MBA1593 Guest Teacher – Mark Toft – How to Build an Authentic Brand in an Insincere Age

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 RMBA show. Because when you get better, so does your business. Every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of the Hundred Dollar mba, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our Guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today's guest teacher is Mark Toft. And Mark Toft is going to be teaching you how to build an authentic brand in an insincere age. Everybody is trying to project their brand on social media, on YouTube, with webinars beating on their chest with bravado and it's just falling on deaf ears. How do you stand out when everybody's trying to brand themselves and look like they're winning? Well, that's why we brought on Mark Toft to teach you how to build a branding strategy that actually works that's real and authentic. Mark Mark Tofta is a Chief Strategy Officer and co founder of the Narrator Group and he's an absolute branding expert. He was the lead digital writer on the Staples Easy Button project. He has over 25 years of experience in business and branding and he wants to give you A gift today, a great lesson on how to focus and craft a brand that matters in today's noisy world. We got a lot to cover in today's guest lesson, so let's get into it. Let's get down to business. We brought on Mark Toft today to teach you a great lesson on building an authentic brand. A brand that stands out, a brand that people talk about, a brand that really has a message and resonates with people. They say brand, or your brand is what other people say about you when you're not around. Let's make sure they say what we want them to say. It's your job to craft that narrative. So I'm going to hand it over to Mark to teach you his guest lesson on doing just that. And I'll be back to wrap up the lesson and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, Mark.

Hello, everyone, this is Mark Toft. I'm grateful that you've joined me today. I'll be teaching you about why brand authenticity is critical to success and three things that all authentic brands do. So let's get down to business. Before we dive in, let's pause on that word branding. A lot of businesses get knotted up by it, especially startups. Here's a helpful and pragmatic way to think about it. If you pulled five people aside at your company and asked them what you do and why you do it, would you get five different answers? This is the kind of challenge branding should solve. But the truth is that a lot of what passes for branding materials and consultation are thickening agents, meant to make businesses feel they've paid for something substantial, complexifying in order to profit, as Tim Ferriss has called it. But branding is, in fact, very simple. You don't need pages of charts and graphs to define it, just a few words or a sentence. Branding is what you stand for and what people experience from your products and services. It's not what you claim to be, it's what you are. Your brand is your purpose. Advertising takes that purpose and assembles it into a compelling story. That's 25 years of frontline branding and advertising experience packed into a few words. But why is authenticity important to branding? Because the temptation to tweet or share things on social media in order to be accepted has never been greater. In a sense, we're all performing for each other like never before, judging by our music, our movies, social media, not to mention our branding and advertising. Being true to ourselves is not what we're after. We want to seem to be true to Ourselves, we want the appearance of authenticity more than the fact. The wise words of Simon Sinek provide a good corrective. Branding is an exercise in trust building, he says. When we fake our way to trust, that trust will eventually collapse. One level of brand authenticity relates to facts. Is that cookie made with natural ingredients? Is that watch a Rolex or a knockoff? Now, this kind of authenticity isn't unimportant, but it's only a starting point. It's like telling people your height or your eye color. These details don't penetrate to who you are or to who your brand really is. It's easy for companies to get hung up in telling the history of their founding in exacting detail. They feel they have to recite information about their origins. Founded in this dear by these two people. Humble beginnings in a garage or a basement. I'm not saying these things should be hidden, but they frequently don't matter. When you think of authenticity in branding, think of it this way. Brand authenticity is believing in and delivering on what you claim about yourself and your products and services. It's your brand's essence, not its facts or its features. And this gets us to the first thing that all authentic brands do. They're built on a clear purpose. In the movie Office Space, an unhappy employee named Peter Gibbons guts a fish in his cubicle and fights the desire to throttle the co worker who tells him he must be having a case of the Mondays. It's funny, because many of us have had jobs like Peter's bad jobs, jobs that seem to have no function other than to make us move paper around and dream of the day we'll quit making Meaninglessness is deadly for brands because humans are wired for purpose. Employees leave jobs when they don't find sufficient meaning. Pay and benefits are rarely the cause. You can't capture your purpose with a long mission statement and pages of brand strategy. Employees and customers need something clear, simple, and true they can go back to again and again. My partners and I call it the hill you defend. It's the first and the final ground on which you stake the life of your business. There are other popular ways to describe the same basic idea. Jim Collins argues that all successful companies adhere to a hedgehog concept. They succeed by finding and focusing on one thing that they do really well. Simon Sinek talks about the Golden Circle and starting with why the center of the golden circle is a brand's reason for being. It's why don't be afraid to embrace a seemingly humble purpose that you can actually live out, rather than a highfalutin purpose that has little relation to the products or services you provide. One young entrepreneur I met was launching a firm dedicated to sustainable architecture. Her passion and her intelligence were clear, although her purpose was staring her right in the face. Building better buildings, that is, buildings that are more affordable and more beautiful and friendlier to the environment. She was clinging to a phrase that she had fallen in love with. We're going to change the vernacular of architecture, she told me. Do you know what that means? Neither do I. She would be more likely to find her company's authentic purpose by thinking of it this way. Could someone call her office and say, hello, I'd like to buy a change in architectural vernacular, please? Nope. But they could call and say, I'd like to commission a building that's better and more efficiently designed. A strong purpose answers a lot of questions and even helps inform business decisions. Why should we design packages this way? Why are we expanding into these markets or reaching out to these customers? Why are we aging our cheese like this? Or for employees? Why do they perform their work this way or not another way? Because that's what a company dedicated to this purpose would do. Think of FedEx with their purpose of guaranteed on time delivery, or United Airlines being the friendly airline. Now they've lost their way, it seems, in recent years. But that purpose at one time catapulted them to being the number one carrier in the world. The second thing that all authentic brands do is they seek conflict. As social creatures, most of us try to avoid or minimize conflict. That's perfectly rational. But conflict is at the heart of good stories, and it's also at the heart of effective branding and advertising. Most products and companies are created out of conflict. To take a prosaic example, a busy parent is confronted by an unhappy teenager whose favorite red shirt is fading in the wash. It's a problem that needs to be solved. Tide Color Guard offers a solution, a detergent that doesn't fade reds and other bright colors even after multiple loads of laundry. The importance of conflict in branding and advertising is often overlooked. Ultimately, addressing or resolving conflict is why people will pay for your products or services. Conflict, interestingly, can help you locate and focus your brand's purpose if you're struggling to pinpoint it. If you're not sure how to express your brand's purpose, think of the conflict or the problem you solve for customers. Finally, the third thing that all authentic brands do is they cause with caution. Not long ago, people were greeted with this KFC announces buckets for the cure. You don't really need to learn more details to sense the approaching doom. Kentucky Fried Chicken partnered with Susan G. Komen to donate $0.50 to cancer research for every bucket of chicken ordered. Funding breast cancer research is of course a noble cause. KFC simply wasn't the brand to do it, at least not in this way. Maybe they could have donated money directly without making it dependent on the consumption of fried chicken. The campaign was met with howls of disapproval and was quickly withdrawn. The public is on to brands looking for cheap grace your customers dishonesty. Censors are set to high, they're quick to see self interest masquerading as selflessness, and they're ready to pounce on and publicize instances of inauthenticity. Cause related marketing is not a bad idea. Not at all. It's just that poor execution frequently makes it a bad idea because brands are either prone to faking it or doing it for selfish reasons. Before promoting a cause, brands should examine and be honest about their motives and assess whether the connection to their purpose of that cause is genuine. Consider authentic cause related marketing campaigns that have been highly effective. EBay's GivingWorks initiative has been praised for helping to raise over $200 million for charities. However, they've done so by putting buyers and sellers in the driver's seat. Giving is optional. Buyers and sellers are under no obligation or pressure to participate. Ebay makes charitable donations easier through a natural use of their online marketplace that is at the heart of their business. They don't make donations dependent on helping spread the word about how generous ebay is. Wegmans, judged by market force to be America's favorite grocery store, donates 15 million pounds of healthy food each year. This is a natural fit with their mission, which is to help people live better, healthier lives through food. If you're tempted to do something grandiose, consider this from Tim Cause related marketing should be giving consumers victories, however modestly achieved, rather than disappointments, however grandly conceived. That's a more realistic and much more authentic path to follow. To recap, here are three things authentic brands do. They're built on a purpose, they seek conflict, and they cause with caution. Thank you for listening. My name is Mark Toft. If you want to learn more about the do's and don'ts of brand authenticity, you can Visit the website authenticity-book.com thanks again for joining me. And back to Omar.

