FOREWORD
by
Dave Lakhani
Just about every day, I’m asked to write the foreword to a book. Most days, I simply say no, even to friends. The answer to why is that I don’t want to be branded as a professional foreword writer. When Blaine and Honey approached me and asked me to consider writing this foreword, I said, “Maybe. Let me read the book.”
They sent it and I started reading. I consumed the book in a day and set it aside, but I kept coming back to it. There was something that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on, but it kept pulling me back. I had to know more. I could sense there was magic in the words that I hadn’t read before; and I had to understand what the magic was, and if it could be profitably and universally applied to small businesses.
Then it hit me. This book is the antidote to everything that is wrong with the plethora of marketing books on business owners’ bookshelves today. It doesn’t offer plug-in, fill-in-the-blank worksheets that promise you a fantastical brand and tagline that is sure to appeal to the ethos, pathos and logos each of us are silently craving. It doesn’t give you a detailed analysis of the world’s biggest brands simply to demonstrate what can be done if you have a big enough budget.
The book tackles, head-on, the idea that branding is a waste and direct response marketing is the only answer to attracting a buying consumer today . . . Blaine and Honey also demonstrate how brand can make direct response more responsive.
They pull out the holy grail of small business advertising and they crap all over it.
There, I said it.
The thing that kept pulling me back was their very direct confrontation of the status quo. But not just confrontation for the sake of being provocative. Blaine and Honey lay bare the consumer influence genome. Most importantly of all, they give you the tools through both rhetoric and example to discover it in yourself (and your clients) to affect you profitably and forever.
Inside this book, you’ll experience an onion being peeled back layer by layer. You’ll learn through examples of large businesses you know, but more often small businesses like yours that you don’t. You’ll learn exactly how brands are discovered and translated into an experience that the consumer can embody and extol.
What you won’t find in this book is a list of colors and how they make you feel.
There is no long discussion of the relative merit of dozens of font styles.
You will find a discussion about why making your logo bigger in an ad is mostly stupid.
For the last few years, pundits have been talking about the imminent demise of traditional media and the dominance of social media. I’ve been writing and preaching that social media is the media, too. It isn’t any different—it’s simply a different distribution channel. Inside these pages you won’t find a long love affair with social media. But they do demonstrate exactly how your brand can be most effectively distributed through the medium. This is a great departure from the hundreds of books being published today about social media and the “godsend” it promises to be. Don’t get me (or Blaine and Honey) wrong: social media is a force to be understood and mastered. But it follows a set of brand rules that Blaine and Honey lay out which remain unchanged, regardless of the medium.
In this book, you’re invited to ask hard questions about yourself, your business and your customer – and they expect you to answer them thoughtfully. But thinking alone won’t do the trick. They urge you to analyze, consider, test and create. They challenge your fear and ego, and you won’t like it one bit. It’s going to scare you, you won’t want to do it, you’ll protest that your business is different (it isn’t). But, in the end, if you listen to the book’s message, your business will be transformed, and so will your customer.
This is a book about creating a customer experience that puts the customer first; a book that understands that customers want to be moved and connected to something they can believe in. They want that old-time religion—an experience that they have to tell someone else about because it touched them at their very core.
What do Andrew Dice Clay, Lisa Lampanelli and Jeff Foxworthy have to do with branding? It turns out, quite a bit. If I told you one was a drummer, one a Harvard grad and one a graduate from one of the top ten undergrad programs in the United States, would you be able to tell me who’s who? Of course not. But if I say “Hickory Dickory Dock”, or “You might be a redneck if…”, or “Usually I'm on top to keep the guy from escaping,” you’ll likely be able to attribute it immediately to the correct comic. Not because of their educational or experiential background, but because they understand what their brand is and to whom it appeals—and they deliver with ruthless efficiency.
What I love best about this book are the Ignition Points at the end of each chapter, giving you a very specific place to start your brand discovery process. Each ignition point builds, moving you from gathering fuel to building a roaring brand inferno that consumes competition and forges lifelong customers.
Be prepared. Blaine and Honey will practice a unique brand of tough love with you (as they do with their clients) throughout these pages. And you will inevitably ask the question, “How does this apply to me?” When you come upon that question, it’s your cue to dig in, to suspend your fear and ego, to stow your preconceived notions and knowledge of marketing to date. Stick with it, examine, explore, question, and test. Your business will be transformed.
Read this book once to understand the concepts, and then go through it page by page, chapter by chapter, and do the work. Without doing the work, this book will be completely worthless to you. But if you do, success will not only be predictable, but certain.
