How to Build a Unique Brand | Tony Robbins Podcast

[Music] hey welcome to the podcast as Tony Robbins listen today we're gonna talk about that second element that's required for any business to grow geometrically do you recall what the two keys are number one every business has to innovate we've got to find a way to meet our clients needs better than anyone else in the marketplace but you can innovate and you can be in a position where you're ineffective in your marketing because that's the second thing you got to do you got to get people to want to do business with you you got to

get people to seek you out in a world where there is so much information coming at them so how do you set yourself apart and if you really think about it every single business out there there are many businesses I'm sure you've seen that have an inferior product or an impure theory or service to your own but if they're doing more business it's because they're better marketers now the ideal is you're the best product cuz you're constantly innovating and you're the best marketer that's something like an apple right that's what they've done they really deliver

the best products the best innovation but they have phenomenal marketing that's really our goal in this podcast is to move you in that direction and so to do that today I've asked a New York to interview drew nice sir drew is brilliant many of you know him probably because he's the CEO of the renowned marketing firm renegade and he's going to talk to you about the skills the mindset and the tools that'll give you a winning marketing campaigns and also what to avoid sometimes some of the mistakes can just take out your marketing so quickly

so his insights and they gonna find invaluable let's get right to the podcast how do you capture the limited attention of your clients through marketing when they are constantly being bombarded with advertising how do you compete with corporations that have seemingly unlimited resources through world-class marketing world-class marketing comes from creating a unique selling proposition we call value add marketing you're literally adding value to your customers lives you do something you teach them something you give them something valuable that cost them nothing then they look to you as the expert and want you to supply them

with more information more experience and more products so to help us explore what it takes to deliver world-class marketing we have June icer author speaker blogger and founder and CEO of renegade a New York city-based social media and marketing agency that helps b2b and b2c clients cut through the BS and improve their marketing ROI drue thanks for joining us today hey I'm excited to be here thanks for having me in your book the CMOS periodic table of renegades guides marketing you highlight sixty-four intimate conversations you've had with marketing leaders at prominent companies were there any

characteristics that these senior marketers had in common you know it's really interesting when you talk to first of all the opportunity to talk to 64 really smart marketers you can imagine is it's a wonderful thing for me and I'm so grateful to all of them but you know you're gonna learn a lot and the first thing you realize is that there is no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution the second thing you realize is that these folks have a methodology that could work wherever they go but their individual problems require very specific solutions and so

one of the things I wanted to do when the book was to lay out a lot of different elements if you can master all of these then it's just a question of putting the right ones together so now I can answer your question I did see some common themes across these 64 and I'll use an acronym cats because these are cool cats and it stands for courageous artistic thoughtful and scientific and if you want I can go through each of those just briefly and explain what those are that would be great so courage is is

something that you really find and in the greatest marketers they have the ability I'm gonna say sometimes to even bet the ranch sir Terry Leahy who became a sir after moving from the chief marketing officer to the CEO of Tesco a huge food company retail chain in in England in the world and at one point in his career as the CMO he risked 20% of profits in order to set a loyalty program that was a huge huge risk but he had the courage to do it similarly Terry grant Terry Funk gram of jack-in-the-box had the

courage to do brilliant advertising including a famous ad where she had a young man hallucinating at the drive-thru about 30 tacos and of course she ran into protesters which he handled courageously by actually turning on the sprinklers at the headquarters which dampened the protesters enthusiasm literally the protest never happened so that's courage is the ability to sort of understand what risks can be taken and the courage to take them there's an artistic element to most of these successful folks and the book is really about blending the art and the science but the artistic ones have

the ability to identify ideas and run with those ideas in a way that's that's pretty special a quick example Marty st. George of JetBlue I had heard about what Carmageddon which was in your neck of the woods when they were shutting down the San Diego freeway and they decided to offer JetBlue offered free flights from LA to San Diego during what was supposed to be called Carmageddon it just got tremendous publicity for that so they did well it was wonderfully artistic one that was consistent with their brand yeah and also at you know adding value

