[Part 1] At 7:00 AM today, I interviewed the man behind the crazy-successful group Gotan Project.

This was not for Hitting The Mark. I did this for Toneoptic, and it is one of many brand marketing strategies I pursue.

When I started Toneoptic, I had to lean into what I knew and the resources I had. After hosting 130+ HTM episodes, I knew how to conduct interviews, create an interesting show, and had the setup.

But just when you thought this was easy, hold your breath. I set out to talk to music icons who actually have record collections because I wanted to ask about the first record they bought and their rarest gems. I wanted it to be a thrill for listeners.

I relied on personal intros to get the first two episodes of the show (Sound Habit) going. My most connected advisor rejected making intros because big talent seeks money in return, and we were not ready for it, he advised. Not an answer I was ready to accept. A habit I share with many startup entrepreneurs: a “no” means “try harder.”

So I spent countless evenings researching artists with record collections and DMing one musician after another. I was basically cold calling. Hundreds. It felt strange.

And then it happened. Fred Schneider, the frontman of the B-52s replied, and I got to tape him for episode 3. At that point, I knew the show had legs. Today’s interview with Gotan Project was only the seventh episode I taped because it is still hard to get the right people on, but just like running a startup, it gets easier over time. Along the way, I made friendships and found advisors and collaborators.

I try to navigate diverse musical genres to attract different fan bases. It’s a hustle. A fun one. Like most of the hustles you will hear me talk about in this new WTT series.

[Part 2] Studying Communication Design and having a career as a Creative Director and Brand Strategist, I frequently exhausted my mind during a typical workday, but never my body.

A goal with Toneoptic has always been to produce products locally, in California, regardless of how difficult everyone made it sound (they were right). With our new product, we made that dream come true: Our factory space that also serves as a warehouse.

Every piece of the product is being touched by my hands. Extrusions are cleaned, aluminum parts drilled, and parts trucked from the powder coater to the anodizer. Trucks I learned how to drive, filled brimful with pallets of things I mastered how to pronounce.

Over the past half year, I learned to cherish the balance between physical and mental stimulation and to embrace the new sensation of working hard with my body (which is very different from working out).

When I was done holding a bag of ice in my right hand after tapping 160 pieces of aluminum extrusions today, I wondered why this pain makes me feel strangely fulfilled. It comes down to a sense of completion that is lacking on a day filled with virtual meetings and e-mails.

I cherish my work of brand identity and strategy, but after handing off a final logo, for example, you won’t see your work in Times Square at that time, for a long time, or perhaps ever. You know you did great work, it is stimulating, but besides an invoice sent and appreciation received by the client, you basically move on to the next project, until a while later, you might start seeing your work being enjoyed in real life.

That bag of ice on my hand, those 160 extrusions that are now tapped, those 200 50-pound boxes I moved to another area in the space, those 1,200 aluminum plates that have now been quality controlled, one at a time, that is something that is real.

It happened. I can see it.

And more so, I can feel it.

[ Travis and I on a factory tour outside Shanghai in 2024]

[Part 3] One significant thing I did early on with my startup?

I created an Advisory Board.

It was not a nice-to-have but a must. Here is why:

With Toneoptic, besides the creative innovation aspect, I am blending four key things:

1. Producing physical objects
2. Acing direct-to-consumer sales
3. Understanding a Hi-Fi audience
4. Killing it with branding

I knew very little about three of these, but all four were needed to give the company even a remote chance of survival.

I put together my advisory board strategically to fill that void:

I needed a leader in product development: Travis Rosbach, Founder of Hydro Flask, was on my show, Hitting The Mark, so I reached out.

A leader in Hi-Fi: James Johnson-Flint, Owner of the highly admired British hi-fi brand Cambridge Audio, did some advisory calls with me (the other way around) throughout the years, so I reached out.

And on it goes.

What is so magical about this – beyond all of them (David Fredrickson, Chris Monaco, Stephanie Bregman, Stuart George) having been crucial to the success of the company – I learned to practice and deeply appreciate the concept of ‘co-elevation.’

A mutually beneficial quarterly, monthly, or – as is the case with Travis and me – weekly conversation to check in and to lean into each other’s expertise to gain tips, contacts, a fresh perspective, or simply a kick in the butt.

