting approach would be to lower your prices in order to gain a little momentum. Bad move! Your audience will expect less, think they’ve got less, share less, associate your brand with less, and complain more when you hike your prices.

Dean realised that purchase hesitation isn’t ever because of price. It’s because his audience lacked trust.

Owen & Edwin was an unknown brand, so it’s audience didn’t trust that they would be getting what they paid for. So, they introduced a new product: Dog Biscuits.

The biscuits, sold at cost, introduced the audience to a purchase with much less risk involved . From dog treats, the customer might choose to purchase a dog collar or other accessory. Finally, the customer knows and trusts the brand, and they are ready to buy their pooch a luxury coat.

It’s unreasonable to expect our audience to trust us from the very start. What can we do to slowly introduce our products to our customers, and earn their trust along the way?