How To Get To It, Now!

Have you ever come to the end of your workday asking yourself, “Why didn’t I get anything done today?” Yeah, me, too. Two posts ago, before we had an interruption for exigent circumstances, I promised you I would teach you how to get to it now and get your customer’s paying work done as timely as feasible. So, let’s get to it now and see how we can make that happen for you.

If you read my book, you will find The P10 Principle, which states, “Proaction, perception, planning, preparation, practice, and persistence promote practically perfect performance.”  I conglomerated this concept from a variety of sources including Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich, Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits, W. Edwards Deming’s Out of the Crisis, John Norcross’s Changeology, and Thomas Greenspon’s Moving Past Perfect.

We can easily assume you are being proactive in your desire to get to doing your paying work done as timely as feasible. So, let’s move on to the perception part of the P10 Principle.

In order to do anything, you have to perceive three things.

  1. First, you have to perceive, in immaculate detail, your practically perfect performance of what you want to do. In this case, it will be the practically perfect performance of getting your paying work done as timely as feasible.
  2. Once you have perceived your practically perfect performance of doing what you want to do, you have to then, second, perceive how you are obviously much less than practically perfectly not getting your paying work done now.
  3. Once you have perceived what you want to be doing and what you are actually doing, then you have to perceive what of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people you can and must apply to get from what you are doing to what you want to do.

Making the change from what you are doing to what you want to do is where most of the work of the P10 Principle comes into play. This working part of life, both personal and professional, is where the planning, preparation, practice, and persistence “P’s” of the P10 Principle come into their necessary use.

As with almost anything else in life, the exact details of how one performs each of these steps varies with the specific facts and circumstances that present themselves to anyone who needs to get their paying work done as effectively and efficiently as feasible. Most of the time, if you have the requisite skills to qualify yourself to get hired to do paying professional work, you really should not need much planning, preparation, practice, or persistence to get started.

The truth is, in most situations where you are not getting your work done timely enough, you already know what it is need to do and you already know how to do it. The real problem, however, is you just can’t get yourself to work doing it.

Why not? Why can’t you get yourself to work doing your paying work? Usually, it is because you don’t really like what you do for a living or because you cannot see yourself making any progress in your life doing what you are doing the way you are currently doing it.

This is a vicious cycle, the breaking of which, requires you to admit you need some help and resolve to go get it. You can get help internally, but you are probably presently failing at that, or you can get help externally, which is going to require you to invest something, sometime, somewhere.

The secret at this point in time, however, is to “Get To It, Now!” either doing your paying work or getting some help getting past whatever is blocking you from doing your paying work now.

 

If you need help, contact me and I will be willing to help you. But you have to ask and commit to working on the problem yourself with my help.

I look forward to hearing from you.

5 “Gets” Any Business Must Get To Get Ahead

Have you ever known what business you wanted to run but couldn’t figure out how to get it running already? Yeah, me, too. But let me tell you what I found out.   To succeed at any business, you only need to get 5 things.

  1. You must get known
  2. You must get called
  3. You must get hired
  4. You must get done
  5. You must get paid

If you do these five things effectively and efficiently, then almost always, you will succeed in your business.

My good friend Linley Richter tells me does almost all of these things almost all the time and he is damn near perfect. I hate to tell him, however, “almost” only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades and if you don’t do all five of these things persistently and consistently, then whatever you are doing will most likely be wasted.

Get Known

Getting known is all about branding your company, your products, and your services. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on branding. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat the whole darned thing here.

Get Called

Getting called is all about marketing your branded company, products, and services efficiently. It’s a digital world, folks; but, don’t forget about traditional media as well. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on marketing in this modern world. Read it. Apply it. No need for me to repeat this whole darned thing here either.

Get Hired

Getting hired is all about taking leads who respond to your branding and marketing and converting them to customers who order what products and services you are selling. Holy cow! Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on converting prospects. All you have to do is read it and apply. No need for me to even say there is no need to repeat the whole thing here.

Get Done

Getting done is something a lot of service-oriented business people like lawyers have a problem getting done. (Yes, I intended that circular statement.) They are great at starting cases; but once they get started, they get distracted getting hired on their next case and put the last case on a back burner. I bet you already know what I’m going to write next. But I’m going to fool you just a little bit. Entrepreneur Magazine has a great article on this. Read it. Learn from it the importance of spending most of your time actually doing the work that directly produces income. Then, take the oldest project you have taken on and get it the heck finished already. That way you and I can both get on the last “Get” you need to get to ahead in your business.

