Participants:
Steve Wershing
Julie Littlechild
Lindsay Pedersen
Steve Wershing:
Welcome to Becoming Referable. The podcast that shows you how to become the kind of advisor people can’t stop talking about. I’m Steve Wershing. In this episode we talk with Lindsay Pedersen, Brand Strategist and author of Forging an Ironclad Brand. Lindsay points out that brand is not marketing. It’s actually the leader’s responsibility because brand is the total experience that people have with your firm and what the public thinks of you as a result. In our conversation, we discover what brand is, why it’s important to be distinct, but not too different, a concept she refers to as optimally distinct. And we discuss the importance of having a brand that is both big and narrow, how you can balance the two and why your brand needs to be both. And listen through to the end where we talk about the importance of increasing customer love and how that’s probably different than you think.
It’s a great conversation where we cover a lot of ground related to how you can create the kind of brand that attracts more clients. And so with that, let’s go to our conversation with Lindsay Pedersen. Lindsay Pedersen, welcome to the Becoming Referable Podcast. We’re so happy to have you.
Lindsay Pedersen:
Thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Steve Wershing:
So when we talk about brand, we talk about how to distinguish yourself from other firms vying for the same clients. Now you cut your teeth at Clorox, which strikes me as something that could be a challenge to differentiate. Can you tell us a little bit about your experience there and how that informed your ideas about brand?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes, absolutely. I spent about six years in brand management at Clorox and worked on kind of what we call the mother brand, Clorox Bleach, but also worked on other categories; cat litter and trash bags and Brita water filters. And the thing about consumer packaged goods companies like Clorox or Proctor and Gamble, is that our products are fairly similar and in some cases truly parity with our competitor’s products. And yet in that environment, the preferred brands, so Clorox for example, for Clorox Bleach, they, even though the product is parity, we still own most of the market and we charged about double the price of a store brand bleach. So what I learned is that the tangible product is only part of the customer experience. That all of the things that surround the actual, the liquid, the sodium hypochlorite bleach, that’s merely a kind of an artifact. It’s the carrier for the customer experience.
But the feelings that they have as a result of using it are what constitute the brand and what allowed us to have more market share despite our price premium. So it’s kind of the crucible. If you can do that in an environment where your product is the same, then you can do it in any environment. So that’s my appreciation for using brand as a source of differentiation came from this environment where you had to do that. Darwinistically, you have to have differentiation in order to have a successful thriving business, which we did at Clorox. So that now is the same principle that I encourage all leaders to appreciate and embrace. Which is that your product, the thing that you bring in a tangible sense is really only part of the story. And it’s not usually the thing that alone is creating the most value for your customer. So understanding that whole, that whole product experience, that whole customer client experience enables you to bring them more value.
Steve Wershing:
And that’s a great place to start because your point is really well taken. If you can differentiate, if you can differentiate sodium hypochlorite then you’ve got a good start on that. So you have a new book, Forging an Ironclad Brand, which has lots of really good advice for people on what a brand is and how to build one and then how to promote it. But I’d like to actually start in the forward, which is kind of unfair because you didn’t write it. But in your forward there’s a point made about the difference between communicating versus persuading and I thought that was important enough that I still wanted to ask you a little bit about that. So can you tell us a little bit about that distinction?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes, absolutely. Persuading means that you’ve moved somebody. That you’ve moved somebody either to change their mind or to instigate a new behavior. And communication is there’s good communication that’s persuasive and communication that’s not persuasive. In an environment like today’s environment where we have all of these channels for talking to, but for communicating with our audience, we get communication happy instead of persuasion happy. So communication is so ubiquitous and it’s so easy and frictionless now that we sometimes rest on our laurels a little bit when actually the way that our business is going to flourish and the way that we’re going to bring the most value to our customers, is if we persuade them to deepen their relationship with our business by kind of coming into the fold of our business. So persuading is really the way that you make communication work in favor of your bottom line of your P&L as a business.
Julie Littlechild:
And so how does brand fit into persuasion?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yeah, so the idea of brand, the definition of brand is what’s the thing, what’s the meaning that you own inside the mind of your audience? What’s the relationship between your business and your audience? What’s that meaning? And all businesses are going to have a brand. All businesses are going to have a position. But the ones that are more deliberate and defining what they want that brand to be are the ones that are going to create the most economic value. So the way that you create the most economic value is by knowing what your customer needs that only you can bring. Because that’s then you’re A, you’re differentiated, but B, you’re also relevant to an audience that is motivated to spend time and money with you.
