Welcome back. Our theme for this series is "Business and The Survival of the Fittest". If you missed Ep. 1, be sure to check it out here.
We've arrived at Act Two of our show. Act two: "Blue Eyes vs. Brown, or: How Customers "See" Your Expertise".
In Act One, we talked about how it's the culmination of thousands of unique, individual experiences that make up who you are. These experiences are the DNA of your expertise--meaning that who you are makes you the expert.
Expertise = the DNA, or the terra firma on which your entire business is built.
In Act Two, we are going to expand the biology metaphor, if you will.
Big B, little b
Ring any bells from high school science class?
BB (big B) or bb (little b) refers to your genotype, DNA, or genetic makeup. It's the stuff you inherited from your parents, but can't see.
Brown eyes (BB) or blue eyes (bb) is how scientists refer to your phenotype, or how your genotype is physically expressed. And no, you won't be tested on this later. It's just the unique way we view expertise at 16 Hoops (link to checklist).
Let's put this all in plain language. If you have two parents with blue eyes, it's genetically impossible for you to have children with brown eyes. But, as my cousin Jenny proves, you can be born with blue eyes to two parents with brown eyes. Your blue eyes or brown eyes are how your DNA expresses itself.
(See--I told you that Mrs. Bresnick's words are burned into my memory!)
What on earth does all this have to do with your business? Still with us?
Expertise = DNA, or genotype.
Branding = Eye color, or phenotype.
Branding is how your expertise is expressed to your customers. It's how your expertise "looks."
Logos, marks, colors, feeling, design, style. Brown eyes, blue eyes, BB, bb.
The best businesses do the hard work to first uncover their own expertise, and then build a brand that expresses that expertise perfectly to their ideal customer.
Effective branding is like a pheromone to your perfect customer. They are drawn to it instinctively, like bears to honey.
Random branding is forgettable
Bad or random branding creates an echo chamber around your business. You might as well be talking to yourself.
Your potential customers are just going to pass you by or not see you at all.
Or worse, your potential customers won't be able to distinguish you and your pretty template logo from every other pretty template-logo photography business out there.
And so they hire the cheapest pretty template-logo photography business they can find--because, after all, what's the difference? They all look the same. If you're one ant in a seething pile, how can anyone be expected to notice you?
This is how the race to the bottom continues in our industry.
If you are tired of competing on price, do the very, very hard work to position yourself as an expert and express it TO YOUR PERFECT CLIENT through impactful branding.
The path to the profitable, easy-to-manage business of your dreams is to ignore everyone else and target your ideal client. You do this by first establishing expertise, then expressing it through compelling branding.
Coming up next week is Act Three: "You ARE good. You LOOK good. Now ACT good."