Get Paid

Getting paid is another thing a lot of service-orienting business people like lawyers have a problem getting to. Some folks are so busy getting known, called, hired, and done they forget the last, but certainly not least, thing any business needs to do, which is getting paid. No doubt, Entrepreneur has a great article on this. Read it. Do it.

Figuring out that these five things exist is not what’s important, however. Reading the articles is not what’s important either.

We know all these things. We’ve heard them all before. There are no secrets to any of them. Entreprenuer magazine didn’t make them up. Neither did the authors of their Entrepreneur’s great articles on them.

After you get done reading about doing all these things and perceiving them, planning them, and preparing to do them, check in tomorrow and read about “The Most Important Get To Get To Get Ahead In Your Business.”[reminder]What do you think the most important Get is?[/reminder]

 

What Others Say About PROMO Sites

Do you ever wonder what others supposedly in the know think and say about professional referral online marketing organization (PROMO) services? Yeah, me, too. And neither of us has to look too hard to find opinions all over the place about the topic.

Here’s a link to let you read Digital Law Marketing’s article on the big ones.

Here’s a link to allow you to enjoy a comment thread on The Lawyerist. Opinions are a dime a dozen on this one and there’s at least a dollar’s worth in the thread.

Here’s a link where you can study JurisDigital’s study of AVVO.

There are dozens of places to read about PROMO advertising sites.

I’m curious what you have found about PROMO sites in your industry.

Post a comment below to tell me your experience in your workspace.[reminder]What’s your best PROMO site? What’s your worst PROMO site?[/reminder]

PROMO No-Mo’; So-Med Instead

Have you ever tried to figure out how much it really costs to buy leads for new business clients sent to you by lead generation sites? Have you been really confused about all the tied package deals requiring you to buy websites (for an initial and then monthly fee) and professional pages (for another initial and then monthly fee) and then you can get leads (for each a per-lead price with scalable flow or a fixed monthly price with an undefined flow or for throwing all the money you have in your checking account into the cloud and whatever comes back to you in leads you can keep)? Yeah, me, too.

Regardless of what type of business you have, almost any business type has two, three, or ten or more industry-specific (legal, medical, automotive repair, plumber, HVAC or whatever) websites that will:

  • sell you a professional profile on their industry-specific site, where people looking for professionals like you can find you and get details about you and ask you to bid on their jobs
  • sell you a website that you can link to from that professional profile,
  • sell you warm leads from their industry-specific website and
  • sell you some paid search services to put your ads at or near the top of search engine results pages for the right amount of money used to buy the right collection of keywords.

I have a real smart son-in-law who has worked for several such websites after graduating with a Bachelors degree in marketing with a specialty of Internet marketing. I’m embarrassed to tell him how much I don’t know about this stuff. So, I asked a bunch of his colleagues who work in my primary workspace, practicing law, to try to explain what they would love to sell me.

For example, I called my rep Scott English at Martindale-Nolo. He explained they have a 3-pronged approach to Internet advertising. First, they have their Lawyers.com and Martindale.com and Nolo.com websites where you can (and, if you want to get a deal on their websites and search services, you must) purchase their full and complete professional profiles. Martindale-Nolo will sell you a profile on those pages so people can find you when they search those sites for help by topic and location.

Second, Martindale-Nolo will also provide you with a professional website, if you don’t have a top notch website already. These websites are mobile responsive and search engine optimized.

Third, M-N will sell you warm leads when people search for lawyers on M-N’s topic-specific (DivorceNet.com, etc.) legal information and professional pages.

Now, try to follow the pricing. My main rep, Scott, could only price the first two items. We had to get a ringer, Dennis Melendez, from Martindale-Nolo.com to price the leads for us.

Having a Lawyers.com professional page by itself costs $250 a month. Having a M-N website costs $100. But, if you buy them together, you can get them for $200 a month. Of course, that combo deal expired this coming Friday (no matter which day of the year you are talking to them).

Then, if you want to add getting the warm leads, it depends on your geographic area and practice area, because the pricing for leads varies by demand. For example, divorce leads in Baltimore, Maryland currently go for $26 per lead. You have to agree to spend at least $500 per month for a campaign. They will bill your leads against your deposit. You get and have to pay for all three kinds of warm leads — the good ones, the bad ones, and the ugly ones. But, if not a lead you receive is not in practice area or geographical area you can request a credit for it.