So persuasion in a way is just, it’s an analogy for this conscious exercise of defining what you want your brand to be, what you want that meeting to be so that everything that you communicate is reinforcing that meaning so that you’re not communicating loosey goosey, you’re actually communicating in order to solidify and reinforce the meaning that makes your business relevant to your audience. And that way they will come to you. You don’t have to shout at them, you don’t have to shove communication down their throat, they will come to you.
Julie Littlechild:
And I still, as you’re talking, some things just clicking for me as it relates to our audience, which is financial service providers and financial advisors in particular. Because I think it’s easy and natural perhaps to say, well, my brand therefore is what my clients need and what they need is a good product. Right? Because advisors are smart and they’re credentialed and they’re experts and there’s so much that hinges on the service really. Do you find it easy, particularly with professional services to hang your hat on the product or service as the brand?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Awesome question. And it’s so true. When we’re talking about a tangible product like bleach, we literally talk about it as a product. But the thing is whether you’re selling a product like a physical product or whether you’re selling a service product, you might think that that’s what you’re selling, but what your customer is buying is everything that they enjoy as a result of experiencing that product. So they’re not buying the product for the product. They’re buying a solution to a problem that they have. And the most finite qualities of your product might be a big part of that. And it might mostly be the things that surround that product, that service or the way that they feel as a result of having interacted with your business. That’s what they’re ultimately buying.
So this is this whole idea. Charles Revson said during World War Two… So he founded Revlon and what he said is when we’re in our factories, we’re creating lipstick. That’s our product. But when our customer is at the drugstore, she’s buying hope. She’s not buying a pigmented stick of wax, she’s buying hope. And the more that you can realize that and kind of internalize that what you’re selling is not the same thing as what your customer is buying, the more value you can create for them. And so it’s really kind of the empathetic way of serving your customer to realize that the most obvious visible quality of your product is not actually why they’re buying it. They’re buying it because of the way that their life has changed because they’ve bought it.
Steve Wershing:
Now Lindsay, you lay out a few different things that are involved in brand, different aspects of brand. Among them are brand positioning and brand promise. And I thought it was really useful to talk about the two of those and how they differ and how they each contribute to it. Can you talk a little bit about those two things and what each of them brings to the table for people who are promoting a brand?
Lindsay Pedersen:
I love that you asked this because I love teasing apart this kind of complex web of brand so that we are all talking about the same thing. Because sometimes if I say a brand and you’re thinking of a logo, but I’m thinking of what’s the heart and soul of the business, then we’re having this really strange, confusing conversation. So defining these terms becomes really kind of the fertile ground to have this conversation. So the brand positioning is, and it’s almost synonymous with just brand, but the brand positioning is the thing that you own inside the mind of your audience. Every brand, every business has a brand, has a positioning. If you have an audience, you have a position in their mind. Your brand promise is the conscious act of choosing what you want that position to be.
So done well, these two concepts have very high overlap. So for example, Volvo, the car brand, Volvo. The position that they own in my mind is safety. And this is pretty universal no matter where I go in the world when I mention Volvo, people think safety. Now the promise that Volvo has decided to deliver and honor since they were founded in the 1920s is safety. We’re going to be the car that is the ultimate safe vehicle. So their positioning and their promise are the same and that’s because they’ve been very conscious and deliberate about that promise. When you have a brand that has… When they don’t have a promise at all, they’re still going to have a position or maybe they do have a brand promise, but they don’t deliver it consistently enough that it reinforces that positioning.
So a brand that comes to mind for me with this is Uber. The promise of Uber, the brand promise is a better way to get there. Kind of this removing friction from transportation. That’s their promise. The position that Uber owns, in my mind anyway, is that it is a frictionless transportation experience, but I also get kind of this quality of like didn’t they just have some unsavory kind of cultural things they got in trouble from and their founder was ousted and don’t they like not provide health insurance to drivers? So all of those things are constituting Uber in my mind. It has some of the brand promise in it, but it’s also… So the position is actually the result of everything you do and the brand promise hopefully is input. And you want to have those two things be as similar as you can. It’s almost like the mark of an excellent brand is that what you intend to own is what you actually own in the mind of your customer.