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Love Today's Lesson by Mark Toft we all heard about Simon Sinek's why Start with why. His whole book, his whole TED talk, and I want to share a little bit of a secret, a little bit of a confession. It took me some time to really deeply understand what Simon Sinek is talking about with the Start with why movement. I thought it was just like, this is a good way to kind of create some messaging for my audience and for my customers so they understand why I'm doing this. And maybe that's a byproduct of starting with why, but it's not the reason why you do. It's actually a good exercise to do it for yourself, for the business, so the team understands. Why are we doing all this? What's our purpose? What's our mission? What are we trying to do here every day when we go to work? Why do we exist? What's the greater goal? And sometimes you really need to take the time to dissect that as a group, as a team, in your management circles and really boil it down. What are you trying to do? It's sometimes painful. Why do you exist? We feel like we have to have an answer because otherwise what's the point of having a business? But don't rush to an answer. Try to really dig deep and understand what problems are you trying to solve and why you in particular trying to solve it? What is your unique spin on it, your unique take on solving that problem? This will allow you to have clear focus and it will influence a lot of your decisions, including your branding, your messaging, your marketing, your marketing materials, everything. Clear brands are simple. The message is simple. BMW's branding is all about being the ultimate driving machine. If you love driving, if you're an engaged driver, if you see owning a car more than just something that you have to do to get from point A to point B. BMW is for the driver. It's for people that love the open road and therefore all their branding, all their products, everything is aligned with that mission. It's so simple. Ultimate driving machine. If you like to drive, you're gonna love this car. This is what we do. Very much the opposite of like say for example, Tesla. Tesla is not a bad car to drive, but their whole claim to fame is technology and actually autopilot, you know, auto driving, you know, automated driving. For those who really care about technology and safety and all that kind of stuff, that's who they resonate with. So understand your why will help you build a better business and not just brand. Thank you so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you want to learn more about the do's and don'ts of brand authenticity, go to www.authenticity-book.com. you will not regret it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this what I found through the years. The reason why branding is so nebulous and foggy is because people think it's something you have to do. You have to actively build all that kind of stuff. Branding is actually a byproduct of doing a few things right. Having a clear, clear why, a mission, a unique selling proposition. The product is informed by that. The product becomes your catalyst, it becomes your biggest marketing tool and the reason why people use it, the things that people say about it, that becomes your brand. It's something that you can reinforce, something that you can react, regurgitate in some way regurgitate out to people and say, hey, this is what other people are saying about us. This is why you should choose us. But this doesn't happen if you are not clear on what you're doing, why you're doing it, how you're doing it. These are three things you gotta nail early on and reinforce and re clarify and make sure they don't get foggy along the way as you grow your business. Thank you so much for listening to the 100 LBHL. See you in tomorrow's episode. Until then, take care.

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