Now, returning to our previous posts, we are trying to develop $25,000 work of business using a $2,500 per month budget. We are paying $200 for a professional page and a website and paying 500 for 19 warm leads. Assuming a 50% closure rate. We are getting 9-10 cases of people who want our $500 “no kids, no property, nothing to fight about, uncontested, easy, inexpensive divorce” uncontested divorce. $700 results in $5,000 worth of business.

Granted, if we took all types of divorce cases, including our “less easy, more expensive”  divorces and the occassional “knock-down/drag-out” divorce then we would be able to get on average $2,500 per divorce or about $25,000 worth of business. This would be a better return on investment, but we don’t want to work that hard. We just want easy, inexpensive divorces. Maybe we can get cheaper leads for the no-contest cases.

Come back for the next post and see.

[reminder]For those of you who have different types of business, what are your similar figures for professional listings, websites, and lead generation farms?[/reminder]

Finding Customers for Pennies on the Dollar Instead of a Dime

Picture of cornucopiaHave you ever thought it would be so great simply to pay one media outlet all your monthly branding, marketing, and advertising budget and be able to get all the leads you could service each month? Yeah, me, too. I’ve both had dreams and lived through nightmares like that. In a prior post, we saw how you could end up spending $2,500 a month for warm PPL (pay per lead) Internet leads and come up short hitting your $25,000 per month revenue goal. So, how can you get more business walking in your door for less, or, better still, almost nothing at all?

First, let’s review all the various ideas that may populate your BMA plan. We saw them a few posts ago. They are:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Blog
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

Note that “Internet directory referral fees,” which are the”professional referral online marketing organization” (PROMO) services we’ve discussed paying $25 per lead, are almost in the middle of this alphabetical list. This is probably where such things belong in a living, successful BMA plan. There are a lot of things you must invest in before paying PROMO services and there are also still a lot of things you should invest in after resorting to PROMO services.

Here are some of the must do’s you must do before investing in PROMO referral services:

  • You must choose a “result-oriented” customer value proposition to serve as the anchor of your branding, marketing, and advertising plan.
  • You must create a good tagline.
  • You must create, print, and carry plenty of copies of a nice traditional size business card, a more memorable quarter-sheet “ten-second” service card, and a trifold “elevator speech” brochure.You must create and claim your Internet address.
  • You must invest resources in a good, in contradistinction to a “bad” or a “killer,” reader-device-responsive, website. We have talked and will continue to talk about what makes a website “good.”
  • You must claim and optimize your social media accounts, your industry web aggregators’ accounts, and local marketing aggregators’ directory identities.
  • You must relate (i.e. be social) with other people in as many social media spaces your time budget will allow and convince them to follow your blog.
  • You must blog with relevant content that is supplemented, persistently and consistently, at least weekly, but preferably more often.
  • You must create a valuable lead magnet to give prospects in return for them giving you their email address.
  • You must convince people viewing your site (for the first time, hopefully) to let you continue to send them your new blog posts every time you send one.
  • You must create and implement an e-mail drip marketing program including both content and a platform through which to send it.
  • You must invest in and use an effective and efficient customer relationship management program that ties your prospect management into your client management aspects.
  • You must network in person and by email with current clients.
  • You must network around “pools” of prospects and people who can refer you prospects.
  • You must create and implement a referral recognition and thank-you program including a shout out in your blog and at mailing them a handwritten note containing at least a $5 Starbucks card. The size of the gift is not nearly as important as the handwritten note and the fact you personally took the time to say thank you in a demonstrative way.

Contrary to conventional thinking that everyone searches for whatever they want on the Internet, word of mouth still generates a lot of business for small business owners. It also costs you pennies on the dollar vs. pay-per-click or pay-per-lead.

If you do all of these things effectively, efficiently, consistently, and persistently, then you may well escape the need for long-term dependence on PROMO leads.

Nonetheless, come back next post and we will take a look at the good, the bad, and the ugly parts of PROMO leads. Spoiler alert! One of my main complaints about PROMO leads and other PPL and PPC digital advertising is PROMO leads only work what little they do only as long as you continue paying the PROMO website owners to send them to you.

[reminder]What’s your experience with PROMO lead generators?[/reminder]

 

30 Ingredients for Your Ragu Marketing Plan

Have you ever wished you could just pay someone 10% of your sales per year to feed you all the clients and/or customers you need to thrive? Yeah, me, too. But wishes like that only come true in our dreams. Real people, running real businesses, for real profits, have to have a real branding, marketing, and advertising plan to get there. And such a real, living BMA plan needs to be robusto, like Ragu Tomato Sauce, meaning, it all has to be in there, Ma.