With all the wild stuff a startup journey throws at you, these co-mentorships – that turned into friendships – are what entrepreneurship is about.

I don’t take them for granted, and I hope that anyone building anything out there is taking this as my kick in their butts to call up the right people in their circles.

You will be surprised by how many will take you up on it and by what it can do for you, both professionally and personally.

[Part 4] Advice we all heard: “The best way to see if an idea for a product will have an audience is to put a sketch or a prototype out there and see how people react.”

And so I learned the hard way that this may not be the best advice, or at least it needs to come with a fat asterisk about production timelines and the risk (!) of virality.

Early on, I shot a prototype: a beautiful walnut box containing my rpm mechanism, which allows records to be showcased library-style and easily flipped through with an elegant motion. I put the product online at a ridiculously high price to see how people reacted to my innovation. I quickly learned that the price was indeed ridiculous, shipping was impossible given the design, but that people loved the mechanism and solution.

A year and a half later, this video was picked up out of the blue and went viral across all major social platforms, with one TikTok clip alone garnering 2.2M views. It was the night I was heading to the airport for vacation, and the week I gave the green light for the production of a different flat-pack-shipped design. No more walnut box. Not what was shown in the viral video.

People loved the clip; they loved the design, but here I was already much further along, and I saw very little reward for an ill-timed moment of unplanned virality, besides making some great connections with A-list musicians and growing our social following. But no sales since the product people saw and wanted, they could not get.

We are now months away from bringing back a similar design. At a fraction of that original cost and with no shipping issues.

But the viral moment has faded.

Lesson: Don’t publicly test your market with a unique product unless you are ready for a wave of positive responses and a process to make that product a reality very, very quickly. Virality comes and goes within days, or if you are lucky, weeks, but R&D and fabrication take months, or more likely years.

[Part 5] When I launched the Toneoptic site featuring a (rather overpriced but) gorgeous prototype, it was an exciting time.

I have launched my first brand. A product I invented that the world has not seen yet, in a market I did not know well.

Finally, a message sent through my Shopify site appeared in my Inbox. It was a rather exciting moment. Even if just to know the contact form was working!

Was it from an interior designer who wanted a unit for their client?
Or a press inquiry?
A customer with questions about the best wood finish for their listening room, perhaps?

In fact, it was from someone who wanted to share how they felt. Not about the design, or the idea, or the brand, but really about me, whom he did not know personally:

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” were the words that popped into my wide-open eyes.

The advice I give founders and CMOs ran through my head: “Your brand needs haters in order to attract lovers.”

Well, screw that, I thought at the moment. And a very, very long moment it was staring at that e-mail.

A glass of wine later, I made peace with the philosophy I like to share and hoped that fans would follow; maybe tomorrow, I thought…

No such luck.

A day later, I received another rant in response to a Facebook post (pictured). I sent a very civilized reply, to which he answered: “I just wish I could afford them.”

And there it was – my smile returned to my face. And this reply taught me everything I needed to know as I set foot on this consumer brand journey filled with pointless rants and unqualified opinions.

It’s difficult, and I’ve learned to pause and cherish the positive moments rather than dwell only on the multitude of challenges entrepreneurship brings by design, as I remind myself of Tom Hanks’ line in A League of Their Own: “It’s supposed to be hard. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

By year’s end, we anticipate having sold close to a thousand of these $350 units.

Only you know your vision; you have to stay focused and believe in the outcome.

And that’s what I tell you, as much as I keep telling myself, as it is the only way to save your mental health and create a brand built to zip right past the haters.

( Me, not in my black dress-shirt uniform, being ‘last week years old’ learning that you blow into plastic gloves to make them easier to put on. Yes, I learn on the job.)

[Part 6] I was a guest on a podcast yesterday (more on that when the episode airs), and Edilsa Bueno, the wonderful host, crafted a theme around the idea that my career is not a ladder or a lattice. Not even a ‘Career in Motion.’

We decided, towards the end of our conversation, that it was a thread.

Welcome to the ‘Thread Career,’ then.

Running FINIEN and being a partner at Chameleon Collective can confuse some clients initially, but it really is just semantics. I am a brand strategist, and FINIEN joined the Collective. One role that looks like two. At the heart? Brand strategy.

Me being an author, an advisor, a podcast host, and a mentor? It’s all about brand strategy.

