In my recent trip to Brazil I took a picture of this shirt, which I think vividly exemplifies a very important attribute of great brands: their ability to generate clear and consistent mental associations as soon as somebody hears their name.

The words on this shirt are exactly what comes to mind when we hear “Brazil”.  This immediate connection is one of the reasons why Brazil is a strong brand.  Other countries, like Paraguay or Honduras, for example, are weak brands because most people are not able to easily associate any meaning to them.

My country, Peru, is beginning to position itself as a brand.  Whenever I tell people that I am from Peru, the most common reaction is: “Oh, Peruvian fooooood”, it’s the best!!!.”  Peru is slowly but surely becoming known for its fascinating cuisine.  Another strong association is Machu Picchu, and the iconic image that has been seen by millions of people all over the world.

There are other associations that can be exploited, but they need a little marketing help.  For example: “surfing”.  Peru’s beaches are great for surfing, but that hasn’t yet been communicated as effectively as the country’s reputation for great food.  Another association that can probably work for Peru is “rain forest”.

For brand associations to be effective, they must work together to reinforce one single central theme.  In the case of Brazil, notice how words like “beach”, “soccer”, “samba” and “caipirinha” work nicely together to reinforce the central theme of “pleasurable relaxation”, or “relaxed pleasure” that usually comes to mind when one hears the word “Brazil”.

Companies, products and people are also brands, and they must work on developing strong mental associations in order to differentiate themselves and break through the clutter, which is the biggest obstacle to making it in today’s marketplace.

What do you want people to think when they hear your name or the name of your product?  Identify a few (five or six) positive and memorable words that go well with you and what you want to project, and work hard to live up to them.  You will then be on your way to building a strong brand.

Posted via email from Mario Sanchez Carrion | Posterous

The following example is a testament to the power of brands.

Head over to your closest Whole Foods and you’ll probably see this Sigg reusable water bottle display:

Each bottle sells for $19.99 or more.

If you head to Walgreens, you will find very similar bottles selling for $3.99.  The difference?: the brand is not Sigg.

Keep browsing through the Walgreens aisles and you’ll find these coffee mugs (essentially the same product plus a little bit of insulation) selling for a whopping $17.95:

Why would somebody pay between 350% and 400% more for essentially the same products?

Because of the power of brands…

You spend $19.99 on a Sigg not because you need a water bottle, but because you want to tell the world that you are hip, environmentally conscious and stylish. Similarly, you don’t spend $17.95 on an NC State coffee mug because you want to keep your coffee warm, but because you want to display your college colors with pride.

People are willing to pay to belong to a tribe,and brands just make it easier.

Entrepreneurial creativity never ceases to amaze me.

I was going through some Twitter feeds today, and found a link to this excellent report on NPR about a company called Bamboo Bike Studio, based in Brooklyn, NY. Three entrepreneurs, Justin Aguinaldo, Sean Murray and Marty Odlin are the force behind this remarkable outfit that is, in my opinion, one of the best examples of niche marketing you can possibly find.

Bamboo Bike Studio has reinvented a product that has been around hundreds of years and has done it in so many different ways:

1. They use a different material (bamboo) to build their bike frames, instead of the usual steel.
2. They have chosen a material that ties in perfectly with the current trend toward sustainability and environmental protection (bamboo is a renewable resource).
3. They are taking their social responsibility one large step further by planning to build bamboo bike factories in different African and Latin American countries.
4. They don’t just sell a product: they sell an experience. Here’s where it gets interesting: you don’t buy a bike, you buy a “bike class”, a weekend-long workshop where the prospective bike owner builds his/her own bike.

By finding this creative niche, BBS has created a true Purple Cow, a product that is at the same time its own marketing: the bikes look so unique that they instantly become a conversation piece.  And, if that weren’t enough, just picture the bike owners telling their friends the story of how they made those amazing bikes themselves!

As they say (and this example proves it) there are no mature markets or products, only mature minds…

Head on to BambooBikeStudio.com to learn more about this great company, of follow them on Twitter.

Can we really separate our personal life from our personal brand? When every person is a channel and broadcasting something to the world is as easy as sending a tweet, everything we say or do is pretty much out in the open. If we say one thing and do another we will sooner or later get called out.

For our personal brand to have substance, it has to be consistent with our personal life. It is dangerous to build a personal brand around a certain image or persona that we’re not willing or able to live up to.