What all makes a sellable marketing sauce?

Generally, a firm’s marketing budget should always include the following categories:

  • Advertising
  • Alumni programs
  • Attendance at industry, trade or professional association meetings
  • Charitable contributions
  • Client entertainment and gifts
  • Club dues and expenses (e.g., for whatever clubs allow interacting with targeted prospects)
  • Collateral materials
  • Continuing education seminars
  • CRM system or client database
  • Digital marketing
  • Directory listings
  • Events and seminars
  • Graphic design and branding costs
  • Internet directory referral fees
  • Mailings and communications (e.g., newsletters, invitations, announcements, alerts and holiday cards)
  • Marketing-related training
  • Market research and client surveys
  • Marketing staff professional development
  • Memberships in industry, trade or professional organizations
  • Networking activities (e.g., dues, membership, and travel)
  • Proposals and pitches
  • Public and media relations
  • Retreats
  • Social marketing
  • Tickets and sponsorships
  • Web site design and maintenance

While many people say, “The whole world uses the Internet now like the old world used the Yellow Pages then,” and while having a platform-responsive website that looks great on a laptop, a tablet, and a smart cellphone is maximally important, social-digital marketing is still not the only thing to think about in your marketing plan.

Take a moment and think about what all these things are, which of them you are doing, how much of each you are doing, what objective results are you expecting from each of them, and how you are tracking where each of your marketing components are taking you, and how effectively each is getting you where you want to be.

Come back to the next post and we will pick at these things a little more.

[reminder]How much marketing can you do yourself and still run your business and sell and deliver all at the same time?[/reminder]

See Your Branding, Marketing, and Advertising As Part of Your Living Business Plan

Have you ever found your self up to your belt buckle in alligators and remembered that all you really wanted to do at the time was just drain the swamp? Are you so busy trying to brand, market, and advertise to perfection that you have no time to actually provide goods and services profitably enough to maintain the rest of your life? Yeah, me, too.

Usually, such situations almost always result from failing to keep the end in mind almost all the time. So, let’s at least begin with the end in mind. And that end is money. There are more great quotes about money, than at which one can shake a stick. A good one is best understood by reading the entire lyrics to the song, Money (Makes the World Go Around).

Money is the scorecard of business. Money measures gross earnings, costs of goods sold, net income, general administrative and overhead, gross profits, EBITDA, and owners’ discretionary earnings (or what most people refer to as “income”). Money is the common exchange medium for the property component of life’s precious resources.

So, as you begin fashioning your branding, marketing, and advertising plan you have to first understand your score card target of your living business plan, which is money and more specifically the end product of almost all entrepreneurs, the entrepreneur’s discretionary income. How much “money” will it take to make your cash register of life go “Cha-ching!”?

A little data may help you decide. From 1967 to 2014, U.S. median household income has trended up from $45,000 to $54,000 or so. And most people are satisfied with that status, being fat and happy enough living in the middle.

Lawyers earned an average annual salary of $136,260 in 2015, which is substantially more than any other occupation on U.S. News’ list of Best Social Service Jobs. Paralegals make much less than half that. In 2015, paralegals earned an average salary of $52,390. So let’s assume for the sake of choosing an example, we are fashioning a BMA Business Action Plan for a lawyer wanting to make $136,260 and pay one paralegal $52,390 as part of his 53% expense ratio.

This means our targeted gross income from attorney’s fees collected will be $289,914.89, or so. Let’s assume the lawyer graduated law school in 1990, which means (s)he will have to bill (really, collect; but that’s another thing to worry about) the $300 average hourly rate for lawyers with 25 years of experience. This means the lawyer has to collect for about 966.382966666666667 hours, or so. Let’s round that up by the 5% effective collections rate of law firms to come to the understanding that a lawyer with 25 years of experience wanting to net $136,260 annual income must gross $289,914 a year needs to bill about 1,000 hours per year.

Established, medium and large firms spend about 3-4% of their billings on marketing. Smaller, growing law firms spend about the average of 10% for all small businesses on their marketing. Therefore,, we need to perceive a BMA plan that will generate $300,000 in billings for about $30,000 a year.

$30,000!

Besser! Have you lost your mind?!? No one spends 10% of their gross revenue on branding, marketing, and advertising. Well, many solo practitioners and small (2-5 lawyers) firms do. They may not realize it but they do.

