Make Your Brand as Addictive as Coffee

Imagine if you knew the secret ingredient to making your brand or business as addictive as coffee?

Big promise, right?

In today’s article I’ll walk you through the exact three things that come up in every successful brand.

Think CHANEL v’s Dior or UBER v’s Taxi’scoffee 2 (2)

For the last month I’ve been holding a Monday morning sales meeting for one of my clients and one of the team members came in super late to the meeting. CRAZY thing was he had made time to grab his morning takeaway coffee!

Let’s just say that totally pee’d me off as I imagine him knowing he was running late but he still made time to stand in line, order and wait for it!

Then the idea occurred … how can we make our business’s create such a burning need?

Now, there’s not just one secret that makes a brand addictive as I noticed they all have some very individual reasons why they have had success. BUT there are some key fundamentals that stand out amongst them all.

1) Consistency

Consistency in quality, Consistency in follow through, consistency in service, consistency with your message… internally with your team and externally to your marketing. The list goes on when it comes to consistency!

How much repeat business do you get right now? When customers come back to you time and time again they expect to receive the same level of quality/service as they did the first time.

Think about how we eat out at cafes and favourite restaurants …leading brands are always consistent. You know exactly what you are getting like MacDonald’s…ok don’t shoot me but we all know they are consistent with service, delivery time and the type of food you are getting.

It’s when we have to wait is when we get upset or don’t get asked the up-sell question “would you like fries with that” is when we notice it as it’s inconsistent to what we have been trained to expect just from McDonald’s.

Hence why people love to get coffee from the same place, day in and day out. They know exactly what they are going to have, how it’s going to taste, how much it’s going to cost, how good the service is, how long the wait time is and not to mention the caffeine addiction… okay maybe we can’t complete with that one!

2) Competitive edge

Is your industry crowded?

I’m sure the answer is yes!

So what do you need to do to stand out from the crowd? You have to continually reinvent yourself, the product, the branding…or ask yourself what do I have to do to stay current to your markets needs?

Mac for Apple computers wasn’t the leader at one stage in computers, though they became king due to continually going beyond customers’ expectations and delivering cutting edge products of it’s industry.

Any sports team plays to win and so does any big brand. They don’t sit back and follow, they stand out to dominate and optimise being seen.

So are you continually marketing, launching new offerings or even better seeing the weakness in your competitors and fulfilling it?

…Think UBER vs. Taxi’s? They see the weekend and you can book a Cab by an app, it’s cheaper, has you feel like you have control as you can view where your ride is, make it easy for no cash exchange – its all digital.

Look at your how your competitors see the gap, there are customers out there for opposites, think CHANEL vs. DIOR, there’s smooth peanut butter lovers vs. crunchy peanut butter lovers…and then there are also the haters so they go for Jam.

3) Exposure

How do you get your business unknown to known?

Those who can saturate the market the more they’ll be heard…you could be the best graphic designer in the world but if you are not getting enough exposure you’ll remain the world’s best kept secret.

A distinctive, successful brand has the ability to reach consumers through multiple channels.

The more the marketing budget the higher advantage they have, but what if you are playing with a small budget?

That’s where forming alliances and partnerships really can be the key and using things like re- targeting online for your ads to be able to pop-up on the right Facebook feed, or follow them around if they visited your website.

Jane Lou from Sho Po said on her interview on my Cashflow Candy Podcast when I asked her “What would you do differently with Sho Po if you had to start from scratch again?” (formally know as Show Pony) she said “I would not have been scared to throw money into marketing. As soon as I did that, it made the biggest difference in my sales”.

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