Supporting your Brand and Your Business

Bruce Turkel will present on this topic, “Brand Messaging is Fertilizer for Growing Your Profits,” a session at TCIA’s Winter Management Conference 2018 in Maui, Hawaii, this coming February 4-8. For more about his talk, to view the entire agenda or to register, click here.

We lost a great big piece of new business. A great, big piece of business we should have won.

The relationship started really well. They were impressed with our outreach and our abilities. We had exquisite experience and were able to demonstrate the great results we had achieved for similar clients. Our ideas were spot on. And the presentation went as well as it could have. We were on fire. But we still lost a great big piece of business.

The worst part?

It was all my fault.

Do you want to know why?

We were meeting with the client after the pitch. They were blown away by our presentation and we were negotiating next steps. They were fine with our pricing and had no issues with the contract itself. They liked the people who would be working on their business. In fact, they were so pleased with the team that their CEO complimented me on assembling such a great group of professionals to work for them.

“Thanks,” I quipped. “With such great people working on your business, there’s almost nothing for me to do. And you know, I’m always willing to do less.”
The CEO stared at me dumbfounded. Although I didn’t realize it at the time, everything went downhill from there.

I was kidding.

Really.

I. Was. Kidding.

There was actually a lot of work for me to do. And I was very excited about doing it. But that little comment that I thought was so amusing – “I’m always willing to do less” – was exactly what our new client was worried about.

It turns out that the last firm they had worked with had apparently done a great presentation with talented senior level people too. But after that they staffed the business with entry-level employees. They never delivered the work quality they had promised and the client’s business suffered.

My new client was concerned that history was about to repeat itself.

Of course, I had no way of knowing that that was her concern, but ignorance is never an acceptable excuse. My attempt to be cute cost us a showcase client and a lot of money.

A few weeks later, I found a story online. I am not the original author but I think an edited version is important enough to repeat here:

Two dogs walk into the same room at different times.

One comes out wagging his tail while the other comes out growling.

A woman watching all this goes into the room to see what could possibly make one dog so happy and the other so mad.

To her surprise the room was filled with mirrors.

The happy dog found a thousand happy dogs looking back at him while the angry dog saw only angry dogs growling back at him.

What you see in the world around you is a reflection of who you are.

Where I saw funny, our client saw lazy. I learned a lot from this about building and supporting my brand and my business.

Building a great brand is not only about reinforcing your business offer. It’s about pre-inforcing your offer too.

Bruce Turkel is a branding and advertising expert. Three words sum up Bruce Turkel’s business philosophy: Useful. Valuable. Enjoyable. Whether he’s helping his clients develop memorable brands, keeping audiences riveted and entertained, writing a blog post or giving branding and advertising advice on national news, Bruce lives and breathes this philosophy. Driven to see clients enjoy greater revenue by changing consumers’ perceptions of their products and services, Bruce employs a unique combination of creativity and marketing to help his clients make their brands more valuable.

Bruce continues to break new ground with innovative work using his simple yet powerful brand building techniques. Over the years, he has created remarkably effective campaigns for American Express, Miami, Discovery Networks, Puerto Rico, Bacardi, and more. Bruce is a weekly contributor on the Fox Business Channel and appears as a branding and advertising expert on MSNBC, CNN, CBS and NPR. He’s been featured in Fast Company, The New York Times, Communication Arts, Fortune, and AdWeek. He’s authored five books on advertising (his latest: All About Them) and is currently finishing his next two. You can read Bruce’s blog and watch his TEDx speech and TV appearances at http://www.BruceTurkel.com.