Julie Littlechild:
And if you’re a small firm without the resources of Clorox or Uber or Volvo, how do you test the assumption that those two things are aligned?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yeah. This is a great, just a general point about kind of size of business and brand. And I use these examples like Volvo and Clorox because people know them. But the principles are the same for anyone who’s in commerce, anybody who is asking for money or time or attention or any scarce resources. They all have access to this, the economic principle of differentiation. And ultimately when you’re really sharp and precise and resonant with what your brand is, you actually spend less money because it’s more focused. It’s the power of being prioritized. So, just kind of the first part of your question Julie is okay, that’s great for these businesses that have large budgets. But what about the businesses that don’t have a large budget? And I just encourage everybody to think this is just a tool.
It’s a tool that makes your marketing ROI higher, but it also makes your business resonate more and create more of an emotional end reward with your customer. So how do you know whether you’re nailing it with your brand? Essentially I kind of liken it to are you meeting your business goals? Are you having the impact that you want to have? Because if not, then your brand position is probably not sharply defined enough. You don’t have to spend any resources to know that. In this way, brand strategy is basically business strategy. If your business is accomplishing what you want it to accomplish, then your business strategy is probably working. And same thing with brand strategy. So that’s kind of a quick and dirty litmus for how healthy is your brand.
Julie Littlechild:
Yeah, that makes sense.
Steve Wershing:
Interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now digging down into that, in your book you lay out nine criteria for a good brand or nine criteria for evaluating a brand. And I was fascinated because two of them are to be big and to be narrow, which on some level might seem to contradict each other. But I love the quote that’s in there about being big enough to matter and small enough to own. Can you tell us a little bit about those two criteria and how they interact?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes. Yes. So the first two criteria for an ironclad brand is one that the brand, the meaning, the brand promise that you want to stand for, you want it to be big. You want it to mean something that’s big to your audience. But the second criterion is narrow. So while you want it to be a big promise to solve a big problem for your target audience, you also want to be coming at it from a place that’s narrow enough that you can own it, that you can dominate it. So these two things are dynamic and they’ll flex depending on the size of your business and your goals. For small businesses, like a lot of listeners to this podcast, think about it as what’s the specific thing that you do that nobody else does or that you do it so well that you essentially own it?
Where you’re not just the best, but you’re the only. You want to be solving a big need, but if you’re not solving it in a way that only you or only your business solves, when you market it, you’re not going to be marketing your business. You’re not going to be creating demand for your business specifically. You’re going to be creating demand for the category. But when you’re a small business and you have low resources, the most efficient way to think about this is what’s the thing that only you can do because that will create interest and demand for your business specifically, not just for your type of business.
Steve Wershing:
Let me jump ahead a little bit because there are a bunch of things that we want to ask you in between here and there in your book. You’re referring to something that you talk about in some depth in your book, which is the uncommon denominator. And I found that whole discussion fascinating and it seems to be sort of the basis for once you’ve figured out what the brand is, how you end up promoting it. Can you talk a little bit about the concept of an uncommon denominator and what it means to somebody who’s trying to develop a brand?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes. Yes, absolutely. So if you picture a Venn diagram that has three circles. There’s three circles in this Venn diagram, and the first circle is your customer and what your customer wants. So what are the things that your customer wants when it comes to the problem that you solve? So that’s like one source of insights is your customer. What does your customer want? A second circle is your competitor. What is your competitor good at bringing to this space? What are their strengths? And then the third circle is your company and your company’s strengths. What is your company really good at when it comes to solving this problem for this customer? So now that you’ve got this Venn diagram, you see you’ve got what does your customer want, what was your competitor good at, and what are you good at? And like with all Venn diagrams, the very center of those three circles, what your customer wants, what you are good at bringing to them, and what your competitor is also good at bringing to them, that is the common denominator.
So I call it the common denominator. And that is where this problem that you solve, but your competitors also solve, which makes it a category benefit, it’s table stakes. It’s not something that you uniquely bring. It’s something that somebody enjoys as a result of buying. So if this is a financial advisor service, what they get by working with any financial advisor. Those go into the common denominator. And the thing about the common denominator is that it’s table stakes. So you do have to be doing things that are for the category. So if it’s a refreshing beverage, so if it’s soda, say, you have to quench thirst. That’s a category benefit of a refreshing beverage. You have to quench thirst. But you can’t have your whole positioning hang on something that’s a category benefit because by definition it’s not differentiated.
So then I call your attention to a different overlap on the Venn diagram. And that is the overlap of what your customer wants, what your company is good at bringing, and what your competitor is not good at bringing? So there’s an overlap between the customer desire and your strength. And it does not encompass what the competitor is good at. That is the uncommon denominator. It’s relevant to your customer, your customer wants it, you’re good at bringing it, and nobody else is good at bringing it. So the uncommon denominator is how you can kind of surface the potential differentiating directions for your business.
