Making Your Brand Impossible To Resist: Secrets For Impressing, Influencing, and Inspiring Your Audience Featuring Sally Hogshead - I Love Marketing Episode #413

What I found is there are six different ways that you can be different. There's no one right way to be different. You can be different than you were. You can be different than your competition and it doesn't have to be a massive difference. It doesn't. You don't have to reinvent yourself at all of the six. An example is your heritage. A lot of times there are parts of your heritage that are exquisitely unusual that are the mythology of how you came to be and how your company came to be. Nobody else has your heritage. You have to be able to go back and find that.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com.

Sally Hogshead is the creator of the Fascinate Personal Brand Test, the first personality assessment that measures how others perceive you. She's got two New York Times bestsellers, How the World Sees you and fascinate. She's one of only 200 professional speakers inducted into the speaker hall of Fame. Sally's upcoming book is titled different is Better than Better. So this conversation will be a different kind of I love marketing meetup. You'll even get a chance to grab a sneak peek of her book.

What we're going to be talking about is really diving into who are you as an entrepreneur, as a leader, who are you at your absolute highest that you don't have to change and you don't have to fix. You have to identify it and articulate it and then not just build your brand around it, but build your entire identity.

I love it. So how do we start?

Better is something that can be replaced. If you're competing on the basis of better, you're competing on the same rules and the same playground as somebody else. I want you to think about better as being vertical. Better is incrementally trying to improve. Better is coming up with one idea and then tweaking it and making it incrementally better. Better is taking something that's already established and then building upon that, but staying tunnel vision. Better only there's only one person who's better. There's only one person who can be the best. So this is going to be introducing in our conversation, instead of being better, which works if you have the biggest budget, the most famous, instead going horizontally to think about being different, there isn't just one idea, there's a profusion of ideas. And the more you can come up with, the more you can make the bad ideas obsolete. It's not about having a reiteration of something that already exists. It's about being able to go through that journey and find a solution. That is the breakthrough. We feel trapped by the brand that we built for ourselves. And the reason why we feel trapped in a cage is because we are trying to compete on the basis of being better than our competitors or better than we were. It was only until I started realizing that I was doing the very thing that I had always told my clients, that I wasn't getting any hate mail and I wasn't getting love letters either. So I had to stop and reinvent. And part of that process was understanding, like, okay, universe, I get it. I can't just say, be different. I have to really deeply embrace that. In 2018, I was so miserable. I just. I think a lot of us can identify with this. Not just feeling depressed, but feeling like nothing we do matters. And the harder we work, the bigger our overhead gets. And we're not able to have quality relationships with anybody because it's exhausting to be inauthentic. Wearing a mask is like wearing hair extensions. Yeah, you're catfishing.

Leading with this message is that as a result of your contemplation, how did it evolve? It's important now for you.

