Minding Your Own Brand

Do you love me?

By Dave Lubelczyk

As The Contours’ song says, “Do you love me, now that I can dance?”
Why wouldn’t you love them? They can Mash Potato…they can do the Twist.

Companies both big and small sing their version of this song everyday. We have the best quality…We offer the finest service… We will give you the lowest prices…Do you like it like that?

The answer is yes, we all like it like that. However, when the company asks if we love them and want make a long-term commitment to being a loyal customer; the answer is more like a line from a Grease song “Tell me more tell me more!”

Everyone is doing the Quality, Service, and Price dance. TV, radio and print ads are full of this message. So if you are focusing on these messages, you sound just like everyone else and therefore are invisible. The moral of the Quality, Service, and Price story is should you have it? Yes! These factors are a given and if you can’t offer them you shouldn’t even be on the dance floor. Should you use it to promote your company? NO!

But you say, “I do offer the best Quality, the best Service and I have the Lowest Prices. Why shouldn’t I tell my potential customers?”
Customers are looking for more. So what can you do?

Say something else!
Focus on an obscure aspect of your business and use that as a selling feature. Rhode Island’s GEM Plumbing market themselves as “The Smell Good Plumbers!”

Do something no one else is doing!
Find innovative ways to use your product and market it to customers whom your competition hasn’t even thought of tapping. A good example of this is The Mason Box Company, a jewelry packaging manufacturer who repositioned a portion of their product line for the funeral industry. They now market a line of custom bags and boxes for funeral parlors to return valuables and urns to loved ones.

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