Owner To Owner Podcast

Michel Hogan brand expert on SME owners using brand as a competitive weapon

Episode Summary

Michel Hogan defines brand simply as the result of the promises you keep. She explains how you can make this work and why a brand can be such a competitive weapon for small businesses when up against the big end of town.

Episode Notes

@MichelHogan is a #brandexpert and #brandcounsel. In her world #brand is the result of the promises you keep. She advises businesses on the risk to #purpose and #values from making promises you can't keep.

For #smallbusinessshe sees brand as a competitive weapon against the big end of town.

She came from the design and marketing side of #brand that she is now quite vocally opposed to but this gives her a little bit of an insight for the #brandstuff she talks about now.

That industry experience forced her to start asking different questions, and those different questions exploded a whole different way of thinking. As a result she moved to her role of being a counsel and really helping people understand brand as a much deeper result of everything they do as an organization rather than this thing that they prop up and create, stick in a corner, and redo every few years. In our discussion we cover;

• how brand is something that has actually become almost like a proxy for how people talk about an organization
• why If you consistently break your promises then you're going to really find it hard to stay in business.
• the definition of a promise - effectively how you communicate what you intend
• explicit promises eg  "we will get it to you by Friday"
• implicit promises eg how we tell people we will behave
• thinking about a brand is being essentially a result of a set of stuff, that plays out across everything you do as a business
• and, what is that set of stuff - #purpose and #values - what's most important to you? What do you care about? What are your values? How do you do things around where you are?
• @unheroicwork - the 4 things that you do as a business on a day-to-day basis that in sum  help form the brand;
  1. back office
  2. front office,
  3. with customers
  4. with partners
• simple measures of this #brandstuff;

1. Are you turning over staff?
2. Are you keeping customers?
3. If you talk to people, what do they say that you care about?
4. What do they say that they think you stand for? Does that line up with what you think it is? If not, why not? What am I doing or not doing that I should be?

• #theruleofthreeandten - as soon as you add a third person, everything changes, then everything changes again at ten
• when a brand is born or starts - the minute you open, the minute you put pen to paper and register your business name, you are off and  running - the brand is forming around you.
• signals of a #badbrand eg you've got a revolving door in staff
• her first question when working with new clients - "When don't people work out around here?"
• her favorite brand - @patagonia
• another brand she isn't so enamored with @uber
• her strong message for #SMEs -  you have a massive advantage over a large enterprise. When it comes to embracing this way of thinking about brand and really using it as an advantage because you are smaller, you have an intimacy with the people in terms of closeness to the people who work for you.
• her latest book  "The Unheroic Work" @theunheroicwork

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