And then there is Toneoptic, a D2C product innovation brand I happened to start out of a need I saw for myself. This is where one would think I lost my organized career path or my professional identity, of sorts.

But nothing could be further from the truth, as it was the next logical progression of brand building: I helped hundreds of clients shape and reshape their brands; I mentored thousands on the same topic. I wrote four books on the subject.

Wasn’t it about time I myself did what I spent all my career doing as the backseat driver, or in many cases, the co-pilot wishing to get my hands on the steering wheel?

Well, now I have.

I am steering.

And I am building the car while reading the manual while going full speed.

It makes all the sense in the world. In the end, this brand’s strategy needs to reign supreme to survive and thrive. This was decades in the making; I just haven’t looked at it quite that way until today.

What is your career thread? I am positive you can uncover one.

[Part 7] As an authority (I prefer it to expert, and definitely to guru or ninja – please!) in brand building, I talk a lot about the importance of building community and how it is different from gaining social media followers.

With Toneoptic, I had to find my own path of creating a community for the brand.

In an almost naive way, I did something so simple, so inexpensive, and so not-corporate that it actually worked.

I am very much my audience: a design and music-obsessed record collector. We like exploring new vinyl stores and finding rare and exciting records.

So I launched Crate Dig, a monthly giveaway of an exciting, usually rare, record. I seek out a new store, ask the owner to pick a record that recently came in and that (s)he is excited about, and that costs around $80, and that’s the record I then give away to our tribe.

I get to know store owners, and they learn about Toneoptic. Our community starts looking forward to seeing where I go and which record is up for grabs this month.

I kept it real. No big brand collab. Just an $80 record that shows I am one of them. It’s the stuff we seek. And we enjoy supporting local record stores just like they do.

We have done this 31 times now, and the records we gave away ranged from a Keanu Reeves-signed record from a store in Chicago to the Rolling Stones’ self-titled 1964 Mono LP from a shop in Santa Clarita.

This month, we are giving away Mac Miller’s 10th-anniversary box of GO:OD AM, featuring two white LPs, plus a single-sided etched yellow LP with bonus tracks. Check it out and enter at toneoptic.com.

Building community this way is an act of shared passion, and that is always a great place to play in as a brand.

[Part 8] An app is a wonderful thing. You build it, push it live, and then keep improving it while people are already using it.

The traditional side of product development is a completely different beast.

Physical products require endless adjustments, prototypes shipped around the world, factory visits, and production runs of hundreds or thousands of units at a time. There are far fewer chances to pivot.

Then those boxes arrive in a warehouse. And you pay for every day they sit there instead of in a customer’s home.

So you have to sell quickly. But not too quickly, because reordering takes time and a lot of upfront cash. And of course, by then you’ve already learned things you’d love to improve in the next version.

Pictured is me in China, in our original factory, at 30°F, working the production floor assembling and packing. A month later, a container with 500 Toneoptic products arrived in Los Angeles.

Today, we’re manufacturing all new products in Los Angeles. The ambiguity and complexity of overseas production is largely behind us. Instead, we’ve traded it for a different set of challenges. Investing in specialized machinery, sourcing aluminum by the ton, and building a manufacturing process that can scale while still allowing us to improve.

I often see titles like Product Designer or Product Manager, but most refer to digital products. The difference is significant. When you launch an app, you can immediately react to user behavior and iterate. When you launch a physical product, you have a warehouse full of thousands of decisions already made. Every decision echoes months into the future.

That’s been one of my biggest lessons, and it’s one that I keep learning different variations of on a daily basis. It’s what has made building Toneoptic one of the most complex learning experiences of my career.

[Final, Part 9] I spent my career as a brand strategist preaching to companies to be better. Better to their employees, better to their customers, and last but not least better to the environment.

When I started Toneoptic, it was deeply ingrained to walk my talk.

Fast forward, pictured: Me horribly stumbling on my walk of shame.

How did I get to a point of cutting corners?

Simply put, it came down to startup survival.

Our first product had to be made outside the U.S. to keep the cost low enough that all 143 premium parts were still somewhat affordable (to the few). Producing it in the U.S. from the get-go simply was not an option that customers were ready to open their wallets for.

I wanted packaging to be sustainable. Reading the fine print of biodegradable peanuts, I learned that they are made of corn and will attract rodents. That, we can’t have in the factory. Unless we create a ginormous sealed container for the huge amounts of peanuts. And that we do not have the resources for yet.