That is why when guys like Eliot Spitzer or Tiger Woods get exposed we feel cheated and let down. It’s as if we had bought an expensive product only to find out that it doesn’t perform as advertised.

It used to be that business was business and what we did in our personal life was personal, but in the age of personal branding and social media business is personal.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/marc0047/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

With social media consultants popping up faster than Realtors in 2006, we need to set the record straight: knowing how to use the tools doesn’t make you a social media expert. Like the proverbial three-legged stool, using social media effectively means paying attention to three basic elements:

• Strategy
• Tools
• People

Strategy:

Before you set up profiles in every social network, think about your customers: who are they, what problems do they face, where do they hang out: are they on Twitter, Facebook, MySpace? If your customers are there, you need to be there. Before putting out content, though, think about what you want to communicate, and how you want to communicate. Your message and style must be consistent with your brand, and with the way you communicate offline.

Tools:

Learn the nuances, idiosyncrasies and etiquette of each social media platform. Social networks are not sales tools as much as they are relationship building tools. Using social media to aggressively sell products is not effective. Instead, focus on building your brand, being helpful and showing that you know your stuff .

Also, you don’t need to jump into every new social media platform. There are only so many hours in a day, and it is better to be an active participant in one or two networks than to just dabble in five or six. As Laura Roeder says, social media is not an area where you necessarily want to be cutting edge: sometimes the tried and true, older social networks are better because they gather a larger audience and more of your potential customers.

People:

The real experts never lose sight of the big picture: social media are just a means to a bigger end. It is not a coincidence that Chris Brogan, one of the top names in the field, has chosen these words for the title of his homepage: Beyond Social Media: Learn How Human Business Works.

The end goal should be to help people and build community (which is also a great way to build a business). Focusing on people and solving their problems is a more sustainable business strategy than just showing them the mechanical aspects of how to use the tools.

As Adam Singer explains in his popular blog The Future Buzz, social media is not new.  Just as it would be ridiculous to build a business around showing people how to dial a phone, social media is soon going to become second nature (it already is for Millenials).  The challenge we face now is not how to set up a Twitter or Facebook profile, but how do we use the leverage that social media gives us to build value and help people.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulofierro/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Your company name can be one of your most important brand signals. In some cases, like in the example I’m about to show you, a name alone can build a brand.

In 1999 the HVLS Fan Company, a manufacturer of large industrial fans, opened for business in Lexington, Kentucky. HVLS is an acronym that stands for high volume/low speed (HVLS), the main characteristic of their products.

During the early days, as each new fan was installed, they noticed that their customers referred to them as “big ass fans”. Before long, they decided to embrace the quirky name and became The Big Ass Fan Company. The rest, as they say, is history.

The new name has not only turned an obscure industrial fan manufacturer in Kentucky into one of the most recognized and innovative small business brands in the United States, but it has also played a part in creating a remarkable corporate culture that blends an unwavering commitment to business and customer service excellence with community involvement and fun.

If you’re thinking of a name for your product or company, remember this example and shoot for a name that is distinctive, memorable and relevant, and that matches the way your customers would think and talk about your product.

To learn more about the Big Ass Fans brand and culture visit their website.

I live five minutes away from Burger King’s headquarters, and today I passed by a BK restaurant located next to their building.  This is one of the few restaurants that sports BK’s recently launched new look.  The new BK, more upscale and futuristic (and more sit down than drive through) clearly stands out from other fast food chains.

But with this redesign BK not only gains in style and image, but also scores big on branding.  Perhaps the most significant brand signal can be seen above the entrance: BK’s classic tagline “Home of the Whopper” has been dusted off and is now the centerpiece of the new design.  This is a big win, since the Whopper is BK’s biggest claim to fame (remember the Whopper Freakout spoof campaign?).  Also, to the side of each door, you can now see pictures of some of BK’s biggest hamburgers.

At a time when fast food joints seem to have lost focus by engaging in a futile “war on calories” and prefer to hype salads and fruit plates, Burger King gets it right by going back to its roots and repositioning itself as the destination for burgers in the fast food space.