to customers like sort of foreseeing what their needs would be and then jumping to to fill that need exactly and that's a really artistic the ability to do real-time marketing as that is described as it really is an art form and yeah you're right and I get to a big believer in what you're talking about I call it marketing a service and it's one of the elements I describe and that is in the next area of this area thoughtful what does it mean to be thoughtful as a marketer they're not just thoughtful in terms of

how they approach their job but they're also thoughtful on a bigger where Marketing fits in in the in the broader social good I mean there's a number of people like Daniel Labette ski the founder of kind is in the book and talks about the role that social purpose plays not only inspiring him to do the kind thing but in it he loves to do this he does this in New York he'll get on the subway he'll see someone who had just shared a subway seat with someone else and I'll hand him a cup Elkind bars

and say here's one for you and one for you to give to somebody else just a sort of nice little kind gesture but it's there's a lot of thinking that goes into um that kind of thoughtfulness and then the last area is this scientific and one of the challenges that a lot of marketers face particularly small businesses they don't know where to spend the money and so they spend it everywhere and then they say well I don't know what's working and more and more and more modern marketers are progressing and finding ways of measuring and

creating measurable programs and and and that's again that's an art form but today with so much digital opportunity it's increasingly easy to measure so for those small business owners who have limited resources who are really overwhelmed with all of the opportunities available not just today that you know the proven methods but things that are coming just around the corner that they might read about or hear from somebody that it's the new hotness how do they how would a small business owner approach the decision making on what to invest time and energy and money into and

it's a great question and I think that the the the the the biggest mistake that I see particularly with small businesses is that they hear about a channel and they jump into the channel oh there's now there's social media we better have a Facebook page what they don't have is a strategy which is a problem because it's sort of that you know every other road looks good if you don't know where you're going in situations so that I always step back and typically when you find a small business that isn't having success with their marketing

it's not because they don't have they're not smart about where they're spending it is because they don't haven't spent time figuring out why their brand is unique notice I didn't say the word better because this isn't about better this is about being unique and you use the words you know unique selling proposition but I think it's deeper than that in the sense of why why are you doing it what makes you unique and it's not necessarily a wholly rational uniqueness the waste better ingredients better pizza is for Papa John's it can be emotional I mean

one of the folks that I interviewed and really enjoyed was from Mary Kay Cosmetics and you talk about a well branded company who in fact the brand is in the hands of independent ambassadors but those ambassadors Mary Kay's commitment is to empowering women the women that sell for them and the women that buy from them so you think about that why and you say okay I'm about empowering women now where do I spend my marketing dollars well maybe I need to do forums on helping women get jobs in the workplace after having a first child

or you know how to re-enter the workforce or I need to help empower women so you make your media choices based on on your uniqueness and so they go together and I think that's really so fundamental but it's so often skipped I will tell you flat-out that 75 percent of small businesses do not have a strategy interesting we were also talking a little bit about company culture and in another interview and that came up at the the core level which is identifying the values of the business and the values of the customer so it sounds

like you're saying that it's very similar in that you really need to figure out what your values are as a company and who your customer is and then every decision that you make including marketing decisions need to be in alignment with that exactly and I think if you it's really important that they use uniqueness not be a coat of paint it really is important you can't just say we're the purple brand right and then paint everything purple and and call it a day and a good example of that I don't know if you've ever been

into or had experience with kids and again but their employees have names it's all about empowering kids and teaching kids by making them in control of their own country so there's a currency there the kids are on the advisory board they only hire people who like kids you know they're committed their commitment to teaching kids in a very different way than the fun environment goes from all the way to the CEO who isn't called the CEO he's a governor to the CMO who's called in a minister of communication so that brand if you were looking

for how deep can culture and brand and marketing go together and be blended so you can't even distinguish them that's when you know you don't doing it right it doesn't even seem like marketing anymore it's it's just this is how we behave so are there any tactics that you would recommend for a small business owner to discover what those things are cuz it sounds simple right you ask okay what are our values what do we stand for who are we serving but in a lot of cases especially with larger brands they bring in a facilitator