This list goes on, and I find myself walking this walk of shame daily. Daily, until we will be at the point of creating a business that is financially sustainable; and I promise myself (and you, and my stakeholders) that the minute we can, we will.

But for now, I am proudly holding a ginormous bag of horrible-for-the-environment peanuts from ULINE, padding our backs that we are producing the new products locally now, and we are packing deliveries securely so our customers will love their products. The brand will have to follow suit.

Until we are a sustainable company, we simply, and sadly, can not be as sustainable for the planet as we wish.

One step at a time. Even if it hurts.

That is the real painful cost of starting small. And a wake-up call for me.

Will I go any easier on my clients? 99% of them, I sure will not. But that 1% that is in true startup mode like we are now, you bet. I might even swing by to lend a hand.

Learn more about the Toneoptic brand: www.toneoptic.com @toneoptic

The post Walking The Talk Series first appeared on FINIEN.

The article outlines 5 key points:

1. Communicate with customers.

2. Be mindful of messaging.

3. Put the customer—not the brand—first

4. Evaluate the risks vs. rewards of launching.

5. Know your customers.

Read the full story here.

The post How to Navigate Product Launches During COVID-19 first appeared on FINIEN.

The post Why You Should Give Away Your Product (And Why Swag Is Dead) first appeared on FINIEN.

In my brand consultancy, we have a unique process of manifesting a brand’s newly crafted identity. Instead of rolling the design language out in great detail across every touchpoint of a client’s brand, we focus on only a few important pieces that will set the direction and thereby create the brand’s visual and verbal rules.

As part of this process (of showing how a brand can come to life), we recently started spending more time on creating newly branded Instagram accounts for our clients through an initial set of posts. We believe it is just as important, if not more important than the website. Why? Because when you see a company’s Instagram account, you get to know who they really are, what the company really cares about, and even more so, you get to meet the brand that exists today.

The beauty of Instagram is, quite obviously, the platform’s visual appeal. And Instagram for brands is exactly as the name implies: Instantaneous. That is also what most potential visitors seek: Instant gratification. 

As of March 2019, Instagram business pages get over 1.5 billion visits a week, “but many entrepreneurs and startups are still ignoring Instagram as a major acquisition channel, mostly because they can’t add links to each post” says Andrew Lee Miller (who I worked with when helping Tinder and Match Group launch a new app).

Andrew, more widely known as AndrewStartups, a startup marketing expert who has led growth for three startup exits, states “Simply put, millions more people are now discovering brands organically through their Instagram account than their website, yet many companies are still spending tens of thousands of dollars optimizing their website, and not a dollar on their Instagram. Hiring a designer, a copywriter and a content strategist for your Instagram will absolutely pay off,” he argues. “It is more important to drive inbound traffic to – and convert on – ‘your new homepage,’ your Instagram page, than almost anywhere else on the web.”

If you are worried about keeping up your account and posting like a true millennial, there is some good news, which should come as a relief: Having a beautifully designed and distinctly on-brand Instagram page that efficiently illustrates your brand, your values, your culture, and your value proposition is what matters to leave a brand impression. Not the forceful, half-hastily constant updates by your intern. Take a breath and start to think of your Instagram page as your up-to-date homepage.

Here are 3 tips from Andrew and myself on how to go about it:

1. Create a longterm, targeted outreach

…and “off-page” social media marketing initiatives that drive new followers to your page every day. 

2. Craft an impressive branding and design aesthetic

…coupled with a distinct brand voice, one that is more natural and tongue-in-cheek than currently found on your traditional channels (Those should adapt to your new, authentic voice, eventually).

3. Add a strong call to action

…in the bio with a link that converts. Share something valuable like an offer, a competition, or a free piece of content (white papers, anyone?) that will draw visitors further towards your brand.

It’s time to respect a channel that will instantaneously provide an up-to-date overview of your brand at its most authentic self. Not only that, but you will be able to sit back and watch leads come in from a source you least expected.

The post Why Instagram Is Your Brand’s True Homepage – And 3 Ways To Turn It Into A Lead Magnet first appeared on FINIEN.

An edited version of this interview was first published in my column on Grit Daily on 02/19/19.

