Want a behind the scenes look at the new Living In Chico commercial?

We recently helped consult and advise one of our clients through the renaming process: the Biggs-Gridley Memorial Hospital which is now Orchard Hospital, changed its name after 64 years of operation.

With so many words and terms in the world of marketing these days it is hard to keep track of what they all mean! A somewhat newer term, “inbound marketing” seems to be quite the hit in the marketing world today. With social media and the internet being so popular nowadays, it is important to understand how to effectively market to this crowd. So, “what exactly is inbound marketing,” you might ask?

You’re thinking of hiring an internet marketing consultant, but do you know why?

If you’re like many small business owners, you’ve heard the term internet marketing, and you’re starting to think that it’s important because more and more of your colleagues are hiring an internet marketing consultant. But maybe you’re skeptical. After all, you’ve been pretty successful without internet marketing in the past, and you’ve seen traditional marketing work just fine. Internet marketing seems a bit like you’re just shooting in the dark. In fact, you don’t really even know what it is. To help you on your quest to do what’s best for your small business, we’ll help you understand the difference between internet marketing and traditional marketing.

A Brand is incremental. That’s right, incremental. It is made up of lots of little pieces that impact the whole.  If you want to better understand what a brand is or how to influence it you need to understand how to see it at both a small and large level.  You may not agree or understand what I’m, “on about,” but let’s start with how I define “Brand.”

Reputation

A brand is described many ways but as Marty Neumier put it so well in his book, “The Brand Gap,” it all boils down to your reputation. Your reputation is what people think of you at a conscious level and an unconscious level. Your reputation is what makes people like you or not like you. It influences whether people trust you or not, and it impacts what they say and do in regards to you or your company. Basically, reputation is an abstract word that we use to group all of the little things in life that give us some hint about who a person or company is. Do you have a reputation for being nice or mean a good dresser or a poor one?  Do you have a reputation for being conscientious or sloppy, timely or late, honest or dishonest? Whatever picture you have of a person is part of their reputation. There are many things that come together to give us an impression of a person or company and those things form a reputation. The conscious mind isn’t even able to keep up with all of these impressions, but your right brain or unconscious mind does and that influences our gut feelings and emotions on any subject. (The right brain is powerful and one of its big job descriptions is to take all the little pieces and then consider the whole picture).

Yes, brand and reputation are complicated beasts when you start to look under the hood, but when you just consider that everything you do impacts your reputation it becomes easier to impact how you influence it.  When I wrote that a brand is incremental, I was referring to all the little things and that is how we analyze it.  Imagine a line with “weak” on the left end and “strong” on the right end and lots of incremental hash marks along the line as if it were a scale from 0 to 100.

Every little thing that improves your reputation in a society, whether you consciously notice them or not, are positive attributes and move you further up the line towards 100.  Everything that takes  away from your reputation, no matter how small, are negative attributes that move you towards 0.  Now take all the little things about a person or a company, and I mean all of them, add all the positives and subtract the negatives and you get a relative score on how strong or weak your Brand or reputation is.

Many of these things are so small, like polished shoes or misspelled words, that on their own people say they are not significant, but when added up they shift our thoughts and behaviors.

A Brand is incremental and when you understand what to look for and how to influence it you reap the rewards of having a strong brand or reputation. In the next blog I will talk more about the little things and  how to know if something is worth your time.

Thanks for reading and let me know if this was helpful.

That’s right, we built a machine that would smoke 680 cigarettes at once.  Why?  Well two reasons.  We did it for one of our clients, First Five of Butte County, as a part of a PSA (Public Service Announcement) campaign (see other videos) and let’s face it, we thought it would be cool, really cool! (If you don’t already know it Half a Bubble Out is a Unique International Marketing and Advertising company in Northern California.) The main goal of the campaign is to educate people on the effects of second hand smoke.  We have really tried to create commercials that stand out from all the other commercials and just get people to pay attention.  We went with the facts and humor angle.  “Smoking 680 Cigarettes at Once” is our favorite so far.  Our clients loved it and all our friends just laugh and look at us with that look in their eye that just seems to say, “one more reason you are Half a Bubble Out.” It was crazy, a little out of control and really fun. So here it is and you decide what YOU think.

WARNING: It’s really gross and some people actually cough when they see the smoke but that’s what it’s supposed to do.  Breathe deep, press play and enjoy…

I've been thinking recently about the main points my clients all need to know.  This last week I had one client contact me and tell me that they are shutting their entrprenurial venture down because it will cost them too much.  They are two Moms that had an idea and didn't realize the cost.  They invented a cool thing for parents and their kids and even spent several thousands of dollars having it developed in China but didn't realize what it would take to go to market.