right you'll have a consultant come in and work you through that whole process is there any kind of primer or recommendations that you would have for a DIY self discovery of what business not just what business you're in cuz Tony speaks about this a lot but what business you should be in so moving forward right thinking about where you are you know I think that small businesses have an opportunity every day to talk to their customers and so often miss that opportunity because they're so concerned about trying to serve the next one and the information

is is right there in front of them and I think it's really important to say not every customer is a good customer so I want to figure out who are my best customers and why are they happy with me what is it about them and spend time with them and find out what their passions are because they may not be passionate about whatever your dry-cleaning service but they may be passionate about looking good right they may not be passionate about you know the water service but they may be passionate about being helped living a healthy

life and those are things that you can find out and just by talking to people and and you don't have to talk to it you can talk to 50 customers for the customers you think he wanted to business with and then I can extend this a little bit more when why am i talking about existing customers and why am i talking about something odd all customers are equal if you look at marketing the problem with more are getting small businesses have is they they see it as cost right how much do I spend so let's

back this into how much is a customer worth to you right lifetime value how much is that customer going to spend either with my brand or by encouraging other people to buy my services right and so you can put a dollar amount on that whether it's five dollars ten dollars a hundred five thousand whatever that number is and then you know well I can spend that much money to acquire this type of customer and in most cases your next customer will look like your current customer so therefore talk to your current customers get to know

all aspects of their behavior find out what sports their kids are doing is it you know maybe that it's all soccer moms or your your target fine then there's your answer for you know how do you serve a soccer moms better and maybe a media sponsor and soccer team right because that's what they really care about so it's it's primary research with your customers is there and and I'll tell you the name renegade for us came from one of our customers before we existed we were a division of a large agency as importance and once

somebody said hey oh you're those renegades over at Dentsu and I said damn right we are going broke Society that's that's where we are that's what we do and and so anyway I think that the you don't need to talk to a thousand you just need to talk to the right ones and you just have to really get the ear wax out and figure out all right how can I uniquely meet their needs and do it on a consistent basis and how can I structure the organization in order to if for example you're all about

customer service then you have better hire people who like people right that actually brings me to a question I was going to ask about how do you equip yourself with the right tools to be able to serve the needs of those customers in other words what behind-the-scenes competencies are key to a successful marketing team or campaign it's a lot of these small business owners are doing it themselves and they feel possibly intimidated by not having a skill set that they think you know maybe I'm not creative enough or we don't have the resources or I

can't you know write copy or you know there are a lot of things that I think they might be struggling with so what are some of the basic ways that they can prepare themselves to be able to to DIY it you know I think one of the things that they can really think about and this is a couple of chapters in the book is networking with other small businesses there isn't a challenge that they're facing that somebody just down the road would hasn't probably addressed and so making the time to get out of the office

or doing it at night or doing it of the weekend and talk to the people and ask them okay how are you doing what tools are using a lot of small businesses have gravitated to HubSpot for example which is a small business CRM customer relationship management tool it allows you to track leads and develop a lead generation program so before you jumped on spot that you can talk to you know ten businesses in your neighborhood and say what were the issues how to do with what resources did it require and then how did you fulfill

those so I think the answer for the morgana right in a neighborhood they just need to get out and make sure that they are talking with people in terms of very specific things again I think it depends on first we have our unique position then we start to say alright how do we execute that make sure that the product or service aligns without a hundred percent then how do we make the marketing align with that and what that it ends up being a content marketing play because you want to provide all the reasons that your

pool service why the reasons you need a specific way your pool needs to be cleaned a certain way right so you create all this content well chances are you personally because you're in this business you know this stuff you could probably even if you're not a writer you can you could write down a bunch of thoughts and once you get your thoughts down then you can find somebody lots and lots of writers out there surfaces out there that can help you get this done pretty cheaply so I think this is where you in one of

the chapters of my book tiny budget Julie garlic Roth talks about how she sometimes out sources and the in sources and she very strategically uses it there are some things where it's just cheaper to go outside and you kind of know what your strengths and weaknesses are and if you don't know how to write then you better get outside help the writer if you don't know how to use a CRM system make sure you get one that's one really easy and then someone in the organization is assigned to go through the tutorials sure that makes