I devoted my professional career to branding, from authoring books on the subject, to holding workshops and deriving brands through my consultancy, I live and breathe branding. Yet, when I sat down with serial entrepreneur Brian Scudamore, who I met when we were both mentoring at Guy Raz’s How I Built This Summit, I changed seats and had Brian share brand advice instead of myself.

Brian just released the book WTF (Willing to Fail): How Failure Can Be Your Key to Success and is making a splash in the business world. And that is mainly because he knows a thing or two about how to build a brand as he has started a business in college which today brings in an average of a million dollars a day (yes, you read that correctly!) and he is on the path to becoming a billion dollar company.

Brian Scudamore is a serial entrepreneur and author who has always taken the road less traveled. At just 19 years old, he pioneered the industry of professional junk removal with 1-800 GOT-JUNK, turning a chore people avoid into an exceptional customer service experience, changing the narrative of an entire industry in the process. When he ran out of new markets to expand to he scaled the business into three more home service brands under the O2E brands umbrella: WOW One Day Painting, You Move Me, and Shack Shine.

In between appearances on Oprah and Dr. Phil, and on the morning where he made it onto the home page of CNN.com, little me was fortunate to score time on his schedule to talk about branding, culture, and naturally about failures in the journey of an entrepreneur.

How do you get into that mindset of embracing failures? It’s so easy to say ‘fail forward,’ but most entrepreneurs are extremely driven, many have a ginormous ego and they often take failures very personally. How do you run towards failure with open arms?

So I’ve learned to ask myself one question in this journey. When I am failing, when I am having a difficult moment, when I am feeling depressed, whatever is going on that seems and feels like a failure, I ask myself one powerful question: What’s one potentially awesome thing that can come from this tough situation? And I start to brainstorm and sometimes I create a big list, and I go wow, thank goodness, this is exciting! How awesome that I am failing, because look at all these amazing things that can happen as a result of this learning. I think it’s a perception. I think that people need to really, really look at why is this failure happening and trusting that you’re in the right place at the right time and that while the mistake might hurt, it is going to get you to a better place if you so choose.

What was a ginormous brand fail that you went through with your venture?

I think one of the biggest ones was my first big flop. I had eleven employees, and they say one bad apple spoils the whole bunch. So I end up getting rid of my entire company. I have nine bad apples, and I sat down with them, and I said guys, I gotta let you know that I think I found the wrong people. I haven’t treated you right. I haven’t given you the love and support you need to be successful, and I’m making a tough decision here, but we’re gonna part ways. So I went from a company of twelve, myself and eleven, down to one. It was just me hauling junk. It was just me answering phones and trying to rehire. But I learned a valuable lesson from that failure that your very first employee has to be amazing because that person is going to spread the culture, the vibe, and the feeling of the business and that you need to really build on finding the right people and treating them right, and it’s made a huge difference. I look at our company of over five hundred people today and how amazing for us to feel so proud about the type of culture we have. It would have never have happened if I hadn’t made some of the mistakes I did.

Let’s talk about company culture a bit because I’m a firm believer that if done right, any startup should invest time and energy into creating a strong culture that can basically serve as the platform upon which everything else can be built. How important are core values to you?

Jim Collins wrote a book called Good to Great, one of my favorite books, and he said you’ve got to have values. It doesn’t matter what they are as long as they’re your values. So we went and took a little retreat to Bone Island, a little island near our office, and I said to my team at the time, maybe fifteen years ago, I said what are our values? What words can describe who we are, not who we want to be or who we are trying to be, but who we are today? What are those words? We took Post-It notes, we put them all up on these big windows, and we grouped all four hundred Post-Its with different words into four distinct categories: Passion, Integrity, Professionalism, and Empathy. And when we looked at those words they made the acronym of PIPE. It turned into this interesting tool around ‘the junkyard,’ our head office, where we would say to people: “I don’t know if that decision was very PIPE?,” or “I don’t know if that behavior was very PIPE. It’s not in line with our values.” And so values can’t just be a poster on a wall. Values have to be something that you hold your team, your people, accountable to and you hold yourself accountable to. If you’re not displaying passion, if you’re not displaying integrity, how can you take a look at yourself in the mirror and say what do I need to change? Let me be vulnerable and admit my mistake and then let me make sure that we are living, all of us, each and every day, by our values.

