Small Business Marketing Guide - DIY (do-it-yourself) BRAND MARKETING STRATEGIES to HELP YOU GROW YOUR BUSINESS

A good brand is not simply a great logo, or a beautiful brochure, or a cool website. The essence of a good brand is a great customer experience.

My favorite example of a company with a great customer experience—aside from Apple—is Threadless, an online T-shirt store. The T-shirts are fashionable and well-made. But more importantly, the customer experience is memorable, enjoyable, and delightful.

Fostering great customer experiences is much harder to do than creating beautifully-designed marketing materials. Here’s what you can learn from Threadless:

1. Show customers you actually listen
Instead of an after-thought, customer feedback is the backbone of Threadless. Customers submit, vote, and comment on all T-shirt designs. All comments are published publicly and the most highly-rated designs get printed. This process enables customers to actually see that their feedback matters and directly affects the product development.

2. Reward your customers
To encourage participation, Threadless rewards their customers. Those who submit winning designs receive cash and T-shirt credits. Customers who upload photos of themselves wearing Threadless shirts earn credits towards purchases. Customers also earn rewards by submitting winning T-shirt slogans and referring other customers to Threadless.

3. Delight your customers
The best thing about Threadless is that it’s fun. The experience is full of delight:

• Customers feel “cool” because shirts are designed through a grass-roots process.
• The visual design of the website is casual and sprinkled with cute graphics.
• The logo is set in a handwritten script, conveying informality and playfulness.
• Email newsletters are written in a casual and friendly manner, avoiding corporate-speak.

4. Deliver quality
Threadless delivers ensure a high-degree of quality in several ways:

• Design
  The submission and voting process means only the best designs are produced. The visual design of the website is also professional.
• Materials
  Most T-shirts are also printed on the gold standard: American Apparel tees.
• Interaction
  The site is fun, participative, and easy-to-use. It also avoids gimmicks such as animations and sound.

5. Extend slowly
Threadless started small. The founders, Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart, started the company in 2000 as a hobby and with only $1,000 in seed money. Instead of numerous products with many features, they focused on one product category: T-shirts. They spent 8 years refining the t-shirt buying experience before venturing into new product categories. It wasn’t until 2008 that they extended their business to a secondary offering: poster prints.