sense creating a custom custom solution based on on your needs so on the topic of content marketing and social media what are some common mistakes that you've seen small business owners make and how can they avoid making these mistakes so you know this the first most common mistake is not having a social strategy literally just saying okay we're gonna be on Facebook and Twitter and Instagram without necessarily a plan the reason why they're going to be there and so that's number one number two is they spend all their time talking about themselves and think of

it as an advertising channel and they're not social and think of it is going to a party and you're going to a party and all you do was talk about yourself well you're the bore that everybody's sort of avoids right and so even Shaquille O'Neal with this what's called a Shaq real rule yeah sort of 60% fun and interesting 30% sort of a little bit closer to brand and then 10% of its actually hey buy my stuff and so that's one though those are two and and number three is again if you have this unique

position then bringing that position to life in a passionate way in theory your position should be extremely attractive to certain types of people right so then you can be delivered that you can find those people in soap on social that are interested and excited around a particularly communal idea and you embrace them and celebrate them and then gradually you know they sort of give you give get or and and so that's really I think that so biggest mistake not having a strategy second is is spending too much time talking about yourself probably the third biggest

mistake is that they assign it to the intern or the person with the most friends on Facebook and not necessarily somebody who actually knows anything about it and a lot of the big mistakes that happen in social media because they turned over their brand but I will say that the upside here was social and content is very high and those that get it right do it are finding tremendous success with it I guess the last thing on social now in particular Facebook has become a paid channel and it is important that it knowledge that if

you want to make hey on Facebook then you need to budget some advertising dollars for it which in my mind is actually a good thing because Facebook is a extremely powerful and effective advertising channel it's just not as social as it used to be yeah and Facebook to continues to evolve I mean they just came out with what people are calling the Yelp killer all right yeah I guess I'm wondering making decisions about which platforms to be on I mean Facebook was originally a an owned media channel what people thought it was and like you

said it's transitioning into becoming a paid media channel do you think that there are any new channels or new opportunities that are going to emerge in 2016 or even beyond that marketers and small business owners should keep an eye on and be aware of and deeply consider starting to leverage well I think you know first and the most obvious answer to that is mobile and mobile everything in the sense that if your website isn't mobile optimized or then you're making a bigger mistake because chances are over 50% of the views will be on a mobile

device also understanding how mobile plays into your category are they consequently searching on mobile or for your location they're doing research you need to understand that so that you can design your your mobile experience accordingly you need to understand how mobile might be a transactional opportunity for you or get it people going to be using Apple pay and are you ready for that so that's a massive thing mobile like the next big area and this has been big for a while but video and especially streaming video I'm a big fan of this platform blab which

it said it's a streaming video platform where like Google Hangouts but it's only for people at the most and it's it's actually just quite a cool little streaming platform and great for archiving video content I have friends who swear by periscope as the coolest hippest thing out there in terms of stream streaming video so I think that's an area that could be an opportunity for for some small businesses and then there's this just this whole world of the Internet of Things IOT and as devices start to connect more and more businesses will need to make

their experience is smarter and I think it's gonna be hard for small businesses in some ways it may be easier and others and by this I mean there's going to be an expectation for example if I go to Amazon right now and I go shopping they'll always say people who like this book like that right so I know that I've expected that I've got used to it it gets smarter as I buy there's beginning to be an expectation that wherever I go on the web the someone's gonna know nothing about me to deliver something intelligence

well this is happening now on an offline basis as well so it's quite possible through beacon technology or Wi-Fi technology that you as a small business would know who this person is there's facial recognition software that would know whether it's a male or female so you could change your video display accordingly there's lots of things like that that small businesses might say oh we can't do that but this technology is going to become very accessible so starting to think about how you keep it into this Internet of Things is going to be important and also

really important that you're not a commodity that can be just ordered on the Amazon renegades philosophy is marketing a service can you explain a little bit more about what that means and what that means for the company the brand and what it means for the customer absolutely so a coin is expression marketing is service to be the opposite of marketing as message and marketing as message is the dominant part of communication strategy most companies try to spend all their time thinking about what can they say what's my message and I wanted to turn that on