If the value that you add in the conversation in the world is to have a message about being different, and then your social media is neither different nor better. It's not adding value, it's just taking up space, then it's time to have a good, hard look at yourself. And so I took my social media and completely blew it up from the very beginning. And I unfollowed everybody. I deleted every post and completely started over. And I said, feel like I have spinach in my teeth. Nobody told me, what are brands that over time, they have not changed the product, they just changed the positioning of the product. So I wasn't changing who I am. I was becoming more getting back to who I am, scraping off the layers, taking off the hair extension. And so I'll give you an example. Did you know that Lysol. Do you know what Lysol used to be when it was first introduced? Lysol was a douche. Okay, I'm not kidding. Lysol was a douche. And it was the same formulation. And it said, there's a reason why he's not attracted anymore. Plato was originally created as a soot cleaner. Before the invention of electricity, houses had these horrible soot stains from the wood fired stoves. And there was this rubbery substance that you would clean it. And when electricity came, their sales went down. And so they repositioned. And not only did they keep the product the same, the reason why Plato has such a distinctive scent is because that was the original scent. But Marlboro was originally targeted to women, and then sales were going down, so they changed to the cowboy image. Viagra was originally positioned to impotence. Well, nobody wants to have impotence, but erectile dysfunction. Okay, that sounds a lot better. We shouldn't change who we are. We should become more of who we are. We don't have to fix ourselves. We have to figure out what we're already doing right and then do more of it. Like Lysol was not doing it right, but I like that pine fresh scent on my floors. What I found was there are four different ways to compete in the Battle Royale between different and better. And I'll briefly take you through it. Imagine we're looking at an axis. Better is vertical. It's an incremental improvement that is always about trying to do one step more than you just did. You will never have a breakthrough simply by trying to be better. The only way to win at competing on the basis of better is to have the bigger budget or have more fame or have an asset. So underdogs, entrepreneurs, college graduates, anybody who's not already performing at the top of their game and doesn't have decades and decades of logo awareness behind them will never be able to win on the basis of better. Now there's different, which is horizontal. Different is where the magic happens. Different is looking ahead to what's next. Now, I want you to think so. There's better and horizontally there's different. Of course, everybody would love to be different and better. That's the holy grail, different and better. This upper quadrant, different and better is where Elon, Musk and Tesla, it's Ted Speeches, Disney, Rolling Stones. It's these iconic brands that have achieved that over time with their credibility of being both. And they're constantly reinventing, they're constantly reinvesting as well. Now, let's imagine there's better but not different. That's the next quadrant over. Better but not different. Those are brands that are mature and they're established and they have a place in the market, but they're at risk of becoming obsolete. These are brands like Toyota, Burberry, Olive Garden, have high name awareness at&t. So the brands are healthy, but if they don't keep re injecting different into them, then they're really putting themselves in a vulnerable position. Because they can just be outdone by the next better. Let's look at the bottom two quadrants. There's not different, not better. This is branding hell. This is where brands go to die. Kmart, Blockbuster. They no longer have a differentiating feature and they're not better. So not only are they a commodity, they have no way to compete. So the market just eats them alive. And the only way they can stay in business is by pumping extraordinary amount of money into their overhead, their man hours. If you're an entrepreneur and you're not different and you're not better, at least as defined by your ideal customer, then the only way you're gonna survive is by killing yourself and slave driving your talent. Now. But let's come over to the final quadrant, and that is different, but not yet better. So strategically, these brands, they don't focus on being better, yet they focus on being different. And this is the magic zone of where entrepreneurial brands come into their own. This is where brands have the highest likelihood of achieving the greatest growth in the minimum amount of time, with the least marketing budget and the fewest number of people. So these are the brands that focus on being different, that are no longer competing head to head with the market leaders. Instead, they're alienating part of the market by intentionally figuring out who they're not for and instead having a much smaller, highly defined niche that they can turn into not just advocates, but fanatics. These are the cult brands. And so when we look at how brands move around these four different quadrants, sometimes a brand will come into the market. When Burberry introduced the plaid trench coat, they rode that plaid wave for 200 years. And the plaid became so ubiquitous that they lost their copyright on the plaid. So they were better, but not different. They became a commodity. They were not different, not better. They moved down. And it wasn't until they got a whole new creative director and they actually.

Burned.

Their stock of plaid raincoats. They literally burned them at the end of the year so that they wouldn't be counterfeited, that they now were crawling their way back up. When you have to choose, which we all do unless we have unlimited funds, you have to choose different. Because different allows you to make sure that you're not trying to outdo somebody else at their own game.

Let's move into a couple of examples.

Billie Eilish, you know, she, she has a, she has a really polarizing brand. And when she first came out, people, people just didn't get it. Carlos says Red Bull. When Red Bull first Came over from Europe. Remember, it was red Bull gives you wings. Americans had no idea what that. What that was about. Why would I want a carbonated drink? I've got coffee. And then it became. It became so mainstream that it was better, not different. And there were so many irritated.

Everything about Red Bull is different, isn't it? I mean, the size and shape of the can is different. The where it's sold is different. Everything. The whole approach was different.

Was. And was is the key word because it was incredibly, incredibly easy to copy. Well, let's take a look at entrepreneurs in the marketplace. Why don't we take a look at Joe Polish. So when he started within carpet cleaning, what a commoditized business, and he wasn't able to really successfully compete because even though he was better than other carpet cleaners, he didn't have a way to be able to get his message out. And he. So he was just schlepping all around without air conditioning and killing himself because nobody understood why they should pay more for his product. And instead, then he started creating those conferences where he would. He became a leader of other carpet cleaners. And, Dean, you probably know this better than I do that the way he differentiated is by being able to find, literally this. It. This. This tribe that was so rabid that pretty soon he was giving away his white Teslas at the event. And now he lives in the world of different and better. What I found is there are six different ways that you can be different. There's no one right way to be different. You can be different than you were. You can be different than your competition. And it doesn't have to be a massive difference. It doesn't. You don't have to reinvent yourself at all of the six. An example is your heritage. A lot of times, there are parts of your heritage that are exquisitely unusual, that are the mythology of how you came to be and how your company came to be. Nobody else has your heritage. You have to be able to go back and find that. I was a copywriter on Nike, and all the Nike business cards have a tiny waffle iron on them. Dean, why do they have a waffle iron?