With building a franchise there is very tight brand management and brand stewardship involved, but equally as important is consistent brand design.  What are some of the key steps that you had to go through to create a platform of tight brand rules and guidelines that also empower franchise owners a little bit, rather than solely restrict them?

I sat down and I read a book called The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. Michael and I have become friends. He is eighty-two years old. He wrote my favorite book on the planet and what the book talks about is people don’t fail, systems do. Take everything in your business, and it doesn’t matter if you’re running a brand agency, or a junk removal company, take everything you do and write down on one page what’s that one best practice and how would you teach someone else to do it? So how do you load a truck, how do you answer the phone in the call center and what’s the introduction? What’s that high energy and how do you talk to the customer? How do you market the business? How do you do your accounting? Every single piece of the puzzle has to be down on one page simplified. Here are the best practices and steps. You start with the right recruiting systems to find the right people, the right training systems to make sure that they’re trained properly, and you’ve got good people doing the right stuff and then the operating systems to keep them great. If you think back to when I fired that entire team, a team with eleven people, the biggest missing system was not those people. They didn’t fail, it was me failing because I didn’t have the right recruiting systems and then I didn’t have the right training systems and so it all kind of compounded in a massive failure, but it taught me and inspired me to end up finding that book not long after to really set up the processes in my business. If you’re trying to build a franchise, franchise brands all they are is proven recipe. A recipe that you can replicate that others can follow with the same success that you’ve had.

Especially with the junk business, you have to give instructions on how to change the narrative and change customer behavior to embrace the company of a franchisee as a brand rather than just another junk hauling man. How did you go about that? A lot of it was great uniforms and exceptional service, but how did you start as a brand, start talking about junk in a way where people felt like oh, 1-800-GOT-JUNK is an actual brand and not just local people who are driving around picking up my junk?

I think it was just years and years of consistency of the blue and green 1-800- GOT-JUNK brand and logo. Our trucks parked as massive billboards across every city that we operate in. It was the PR. All these things that continued to happen, it was building that press engine. It was building that consistency of the brand and that people wanted to be a part of the winning story. Our success has helped, but these overnight success stories as they say, sure take a long time. This wasn’t something that just happened in a year or two years, next month will be our thirtieth anniversary as a company.

You are a brand genius. You have done more than most people will ever do with one brand. What does branding mean to you?

Branding to me is a look and feel, a connection. Think of a person. You look at Oprah Winfrey, the way she dresses, the personality, the energy she’s got, her intelligence, the way she can connect with human beings on humanity. She is a great brand. Businesses have to do the same thing. How do you look? How do you act? Your values, what’s the brand feel like and what makes you so special and how do you differentiate yourself from anyone else in the world? Look at brands, here in front of me I’ve got my iPhone. Some people have an Android device. Both are great, both are brands. They’re very, very different and they appeal to different people for different reasons. I think that’s the key. it is just understanding that a brand is a feeling, a look and feel and how do you strategically create it in the right way?

What in your eyes is the most important part about branding that any startup should invest in getting right in the beginning? What is this one thing with your brand you have to get right in the beginning?

I think the one thing is just deciding what the brand will look and feel like and stick to it. Just really be consistent. Is McDonald’s the greatest looking logo in the world? Eh, the colors don’t appeal to me, but you know what they’ve done exceptionally well? They’ve been consistent over time, they have not strayed from their brand look and feel. So, I think it’s more important just to pick something and go, you know what, we are going to be proud, we’re going to be all in and stick with it.

The post How Brian Scudamore, Whose Brands Are Making A Million Dollars A Day, Leads With Brand Thinking first appeared on FINIEN.

Download our free white paper to learn about:

• Why it Matters
• Constructing a Philosophy
• Crafting a Personality
• Discovering how you Differentiate
• Identifying your Ideal Audience
• Creating a Positioning Statement

The post 5 Ingredients of a Strong Brand Foundation first appeared on FINIEN.

Download our free white paper to learn about:

• Why it Matters
• Strategy Option A: House of Brands
• Strategy Option B: Branded House
• Top 3 Considerations for your Brand Architecture Strategy

The post Brand Architecture Strategies for Sustainable Brand Development first appeared on FINIEN.