To get a grip on how much it really costs to branding, market, and advertise a small business, in this case a law firm, start off by reading this old article from the ABA Law Practice folks. The data is just a little dated, but the theory is still fairly current and it applies to almost all small businesses providing goods and services.

So, go read the reference article and come back to the next post to begin working with the end in mind, developing a BMA plan that will result in $300,000 a year in annual collections.

[reminder]What’s your BMA plan? And, more importantly, if your BMA plan doesn’t work, then what is your plan B?[/reminder]

Who Should Brand, Market, and Advertise Your Business?

Have you ever felt completely disintegrated in your branding, marketing, and advertising efforts; wondering what the heck you are doing vs. what you should be doing vs. who else you should get to do it for you vs. how you and them should be doing it; such that you then make the worst choice of all, which is to do nothing but depend on letting God work it out for you? Yeah, me, too. I know how you feel. I’ve often felt that same way. But, let me tell you what I found out.

Having a better business action plan for branding, marketing, and advertising leads to much better preparation and practice of that plan for persistently promoting your practically perfect performance of not only that plan, but also the rest of your business.

Confused? I was, too. But, thank me, I’m doing much better now.

First, you have to understand the difference between branding, marketing, and advertising and how each fit into your branding-marketing-advertising (BMA) plan.

Second, you have to understand the difference between being the entrepreneur, the manager, and the technician in your enterprise and let each of those three people living schizophrenically inside you have their say and do their work respectively on and in your business.

Third, you have to perceive your BMA plan as your entrepreneurial self, manage your BMA plan (naturally) as your manager self, and do the actually work of your BMA plan as your technician self.

Go get a copy of The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery by Michael Gerber, zip through them over the weekend, and come back this coming Monday ready to get to work on a Better Business BMA Action Plan.

[reminder]How should you brand, market, and advertise your business?[/reminder]

Can You Culturally Brand With Your Website?

We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.
We can help you solve your online cultural marketing puzzle.

Don’t you wish you could just get one consistent line of advice about how best to market in the digital world that you could then learn, understand, master, and use like Ron Popiel’s Rotisserie Oven (“Just set it and forget it!”) Yeah, me, too. But, that is not going to happen.

This is the real life of marketing in the modern world. People are fickle. They are fickle about what they want. They are fickle about how they figure out what they want. The majority of them now use online search to do it, but online searchers are  fickle, from moment to moment, about how they find and use your website. And do not even get me started about how Google and the rest of the search engines change their algorithms faster, but with a frequency that seems much more often, than the average couple’s sexual encounter. But I digress.

We are discussing in this series of posts cultural branding and today we are wondering if you can culturally brand on your website. If we look at the websites of the cultural branding examples discussed in Holt’s literature (see the prior posts for details), we see some cultural branding going on in some of them.

The best example is Dove soap. http://Dove.com It’s “Real Beauty” campaign is right there, front and center on the home page. You see that real, but very pleasant looking woman and you want to read what she has to say. Your click the “Read more” and get drawn into the issue, wanting to read more. You click the big circle to find out people’s answers to their survey of “beauty bias.” When you are done, if you are looking for a comforting, caring, friend who “gets you, really gets you” and loves you for all you both are and are not, you can’t wait to go out and pull a bar of the grocery store shelf on aisle 7, halfway down on the right, just are eye level.

For Chipotle, http://chipotle.com, you have to hit the “Food with integrity” button on their top menu, but then you are sucked into Chipotle’s commitment to cook up a better world with every burrito they wrap or bowl they fill. They love their pigs right up to the point they kill them …. But I digress. They even link you out at the bottom of their long culture page to their self-produced comedy series, Farmed and Dangerous. I couldn’t get the first episode to run on my MacBook Pro and gave up after looking at a black box in the middle of my screen for two minutes. Nonetheless, Chipotle has cultural branding there.

Axe, http://www.axe.com/us/en/home.html has much better cultural branding than does Old Spice, https://oldspice.com/en . Compare the two and you will see the obvious differences. Panera, https://www.panerabread.com/en-us/home.html, has it’s 100% clean food success front and center on the first page of its active and interest-grabbing slider.

But, no one, NO ONE, does cultural branding than Starbuck’s, https://www.starbucks.com. Like the others, they make you click their top menu’s “Responsibility” button to find it, but when you do, you are immersed in a multi-media extravaganza about Starbuck’s egalitarian bonding with everyone, while disparaging no one.