Yeah, that's interesting, because the very first shoes that they did were made in the waffle iron. That was how he did it, right?

Yes. Right.

Yeah.

So heritage. Another one is your actions. What are you doing that's so unlike what anybody else is doing that people are going to notice. Another is culture. What's a practice of who you are for your community and for your employees? An example of a brand that did this very badly is Ed Hardy. Remember when Ed Hardy first came out that, you know, like the tattoo, love kills slowly. The birds in the heart. When they first came out, I remember I was living in la and the Viper Room would have, you know, Johnny Depp coming out after his night on the town wearing his Ed Hardy. And it was hot, hot, hot. But then because they. So they focused on culture, but they didn't focus on their heritage, they didn't focus on their actions. And so the brand became one dimens. So pretty soon the Ed Hardy brand, in order to stay alive, they had to go into line extensions like Ed Hardy pacifiers, Ed Hardy airline, Ed Hardy, things that had absolutely nothing to do with the brand. And I was just looking in the Macy's, in the Macy's catalog, and now ed Hardy is 95% off for their cotton duvet covers.

Oh, my goodness.

Now, there are people who made a lot of money and definitely cashed out. But as brands, we can't just differentiate by having line extensions, which is what Red Bull's doing.

Where do we start to maybe explore this or think about this?

I'm going to give you a URL, and when you go to the URL, you're going to be able to download a mini sample of the book so you can tell me what you think. And here it is. Okay. It's SallyHugshead.com forward slash. I love marketing. All one word, not case sensitive. Once you understand what makes you different, how can you continue to take that further and further and further and further so it becomes so refined that people become obsessed with you instead of just mildly interested in you. The first thing that I did is I looked at what are the elements of a live keynote speech that have not yet been replicated. And one of the things that I saw was that a lot of people were using. They would open up their computer and be doing the zoom there like we are right now, or they would be standing up in front of their iPhone video. I'm here in my. I built a complete home studio. I have two team members who are over here. Hi, guys. Say hi. So we have a director, a teleprompter machine. We always have somebody who's the second tech. And then I have an executive assistant who's here to make sure that if the client has any questions and then that I, our strategic liaison is on the phone with the client and with the studio so that if there are any concerns with audio or visual or they're moderating chat does that raise overhead? Absolutely. And kind of hyper finessing the quality. But we looked at how can you replace, how do you replace Q and A? I love ad lib. And it's really hard to do that sometimes with a speech, especially with slides. And so what we've been doing is we do zoom interviews with either the customers or the team members of a client. We take those, we edit them, and then we incorporate it into the speech so that as people are watching, they've got familiar faces. Or it has that same proximity effect of a live in person event. And then we shoot behind the scenes B roll and we give it to them. We have somebody who's on social media, Gina, our director of communication. She'll be live on social media. So if people are posting questions like, okay, how do I apply this? Then she's there to constantly respond. So what that's allowed me to do is now that we're coming back into live events, that I feel really lucky and I feel blessed to have the team that I do because we never compromised on fee. I don't have to crawl back up out of that hole. And here's the point that I want to make. This isn't about me and my fees. It's about how you lead your business. Is one way to differentiate is on price. And differentiating on the basis of being different doesn't mean that you go downscale. It doesn't mean that you're cheaper. In some cases, price elasticity allows you to not just charge more, but to differentiate. The way this relates to entrepreneurs, to small business owners, to leaders is it's about the perception that you're creating on your differentiation. And there's no one right way to differentiate in the speaking world. When I started, I couldn't figure out what's the correlation between a speaking fee and how much that speaker is willing to charge. Is it reputation? Is it reviews? Is it connections, status? And so I looked at top speakers and on speaking sites, there's a dropdown menu just like Amazon. Which categories category are you looking for?

Right.

In speaking, the category is economics, politics, comedy. And what I found was that speakers who used the word innovation to describe their topic made on average $5,000 more per keynote than speakers who used the category creativity.

Oh, wow.

Innovation and creativity. You could take the same speech and simply change the word, but innovation had a much higher perception because innovation is a means to an end, whereas creativity is perceived as a process that doesn't necessarily have a benefit.

Boy, that's really. That is interesting.

And so that's it's an example of different how to make your product a very subtle nuance. The product becomes different, which thereby makes it be perceived as better through marketing.

Don't miss another episode of I Love Marketing. Subscribe today@ilove marketing.com for forward slash subscribe. If you'd like access to the show notes or resources to help you take action on what was discussed, Please visit ilove marketing.com413.