its head by saying what can we do not what we what can we say so we think in terms of do's not saying and those do's can be entertaining they could be enlightening they can be an experience they can be content there's a lot of wonderful ways of doing things a20 marketing into a service and I can give you a quintessential example of one that I'm really proud of it renegade did several years ago HSBC the large global bank and an HSBC came to us and said hey we're this large global bank but we have

this world's local bank position we want to put the New York and the local into our our message and also we wanted to people to understand that we have local knowledge so we actually came up with a program called the HSBC Bank ad and the bank cab is a checker cab that's red and white and that drove around New York City and was free to HSBC customers so it was a marketing that was a service now the twist that we did here was we did a search for the most knowledgeable cab driver in New York

which got literally a hundred million PR impressions a global basis as we because most people think of New York cabbies is not being knowledgeable these days so we hired this guy Johnny Morello he drove his cab around New York City for 12 years and people loved it I mean people who rode in the cab were twice as likely to recommend 80% more likely to stay loyal to the bank and so it was a wonderful long lasting experience it generated PR it generated well it was a service that was Morgan another example of marketing and service

and it covered us in the book and great detail is is American Express's approach to marketing I know you've heard Small Business Saturday and the open forum they have many other examples of marketing and service in their philosophy is that if they help small businesses grow their business will grow right along with them so you asked John Hayes the CMO of American Express can I point to revenue increases as a result directly of this program no but he can say we see it in a bring bramlett we know that small business customers like small business

that are they in fact they've started a movement you know in a way and so it is had informed everything that every negating has been doing that's why we got into social media so early in content marketing so early because those are two great ways of being of service and and I think that if you think about social media as a service channel first it will change your perspective on the posts that you do did you sort of say oh I can be a service dear how could I be helpful today sorry that's that's more

getting a service thanks for asking great so were there any key takeaways from the book or from you know some of your future thoughts on on marketing that go beyond marketing that sort of reach deeper into business philosophy yes I mean there were a number of things I mean one of the things that I think distinguishes successful businesses from the unsuccessful ones is there these folks are truly passionate about what they believe I mean they really are evangelist for for their business and and the service or product that they provide and and I had an

opportunity to talk to Johnny Emmerich of NASA and that's you know national era sonic space administration and they have built the nominal social media presence based on the passion that John Emmerich and his partner have for science and astronomy and they've done amazingly clever things during Super Bowl Sunday they did supernova Sunday and inundated during if they've done a number of other things like that but here's the ultimate measure that you can figure out - exceeded on social win and in is young recomment company were not allowed to post during the government shutdown so we

couldn't post writing his about millions of followers across all of these channels well the fans when they heard that they couldn't post took over the feat they were so dedicated to the feat they did it so you have to ask yourself but we've done such a good job with our content of social that our fans would actually mrs. if we didn't provide it and that to me that stems from a passion and and you can see that same compassion by the way in GE you go to their Pinterest boards and look at how excited they

get about science it's it's an amazing the power of passion and optimism and I saw this thing that from all of the successful senior marketers that I talk to okay well thanks drew is there anything else you'd like to share with Tony's audience before we sign up well I would like to leave you with with two thoughts and as as you go forth into your marketing that there's this artistic part and this science part your challenge is identify the artistic part and by that I think the unique positioning and the science part is your ability

to manage make your decisions on a test and learn basis so you do something you see what kind of results as long as you're measuring the right things you add another component you measure that and you keep going is what you don't want to do at the end of the year of your marketing you say I have no clue what worked what didn't so blend the art and a science and then them you know if you need a refresher go ahead and get CMOS periodic table a renegades guide to marketing my new book just came

out and I think you will find it extremely useful great well thanks Jerry so much for your time my pleasure thank you for having me [Music] do you have the right mindset and skills to take your business to the next level business mastery is the only event in the world created by Tony Robbins to prepare you to master the mindset and skills you need in business to elevate your game a one-of-a-kind immersive program business mastery will allow you to understand critical factors impacting your business then refocus and realign with the strategy and psychology you need

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