There are a ton of examples of both good and bad cultural marketing on websites. But almost all of them are professionally produced with really HUUUUUGE financial budgets behind them. Which brings us to the question driving this post, “Can you culturally brand using your website?”

The answer is definitely, yes, but you have to use your own POWER and proceed only with every resource you have in order to do it. You have to invest at least some of each of your life’s precious resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people to ring the bell with your website. Websites are, however, the major marketing media used by small businesses and you have to leverage your resources to make yours work for you effectively and efficiently.

Come back tomorrow and we will talk more about how.

[reminder]How much of your resources are you investing in online marketing?[/reminder]

 

 

 

Use All 5 Steps of Cultural Branding to Build a Better Ranking Website

 

Do you want your website to deliver you a super-engaged community that will then buy and use and return to buy and use more of whatever product or service you are selling? Yeah, me, too. Alas, however, before you can enjoy the benefits of such a relationship, you must invest some of all your resources of self, time, effort, energy, emotion, intellect, property, and people in online cultural branding to create and sustain that relationship.

Cultural branding did not just spring up last week, month, or even year. One of the early writers about it is Douglas Holt, who wrote How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding. Holt, a former Harvard Business School professor who wisely gave up academia for lucre, founded the Cultural Strategy Group. http://culturalbranding.org. His friends at HBS apparently still love him, however, because they published his work another time as a Big Idea section titled Branding in the Age of Social Media. https://hbr.org/2016/03/branding-in-the-age-of-social-media.

Cultural branding requires you to innovatively leapfrog the conventions of your workspace and champion ideologies that are meaningful to your largest sphere of prospective customers. This requires a shift from mindshare branding, through purpose branding, and to cultural branding.

If you’ve ever marketed anything in the past, then you familiar with mindshare branding, whether you call it that or not. Mindshare branding uses psychological associations to convince prospects whatever you are selling will enhance their benefits, emotions, and personality. Purpose branding, mindsharing in the present third millennia, actively espouses the values or ideals prospective customers share.

Cultural branding requires less obvious selling and more subtle, but also more active, support of a targeted pre-existing cultural segment of society’s values and ideals using a strategic combination of traditional media platforms and current social media tools. The targeted subsegment is one that is working on leapfrogging the larger society’s orthodoxy, which creates a cultural opportunity that a marketer can then champion purposefully, truthfully, effectively, and efficiently. Cultural branding requires actually figuring out what culture you want to serve and then actually joining and serving that culture.

Finding, joining, and serving a culture takes # steps:

  • Mapping the cultural orthodoxy
  • Locating the cultural opportunity
  • Targeting the crowdculture
  • Diffusing the new ideology
  • Innovating continually, using cultural flashpoints.

In his HBR article, Holt explained each of these five steps and describes how Chipotle scored 80% over the test of time:

  • Chipotle leapfrogged the cultural orthodoxy that “BigFood’s” commercially processed and refined foods were good for us,;
  • located the cultural opportunity being pushed by Whole Foodies, Trader Joe’s fanatics, Jamie Oliver home-cuisinartists, and others that they wanted healthier food such as organics, non-organic, but unprocessed, and farm-to-table fruits and vegetables;
  • Researched, recognized, and joined the grassroots subculture (crowdculture) advocating these ideas;
  • Diffused the subcultures idea in an entertaining, educational, and enthusing way using some short, animated movies tied in to a good social media presence and traditional media platforms; but
  • Chipotle spun out in the end, however, when it didn’t continue along the culturebranding path by picking inconsequential issues to support, picking consequential issues such as non-GMO foods, but failing to walk that walk, and then suffering through its E.coli problems.

Holt’s article mentions other brands that have exploited subcultural shifts, such as:

  • Axe (men’s grooming products exploiting the “lad” fad)
  • Dove (led the body-positive crowd with a campaign for “real beauty”)
  • Old Spice (used Isaiah Mustafa to let women believe they could improve their men with Old Spice deodorants and colognes).

So, apparently, Holt’s recognized and pointed out for us cultural branding. The question remains, how do we in small business, who cannot afford much in the way of professionally produced videos run first on traditional media and then seeded over social media, use cultural branding most effectively and efficiently to run, grow, and sell our businesses better?

Come back next time and we will discuss more about that.

[reminder]How does your website compare and contrast with the websites of the companies mentioned in Holt’s article discussed in this post? Look and see and then come back read the next post in this series.[/reminder]