Because most people, what they do is they’re defining their brand and they get really excited when they’re like, we bring you the best return on your portfolio, we provide great service, we always answer the phone. But the thing is, if your competitors do that too, then it’s not differentiated and it’s not going to bring you disproportionate value. So instead focus on that thing that only you can bring. So much better to be the only one than to be the best at something. What’s the thing where you’re the only?
Julie Littlechild:
So I think it’s a really good distinction because… And you’re pointing to something, certainly in our industry that we do hear a lot. I deliver great service or no, I really care about my clients. If we emphasize the word really it suggests nobody else actually does. And I don’t know how we measure these things. And of course they all end up getting lumped into what you’ve called this sort of the category benefit, which I think is brilliant. Is it fair to say it’s what you and you alone do or just that where you see a gap? Because I imagine it’s quite difficult to come up with something where you believe you’re the only one who can do this.
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yeah, I mean, I think you’re right, Julie and I’m kind of being provocative by saying like, “get to the only thing”. And you’re right. Most people don’t go far enough with this. Most people play it too safe and they don’t push themselves enough to get sharp and distinctive here. So I’m kind of pushing the envelope a little bit by saying, “where are you only?” But if you push yourself in that direction, then you’re already ahead of the game by holding yourself to kind of a higher standard of distinctiveness.
But you’re right. Are you really going to be the only one insert blank statement? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you are. And I challenge people with this because I really do think that you can be the only. You might have to narrow, so this is back to this, the criterion of narrowing. You might have to narrow it a little bit. Like maybe you’re the only one in your region or you’re the only one and you narrow it in some other way. But don’t let yourself off the hook too soon with this because it’s the way that you get the most credibility with your audience is that you’re not couching it too much. The more general you are, the less memorable you are.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. I think that’s really important. And in relation to this point, you have a quote in your book that’s great and it’s worth I think people dwelling on a little bit. And that is, when you’re trying to think of what that differentiator could be, what do you do really well that’s really hard? I think that’s just a brilliant quote.
Julie Littlechild:
Thank you. I mean this is hard? You just messed it up for me.
Steve Wershing:
Yes, sorry about that.
Lindsay Pedersen:
Sometimes this is staring you right in the face. There’s something that comes really easily to you that doesn’t come really easily to most people. Maybe it’s that you have this subject matter expertise that you are interested in that nobody else is interested in and therefore you bring the most knowledge and curiosity to that. So for example, maybe you’re an expert on institutional municipal bonds. Something really hard and that there is going to be a market for. But something that’s not hard that you’re really good at is likely not going to be different. And the name of the game is to be different. To stand up and to mean something different from the rest of your audience because then they’re more likely to remember you and bond with you and talk about you.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Now, in terms of that distinction, there’s another point that you make in the book, which is also really, I think, useful and important and that’s that you have to be distinct from your competitors. But you referenced the idea of being optimally distinct. Could you talk a little bit about that?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes. Yes. So the idea of optimally distinct, and I kind of borrowed this from the field of social psychology, which is this idea that people like to be in social psychology among humans we like to be different, but we don’t like to be too different. So we don’t want to be too out there. That’s kind of this sort of observation that psychologists have made about humans. And it varies some from culture to culture, but there’s this sense that we have an optimally distinct place. The same kind of Goldilocks idea applies to brand. You want it to be different because when it’s different, they’re going to remember it and they’re going to be more likely to refer you, but you don’t want it to be so different that it’s obnoxious or off putting or it removes some of the believability of your category benefit. So that’s what optimally distinct is, is like where is your happy medium between being acceptable to this audience, but also standing out? So standing out without alienating people such that it doesn’t matter that you’re different because nobody likes that different thing.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah, I think that’s great. I think that’s fascinating. Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
That makes a lot of sense. And I know you talk about when you talk about amplifying your brand, which is kind of… there’s defining obviously and then amplifying. You talk about this idea of fostering customer love. And I think it’s just a really interesting concept. Do you mind going into that a little bit?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Sure. Yes. So once you have defined what you want your brand to stand for, so you’ve gone through this deliberate exercise of defining your brand promise, defining what you want your position to be, and you use the Venn diagram we talked about earlier, you don’t just rest on your laurels. You don’t say, “okay, we’re the thing. We’re the car that’s the most safe”. You continue to get better and better at your strengths. So you build out the strengths that you started with and you also get increasingly curious about your customer and what it’s like to be your customer, solving the problem that you solve. So this is not a one time static exercise of, “okay, our work is done here. We figured out a brand strategy”. You always get better at it.