Download our free white paper to learn about:

• Characteristics of a Great Name
• Types of Brand Names
• Selecting the Final Name
• Trademarks
• Megatrends, Trends, and Fads

The post How to Name your New Brand Successfully first appeared on FINIEN.

Download our free white paper to learn about:

• Branding your domain name
• The process of choosing a domain
• Purchasing a domain from an existing owner
• What to do when the .com domain name for your brand is unavailable
• How much money is a .com domain worth?
• Alternatives to “brand.com” ownership

The post How to Match Your New Brand Name with an Appropriate Domain Name first appeared on FINIEN.

The full article of below’s excerpt was first published on Forbes on 05/16/18.

How can a brand transform into being authentic when authenticity is the very core of any brand?

Last year, I wrote a book in which I studied commodity brands that people go crazy for in today’s age of innovation and disruption. It fascinated me to think that companies offering commodities — products that people don’t necessarily need more of in the marketplace, and that see no innovation in functionality or design — were flourishing. All of these companies had only two things in common that created their success: fantastic brand thinking and a truly authentic story to tell.

There’s a lot to learn from these brands, even for an established brand that may have lost its authenticity along the way. Here are five traits I saw in these companies and how they can be reinfused into any brand that wants to connect more deeply with its audience:

1. Story

Telling a brand’s story is key to branding and a fundamental element of any marketer’s playbook. Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, famously said, “In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hope.” Stories can change brand perception more than anything else, but they have to be authentic in order to resonate.

Rewrite a brand’s story by going back to its roots. You have to feel the passion that initially formed the brand, then work your story from there. People love visionaries, problem-solvers, DIYers. They love passion and, in return, will become passionate about your brand.

2. Cause

Lately, we have been “cause-washed” by thousands of startups jumping on the “buy one, give one” bandwagon started by the TOMS and Warby Parkers of the world. Yet there is a reason for their success. According to a survey, almost two-thirds of respondents said they actively seek out brands that support certain causes, and they’d be more likely to purchase from a brand that supports a cause they agree with.

Instead of writing a big year-end donation check or blindly giving a product away for every product purchased, ensure the cause you support is fully integrated into your brand’s messaging and can only be seen as truthful. Base it on a logical proposition that creates an immediate emotional connection with your audience. Plan for it to be expandable as your service or product offering diversifies.

3. Delight

Researching commodity brand sensations, I stumbled upon a slew where the small delights they offered were bigger than the actual product. A great example is pet supply startup Chewy, which takes delighting its customers’ love of their pets to heart. The brand sends out handwritten cards, including the customer’s pet’s name and provides a 24-hour hotline for customers to ask pet-food-related questions. How impactful can the brand trait of simple customer delight exactly be? Well, Chewy was acquired by PetSmart.com for $3.35 billion in 2017, which was a record for an e-commerce company.

The core idea of consistently providing small but thoughtful delights is often the only thing setting brands apart.

If you’re operating in a rather mundane segment, think about which part of your audience is not having fun, then catch them when and where they least expect it and shake them up through delightful surprises. Start with email and slowly work through your entire communication chain. One interaction at a time will make your brand more loved.

4. Transparency

You will likely recall when Avis, which held the No. 2 spot behind market leader Hertz, famously launched its 1963 brand campaign with the tagline, “When you’re only No. 2, you try harder. Or else.” That was sheer brand transparency gold.

Today’s startups enter markets and verticals that have been known for not being truthful. If your brand falls into a category that aches for transparency, comply and tell all. Customers will instantaneously trust your brand as a whole and its products over your competitors.

5. Solidarity

Aligning a brand empathetically with someone else’s dream is a move I saw many startups discover. Often going after an initial niche audience, their entire messaging became aligned around their tribes’ point of view. They exclude everyone else and thrive.

Planet Fitness is a poster child for leading with solidarity. “We don’t judge” is the motto, and “judgment-free zone” is the verbal brand glue that holds its 1,300-plus franchise locations together. Occasional free donuts at the fitness center entrance and tweets about sweets connect more than 6 million members that would otherwise not have easily found their tribe in a traditional gym.

Perhaps it’s time for your brand to wholeheartedly support your tribe’s feelings and actions and, in turn, become one of them. Forming, not forcing, a friendship with your audience is the best way to create long-term brand love.

The post Five Ways To Transform Into An Authentic Brand That People Will Love first appeared on FINIEN.