Marketing and Branding Your Company

Jeff: Hello, I’m Jeff Philips and welcome to this week’s webisode. Today I have a marketing and branding expert. Tim Pedersen, welcome to the show.

Tim: Thanks, Jeff.

Jeff: Why don’t you explain to the viewers a little bit about yourself and what it is that you do?

Tim: Great. Again, my name is Tim Peterson, and I have a company called Right Brain Branding. We help companies develop their brand. A brand is basically your company’s story and what your company’s about.

Jeff: Why is it so important for a company to have a brand?

Tim: A brand is really all about the mission of the company, the story of a company, the vision of a company. It encompasses everything about it, so the personal and even the cultural side of a company and the visual as well. Let me throw it back at you. What’s your favorite coffee shop?

Jeff: I would have to say Caribou Coffee.

Tim: Great. Okay, so when I say Caribou Coffee, tell me what do you think of?

Jeff: I think of a ski lodge, especially in the wintertime.

Tim: Excellent. Perfect, so they have spent probably millions if not almost billions of dollars to get you to think about that because when you say Starbucks, you don’t think ski lodge.

Jeff: No.

Tim: You don’t necessarily think warmth or a warm atmosphere, but Caribou you do. That’s their brand. That’s what they want you to know them as, and why you wouldn’t go to Caribou over Starbucks. Now, some people go to Starbucks because they like whatever it is about Starbucks, and they’ve spent millions upon millions of dollars to get you to think about their company.

Jeff: Okay, is branding just for the bigger companies?

Tim: We talked about big guys, but it’s for everyone. You are a brand, and In Focus Studios is a brand, Right Brain Studios is a brand. We ourselves are a brand, and so it’s everything that you are with your company and all the people in your company. It’s the personalities, it’s how people think about you, how people feel about you.
There’s a little thought process with branding. The only time you actually own your brand is that first day when you create it and put it out there. After that, it’s out there for the world to disseminate, and create and fix in their head of what it is, so it’s important to constantly be controlling that conversation or guiding that conversation about your brand and who you are.

Jeff: Is it expensive to come up with a brand? Obviously, you said these companies spend millions of dollars to create it, but since we’re talking smaller businesses, at this point, what does it take for a small business to create a brand?

Tim: What it is, is basically your story, stories are huge in branding. People love stories. You want to get that story out there. There’s a story about why you started your business or why you love doing what you do, why you’re passionate about what you do. That’s part of your brand, and that’s what people want to connect with.
Everyone has that with their company or should have with their company, hopefully. That is all part of creating that brand for you and, again, putting it out there for people to understand and to be able to resonate with. You want them to be able to have some kind of feeling about your company and get that personality feel from it.

Jeff: How does all this play into the web?

Tim: Well, whether we like it or not, we have global companies. We live in small towns. We love the small town atmosphere, but we’ve all gone global. We’re all on the worldwide web. The internet is huge in building your brand. It’s a lot of times, the first thing or second thing people see about a company. They might get a referral, they might meet somebody personally. The first thing they’re going to do is go to the internet and look you up. What you want to do is make sure, again, that you have that story on there. That you have the look and feel of your company.

It’s very visual, so you want to have the right visual things. Your business card and your website match because if they have your business card and they go to your website, this is green and this is blue, there’s a disconnect. They have a story of you being warm and friendly, and you got this cold, sterile website. You have a Starbucks website instead of a Caribou website where it’s warm. There’s a disconnect. You want to make sure now that with the web and everything that’s going on in the web, is really connecting to what is out there because it’s out there all the time working for you.

Jeff: Very good information. If the viewers would like to find out more, talk to you, where can they go?

Tim: Our website, which we’re actually redoing to better connect with our brand is www.rightbrainbranding.com, so feel free to peruse the information that we have there.

Let us know how you have branded your company by leaving a comment below. Or give us a call to discuss how to improve your branding or enhance your marketing strategy with video!