Dave Lakhani
Author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want & How To Sell When Nobody’s Buying (and how to sell even more when they are)
www.howtosellwhennobodysbuying.com
January, 2012
Boise, ID
They sent it and I started reading. I consumed the book in a day and set it aside, but I kept coming back to it. There was something that I couldn’t immediately put my finger on, but it kept pulling me back. I had to know more. I could sense there was magic in the words that I hadn’t read before; and I had to understand what the magic was, and if it could be profitably and universally applied to small businesses.
Then it hit me. This book is the antidote to everything that is wrong with the plethora of marketing books on business owners’ bookshelves today. It doesn’t offer plug-in, fill-in-the-blank worksheets that promise you a fantastical brand and tagline that is sure to appeal to the ethos, pathos and logos each of us are silently craving. It doesn’t give you a detailed analysis of the world’s biggest brands simply to demonstrate what can be done if you have a big enough budget.
The book tackles, head-on, the idea that branding is a waste and direct response marketing is the only answer to attracting a buying consumer today . . . Blaine and Honey also demonstrate how brand can make direct response more responsive.
They pull out the holy grail of small business advertising and they crap all over it.
There, I said it.
The thing that kept pulling me back was their very direct confrontation of the status quo. But not just confrontation for the sake of being provocative. Blaine and Honey lay bare the consumer influence genome. Most importantly of all, they give you the tools through both rhetoric and example to discover it in yourself (and your clients) to affect you profitably and forever.
Inside this book, you’ll experience an onion being peeled back layer by layer. You’ll learn through examples of large businesses you know, but more often small businesses like yours that you don’t. You’ll learn exactly how brands are discovered and translated into an experience that the consumer can embody and extol.
What you won’t find in this book is a list of colors and how they make you feel.
There is no long discussion of the relative merit of dozens of font styles.
You will find a discussion about why making your logo bigger in an ad is mostly stupid.
For the last few years, pundits have been talking about the imminent demise of traditional media and the dominance of social media. I’ve been writing and preaching that social media is the media, too. It isn’t any different—it’s simply a different distribution channel. Inside these pages you won’t find a long love affair with social media. But they do demonstrate exactly how your brand can be most effectively distributed through the medium. This is a great departure from the hundreds of books being published today about social media and the “godsend” it promises to be. Don’t get me (or Blaine and Honey) wrong: social media is a force to be understood and mastered. But it follows a set of brand rules that Blaine and Honey lay out which remain unchanged, regardless of the medium.
In this book, you’re invited to ask hard questions about yourself, your business and your customer – and they expect you to answer them thoughtfully. But thinking alone won’t do the trick. They urge you to analyze, consider, test and create. They challenge your fear and ego, and you won’t like it one bit. It’s going to scare you, you won’t want to do it, you’ll protest that your business is different (it isn’t). But, in the end, if you listen to the book’s message, your business will be transformed, and so will your customer.
This is a book about creating a customer experience that puts the customer first; a book that understands that customers want to be moved and connected to something they can believe in. They want that old-time religion—an experience that they have to tell someone else about because it touched them at their very core.
What do Andrew Dice Clay, Lisa Lampanelli and Jeff Foxworthy have to do with branding? It turns out, quite a bit. If I told you one was a drummer, one a Harvard grad and one a graduate from one of the top ten undergrad programs in the United States, would you be able to tell me who’s who? Of course not. But if I say “Hickory Dickory Dock”, or “You might be a redneck if…”, or “Usually I'm on top to keep the guy from escaping,” you’ll likely be able to attribute it immediately to the correct comic. Not because of their educational or experiential background, but because they understand what their brand is and to whom it appeals—and they deliver with ruthless efficiency.
What I love best about this book are the Ignition Points at the end of each chapter, giving you a very specific place to start your brand discovery process. Each ignition point builds, moving you from gathering fuel to building a roaring brand inferno that consumes competition and forges lifelong customers.
Be prepared. Blaine and Honey will practice a unique brand of tough love with you (as they do with their clients) throughout these pages. And you will inevitably ask the question, “How does this apply to me?” When you come upon that question, it’s your cue to dig in, to suspend your fear and ego, to stow your preconceived notions and knowledge of marketing to date. Stick with it, examine, explore, question, and test. Your business will be transformed.
Read this book once to understand the concepts, and then go through it page by page, chapter by chapter, and do the work. Without doing the work, this book will be completely worthless to you. But if you do, success will not only be predictable, but certain.
Dave Lakhani
Author of Persuasion: The Art of Getting What You Want & How To Sell When Nobody’s Buying (and how to sell even more when they are)
www.howtosellwhennobodysbuying.com
January, 2012
Boise, ID