A Word in the Mind, Is Worth Two in the Bush:Why Branding is Essential to Your Sustainable Business

by Joe Mozdzen

“Ironically, the people of the future may suffer not from an absence of choice, but from a paralyzing surfeit of it. They may turn out to be the victims of that peculiar super-industrial dilemma: overchoice.”
Alvin Toffler, Future Shock, 1970

Possibly the marketing buzzword of the late nineties, Branding describes the process of building your product or service into a clearly identified brand – it’s the ultimate way to cut through the mind-boggling clutter of today’s overcrowded marketplace. Branding is a method of pre-selling your product or service to its end user. Branding isn’t the only way to sell things, it’s just an extremely efficient way. And it’s not just for giant corporations; sustainable businesses, non-profits, and even individual consultants should be aware of the power of branding.

Just like branding on a cattle ranch helps to differentiate your cow from all the other cattle, branding in business helps make you clearly unique in a field of look-a-likes. Ideally, in the business world, if you marketed cows you’d want to “own” the word, cow. If you branded successfully, your brand
would be synonymous with “cow.” Owning a word or category is the Holy Grail of branding. Think overnight delivery. Think of the safest car. Think of film for your camera. You get the picture, no pun intended.

The whole point of branding is to streamline and focus how you are perceived. The enemy of branding is attempting to be everything to everyone. A successful brand does not expect to appeal to everyone. A successful brand is the fastest, or the most efficient, or offers the highest quality of service, is for the discerning, or for the everyman, is the best engineered, or the most innovative. It is never all of the above.

What does your company do? Manufacture bamboo flooring. Offer socially responsible investment. Design alternative energy systems. Create organic cotton fashions. Clean up oil spills. Are you an alternative college? Why aren’t you the alternative college? If you market organic coffee, why aren’t you synonymous with organic coffee in the mind of every cultural creative in town? Fact is, branding is harder than it looks, but it’s not necessarily expensive, primarily because tons of advertising is not, as some think, the key to branding. Branding is not necessarily expensive because it is initially built on old fashioned word-of-mouth and new-fashioned word-of-internet. Eventually, your brand will need advertising to keep it healthy and strong.

At my firm, when we work with our clients on branding we spend a lot of time backing up, returning to the core values of the company or organization. What product or service is its heart and soul? What does it do best and why? Who are its competitors, not just in similar products or services but in different means to the same end. If you make solar panels you’re not just competing with other solar panel manufacturers. You’re not just competing with other alternative energy systems such as wind and hydro power. You’re also competing with the grid, the status quo. In fact, you’re competing with other ways of thinking, other memes.

Examine your product or service line-up. Have you extended or over-extended your brand? If you’re a solar contractor, do you do some regular electrical work as well? If you sell organic coffee, do you also sell some non-organic coffees, some teas? Do these additional brand-extensions weaken your brand? Most likely they do. You probably didn’t think about them that way, but these decisions often dilute your image. So we help our clients do some soul searching, and sometimes painful, decision making as to what products or services make them unique and which ones dilute their mission.

Armed with this new streamlined product line, we then initiate a process through which we hammer out a figurative model of the organization as brand. Every decision faced at every fork in the road is held up to this new model, and questions answer themselves. The result is a clearly defined picture of who and what the brand is. This is the brand we then present to the world. Thus begins the next challenging step of making the brand become the organization’s particular product or service. We unleash what author and marketing consultant Seth Godin calls, “the idea virus.”

This is an extremely simplified account of an involved and lengthy process, but the point is that branding cannot happen without some serious understanding of what story your organization is telling. The more clear and simple your story, the more power it has. The more power your story, the stronger your chances are of building a powerful brand.

Very few sustainable and green businesses have branded themselves clearly in the public eye. This presents a huge opportunity for savvy marketers to carve out an ownership niche in their respective markets. Most green businesses, while faced with powerful competition from non-green businesses, have relatively few competitors in their greener, enviro, socially responsible niches. Now is the time to strive to own a word in the minds of your customers. A crucial component in the success of any brand is its claim to authenticity. And proving market leadership is one key way to establishing the authenticity necessary to reach the cultural creatives with your brand. Green businesses are leaders by definition. We are the fringe of a powerful meme that will someday become the status quo. Now is the time to make your mark in an increasingly crowded playing field.

Enter Simplicity Marketing
How cluttered is the marketplace? Have you looked in the “pain reliever” aisle of an ordinary grocery store lately? Box after color-coded box of capsules, gel-caps, nighttime formulas, daytime formulas, sinus formulas, buffered, extra-strength, as well as a generic grocery option of virtually every manufacturer’s version. What stands out now? Ironically, it’s the one odd man out, that non-boxed, old-fashioned, clear plastic generic bottle of inexpensive aspirin. This highlights an inadvertent entry into another new trend of selling in a world of overchoice: Simplicity Marketing.

The generic brand craze of the eighties was a genuine, if somewhat misdirected attempt at simplicity marketing. It offered a respite from rampant brand extension and resultant overchoice overload. Looking for beer? How about an inexpensive six-pack of BEER in the ubiquitous Stencil typeface? But simplicity marketing, as we see it in these early years of the twenty-first century is an authentic attempt to cut through the clutter and confusion of an overstimulated marketplace.

Simplicity marketing seeks to offer safe harbor for consumers who know all too well that depressing letdown of returning from shopping only to discover that their purchases fail to satisfy, are not what they wanted, are too complicated to learn how to use, or are clearly not as advertising. Simplicity marketing attempts to offer products and services that help people narrow their choices, choose more accurately, and thus be more satisfied with their purchase. Simplicity marketing helps avoid the unwanted purchase. After all, what better way to build your brand than to have it offer built-in stress relief?

Simplicity is a serious strategy, both as a marketin
g tool, and as a way of designing or redesigning your products or services. The iMac is a classic example of simplicity marketing. It was the first to combine CPU, monitor, and speakers in a single unit, offering the ultimate simplicity of choice in a fantastically crowded market. One of their advertising headlines was, “One decision. One box. One choice.” Add a trusted, innovative name, easy internet connection, ease of set-up and use, high quality product design, and it’s easy to see why the iMac was the most successful launch in Apple’s history since the original MacIntosh was introduced. I can almost hear a sigh of relief as a new customer leaves the store with one box and is on-line an hour later.

Good news for us is that simplicity is an ideal match with sustainability. Many green purchases are made simply because the product or service has the built in relief of knowing one is doing the right thing by buying from a company that’s doing the right thing. Add in leadership and authenticity, great customer service, good design and ease of use, and you’ve got the formula for a winning brand.

Your business is defined by the story it tells, from your mission statement, to your logo, to that single headline in your ad. Can you describe in a few sentences, to a twelve year old, what your business does? Perhaps more importantly, can that twelve year old then go on to describe to someone else, in one sentence or even one word, what your business is all about? This might be the best definition of your brand you’ll ever get.

Reading List:
The 22 Immutable Laws of Branding, Al and Laura Ries, HarperBusiness

Simplicity Marketing; End Brand Complexity, Clutter, and Confusion, Steven M.
Cristol and Peter Sealey, The Free Press

Unleashing the Ideavirus, Seth Godin, Do You Zoom, Inc.

The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown & Company