Posted via email from Mario Sanchez Carrion | Posterous

http://www.flickr.com/photos/chaimann/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

A few weeks ago I took my car to the dealer for an oil change and the clerk promised it would be ready in about 1 ½ hours. Once the car was ready, he presented me with a questionnaire which asked, among other things, if the car was delivered within the promised time frame. The answer was yes, or course, but the promised time frame was 1 ½ hours, or about 1 hour more than it should really take. Sandbaggers.

Four years ago, after hurricane Wilma hit South Florida, FPL advised us that full restoration of power could take four weeks. Eighteen days later (ahead of schedule, of course) full power was restored. Sandbaggers.

Perhaps the ultimate sandbaggers are Wall Street guys, who insist they deserve bonuses in spite of piling up billions of dollars in losses (because if it weren’t for them the losses would be much greater, of course). Sandbaggers.

Setting low ball goals breeds a culture of complacency and underachievement. Setting two types of goals, regular (easy) and stretch (hard), is also counterproductive, because it allows us to claim victory even if the stretch goals are not achieved.

Every goal should be a stretch goal. Stretch goals should be hard, but achievable, and should require us to exercise creativity and effort above and beyond the call of duty. If you want to instill a culture of performance, always set stretch, ambitious goals and give people the guidance, tools and support to achieve them.

I was browsing through my advance copy of the next issue of Personal Branding Magazine, and found an interesting interview with MC Hammer. Hammer, as you probably know, is a hip hop artist who had his fifteen minutes of fame back in the 1980’s, and after many years under the media radar has now resurfaced as a social media celebrity. He has been blogging since 2006 and now boasts more than 1.6 million Twitter followers.

The lesson MC Hammer’s story teaches us is that we can start with whatever assets we have today, and leverage them to take us closer to our goals. In his case, he took what was left of an old and fading asset (his 1980’s fame) and found a catalyst (social media) to breath new life into it. Instead of complaining and dwelling on fame and fortune gone by, Hammer reinvented himself.

All of us have legacy assets of which we are not taking full advantage, like a passion we’ve been supressing, an old acquaintance we haven’t contacted in a long time, or a skill we haven’t practiced in years.

Like Hammer, you can bring those neglected assets back to life.

For example: That book that you always wanted to publish but couldn’t move it through traditional publishing houses? You now have many self publishing options at your disposal. That long lost high school buddie that you found through LinkedIn? Contacting him may lead not only to a rekindled friendship, but also to a promising new business opportunity. The presentation skills you learned at your teaching job? You can leverage them in a new career in sales.

This process is called re-branding, and it is not that hard. Start by taking inventory of all your skills, passions, relationships, values, points of view and personal preferences. Then, take a look at your environment. Most likely it has changed in your favor since the last time you were paying attention. Social media is just one example of that change, but it’s a good place to start, as an old school rapper already knows.

I just finished reading Chris Anderson’s book Free: The Future of a Radical Price
. It is a fascinating read, following in the footsteps of Freakonomics, the book that a few years ago taught us that a subject as dry and technical as economics could be entertaining if used to explain why ordinary things around us turn out the way they do.

Free has generated a lively debate in the blogosphere, with some questioning the validity of its conclusions, others finding some merit to them but hoping that we can find a way out, and others fully embracing them as the inevitable way things will be from now on.

The book is full of interesting examples of how companies and entire industries have been build around giving away stuff. There is a comprehensive chapter on Google (probably the best known company that has been able to build a business around a wide array of free services).

There is also a very good example that I think summarizes the main point of the book: that as previously scarce things become abundant, new scarcities are created, and with them, new ways of making money. Anderson goes back in time to remind us how in the early days of radio, musicians got paid for life on-air performances. That business model was killed by records, which became the new way to make money. Nowadays, of course, the recorded music industry is being challenged by the zero marginal cost of distributing music over the Internet, which has forced musicians to embrace other ways to make money, like live performances and licensing.

My impression after reading this book is that we are not necessarily doomed by the economics of free, but we do need to work on creating business models where we can turn giving away stuff to our advantage (for example, to build an audience faster) and then find related products and services where money can be made.

The main importance of this book for small business owners, in my opinion, is that it will open our eyes and minds to new ways of charging for products and services, and will help us understand the complicated dynamics of pricing in an Internet economy.

As we internalize the concepts discussed in this book, we will come to accept that some of the things that made us money in the past may need to become a marketing cost, as we strive to create multiple, new streams of income that feed each other.