So I’ll use Volvo again. Volvo in the 1920s what safety meant was the car didn’t break down because in Sweden, if your car breaks down in the middle of winter, you are unsafe. It is not safe to be stuck in the snow in Sweden. So having a car that didn’t break down that constitutes safe. Now today, what safety means for Volvo is not just that it doesn’t break down. It’s that it’s a company that pioneered passenger airbags. It’s the company that initially designed the three point harness seat belts that are now standard in pretty much all cars that are manufactured. So becoming continually more adept at delivering on your promise and always cultivating this empathy for your customer and what it’s like to be in the midst of solving the problem that they are trying to solve so that you can be anticipating new ways of delivering that promise and new ways of reinforcing that.
And it really starts from when I talk about deepening love for the customer, it’s like having this ultimate respect for them as just like any person that you’re in relationship with. Be really curious and humble about what it’s like to be them as a human being. And then more particularly what what their relationship with your category is like? How do they feel about money? How do they feel about planning? How do they feel when they spend money? How do they feel when they save money? Get ever more textured in your understanding of this person. And when you do that, you set yourself up to innovate in ways that others can’t and therefore to deliver on this promise in a way that nobody else can and that will continually delight them and amplify the value of what you’re bringing.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. It’s a great piece of the book and never leaving it alone and always trying to dig further and further into it I think is such an important message for folks. And just trying to relate to them. I continually think there’s the one example that you’ll know immediate… that I’m sure you talk about. I drive Toyota mostly and I’ve probably owned seven or eight Toyotas over the course of my driving life. And I love Toyota and I’ll probably continue to drive Toyota. But my friends who ride Harley Davidson’s, they will seek out wardrobe that has that logo on it. They will tattoo it on their bodies. I mean, that’s an insanely high level of customer engagement right? And I can’t think of a better example of customer love than what they’ve done with their brand.
Lindsay Pedersen:
I love that. Yeah.
Julie Littlechild:
Is that what you’re saying?
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. You can’t see the tattoo on my forearm of the Toyota logo. But I don’t show that in public very often.
Julie Littlechild:
The most boring tattoo.
Steve Wershing:
Exactly.
Julie Littlechild:
The Toyota Camry.
Lindsay Pedersen:
It’s true. And I think that the thing with Harley Davidson, they are so… First of all, one thing that makes it easy for them to be empathetic toward their target audience is that they themselves are their target audience. They over recruit for people who ride Harley Davidson’s. So that that empathy is internal. You don’t have to do a lot of market research to understand your customer when you are that person. And therefore they can create this like outsized bold image-defining and creating category that people can’t stop talking about.
Steve Wershing:
Yeah. Yeah. Well there’s an awful lot more in this book that I would love for advisers to hear about. But they’re going to have to go dig it up themselves because we’re out of time. So where can people find you Lindsay and where can people find the book?
Lindsay Pedersen:
Yes. Thank you so much both of you for this conversation. It’s been so fun. And the listeners. Yes, so my book is called Forging an Ironclad Brand. It’s available on Amazon and wherever you can buy books online. And also if listeners are interested, I have a free giveaway on my website which is ironcladbrandstrategy.com. It’s a workbook that I adapted from the book, Forging an Ironclad Brand and it serves as a supplement to the book. So it’s the step-by-step workbook to guide you to building a brand strategy for your business. And you can find that at ironcladbrandstrategy.com and I would love if you did so we can stay connected.
Steve Wershing:
That’s great. Well Lindsay, it’s been a great conversation. Thank you so much for coming on the show. And it is a terrific book. A lot of really good information and thank you so much for sharing your expertise with this audience.
Lindsay Pedersen:
It was really a delight. Thanks for having me.
Julie Littlechild:
Thanks.
Steve Wershing:
Thanks.
Julie Littlechild:
Hi, it’s Julie again. It was great to have you with us on Becoming Referable. If you like what you’ve been hearing, please do us a favor and rate us on iTunes. It really does help. You can get all the links, show notes, and other tidbits from these episodes at becomingreferrable.com. You can also get our free report, Three Referral Myths That Limit Your Growth and connect with our blogs and other resources. Thanks so much for joining us.