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

We humans are all wired for a great story. We love narrative, it’s how we relate to each other and the world. Over the course of the past 20 years I’ve been involved in naming a lot of new things – from the early days at Wired (more on that in a minute) to Web 2.0, to my current work at Federated Media. And as I review all the  names and brands I’ve been involved in starting or advising, one thing becomes crystal clear to me: the best names are ones that have a great story buried inside.

It’s often said that a brand is a “vessel waiting to be filled.” In other words, you can call a new product or service anything, and after a while, if your product is successful, that brand will come to mean whatever experience it ends up delivering. While I generally agree with the thesis, I’ve found that having a great story is a very good way to jumpstart a new brand, and a great way to help sell it and keep defining it in the long term.

A few examples. Let’s start with the first great name I had the pleasure of being involved with: Wired. I had nothing to do with naming Wired, that came from Louis Rosetto and his partner Jane Metcalfe. When Louis called me before launch, “Wired” was associated – to my mind anyway – with a book chronicling the life and rather sordid death of John Belushi. Being “wired” meant you had done a lot of drugs, and I wasn’t sure it was a great idea to associate anything with that concept.

But Louis and Jane were certain the brand would take off, mainly because they were plugged into a small but growing culture of digital counterculturalists who had appropriated the word to mean “connected to the digital revolution.”

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This may surprise you, but “Guy’s Golden Touch” is not “whatever Guy touches turns to gold.” If only that were true. Instead, Guy’s Golden Touch is “whatever is gold, Guy touches.” The concept is that something that’s gold is easy to brand and sell, so the task is simple: find or create something gold.

This recommendation may impress you for a second but probably not much longer. It’s really a duh-ism as in “Duh, of course I should create something great. I had to read this blog post to learn this?” What I need to do is take you from this 50,000 foot strategic view right down to a 2,000 feet tactical view.

For this, I invoke the acronym DICEE. It stands for deep, intelligent, complete, elegant, and emotive. These are the five salient qualities of stuff that’s made of gold.

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Think of a megabrand—Coca-Cola, Apple or McDonald’s. Their logos and brand colors immediately jump to mind, right? Unfortunately, omnipresence isn’t achieved overnight. So let’s forget about logos and design for a moment. Not that those aren’t key elements when building a brand, but as a small business with limited resources, you’ll have to tap into other ways to make people remember your brand and your product.

One of the most effective—and cost-effective—brand identity tools is storytelling. A good story doesn’t just create a connection between you and your customers, it’s also something they’re likely to share with others.

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