Problem. Branding problem. Big branding problem.

Consumers have taken control of Snapple’s brand and rubbed their noses in the mess. According to Bud Kennedy at the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Bonnell’s will no longer serve the brand formerly known as Dublin Dr. Pepper, even though the same product will still be available sans the Dublin moniker. Other establishments are following suit. Consumers are protesting with their taste buds as well, vowing to boycott not just Dr. Pepper but all Snapple products. That includes Snapple, 7UP, Mott’s, Canada Dry, A&W Root Bear, Clamato, Country Time, Orange Crush, Deja Blue, Diet Rite, Hawaiian Punch, Hires, Margaritaville, and more. (They may have to work real hard to avoid all Snapple products.) I’d say what we have here is a tarnished brand.

If we could re-wind that tape, there are a few branding principles I’d want Snapple to understand about the Dublin Dr. Pepper phenomenon.

First, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group should understand that Dublin DP was about so much more than a soft drink, more than a trademark. It had the hearts and minds of loyal imbibers that went beyond mere taste. Let’s look at some of the attributes of the brand.

Mystique: A positive aura surrounded the Dublin Dr. Pepper name. The little bitty bottling plant managed to stick to its guns, refusing to bow to the cheaper, less tasty god of high fructose corn syrup. It’s a David and Goliath story. We like the little guy with the little slingshot and the little pebble. Do you get that, Dr. Pepper Snapple Group?

Nostalgia: The Dublin folks continued to use the old bottles we baby boomers grew up with. How fun it was to sip your DP from a faded 10-2-4 container! (Remember when they got you to drink more by saying you needed a picker-upper three times a day?) A day trip to Dublin to pick up a case or two enhanced the experience as you drove through the Texas countryside to reach your destination. And if you didn’t grow up pouring a pack of salted Planter’s peanuts into your DP, well, you’ve missed something. Maybe it’s an acquired taste, but it’s a memory I cherish. Snapple, did you ever bother to understand that memories were part of the brand?

Exclusivity: You couldn’t find Dublin Dr. Pepper just anywhere. Even when the small town bottlers wrongly went beyond the 40-mile circumference that defined their distribution territory, it was still something you had to hunt down with a purpose. That’s why we made pilgrimages down Highway 67 to get our own stash. Inconvenient? Sure. But it’s part of the experience. What kind of experience will you provide your customers, Mr. Snapple?

So if the former Dublin Dr. Pepper brand enjoyed mystique, nostalgia and exclusivity as important brand attributes, what brand attributes are now identified with Snapple, the “winner” of this dispute? How about “bully?” How about “clueless?” Remember, the consumer is the one who has the final say on what your brand is about.

Understanding the loyalty of Dublin Dr. Pepper fans early on in negotiations could have led to a very different outcome. Being known as the corporate giant who obliterated 14 highly valued jobs at a tiny bottling plant in a small rural community does not win friends. I doubt that Snapple will suffer much from the debacle, but Texans have a long memory, and the corporate giant will need to be working on damage control for some time to come. I’m thinking, Mr. Snapple, you didn’t really win.

Well, you can’t blame me for dreaming. The start of a new year is the opportunity to clean the slate, to do things differently, to make our businesses into better versions of themselves, right?

So I’ve been working on that. Maybe you have, too. But along with the specific, measurable, time-sensitive goal-setting that we business owners do, I wanted to stretch beyond that. I wanted to think beyond numbers, tasks, and measurement to look at—oh, no, hear it comes–the mission statement.

Mission statements set the tone for the direction of the brand, so it makes sense to check in on it from time to time. As I revisit my own, maybe my questions will help you re-define yours as well. Here goes.

How will you change the world?

How does your organization make life better for others?

Businesses exist because they make life better for people. You may think they exist just to make money, but nobody else really cares about that. Yes, owners, execs, and stockholders care about making money. But that won’t happen unless the business changes the customer’s world somehow, solves a problem, clears up a zit.

What human beings have the problems you can solve?

Does your mission statement identify them? If you clear zits, does it make sense to aim your mission statement (and thus your marketing) toward all human beings, or just the ones most likely to have zits?

Have your practices and day-to-day activities evolved beyond your mission statement?

Organizations change. The environment around them changes. Someone stumbles–or purposefully steps–into new territory just beyond the clearing, and before you know it, there’s a whole new aspect to your business. Or a whole new business. Zit-clearing leads you to prom limo rentals. Or skin consulting. How will your mission statement remain sturdy and robust in the face of inevitable change? Or has the company lost its way? Would it be better to re-focus on the original mission? You know, return to your roots? Do the roots even exist anymore?

Does your mission statement inspire, or produce yawns?

I want to be inspired by your mission statement. Heck, I want to be inspired by my own mission statement. Changing the world and solving problems are not for the faint of heart, even if you’re working on one tiny corner of the world. If you clear zits and help teenagers experience their proms with joyful confidence, say so! Be bold. Be brave. Put yourself out there.

Okay, now I’m pumped up. Mission statement, here I come! I’ll let you know how it turns out.

The following summer with no help from me, petunias started sprouting in unexpected places, like between the courtyard pavers 15 feet away from the first location. I left them alone, and enjoyed their spirited scent over and over again.

Last summer I thought they were done. No courtyard petunias. Until, late in the season, I noticed a couple lavender-pink blossoms waving in the breeze in yet another spot–next to the street under a palmetto where I’d had trouble getting other flowers to grow, about 30 feet from the previous place. They flourished into the fall. Now it’s January, and after some freezing North Texas weather, they’re still standing, with only a couple blooms hanging on, but still vigorously green. Hardy little boogers!

Thriving in January

Keep in mind that heirloom plants can be grown from seed and will come back “true to type.” The second, third and forever-after generations look and smell just like the first.

So what business lessons do my heirloom petunias have for us?

First, honor your roots. Heirloom petunias are tough. It’s in their DNA to re-seed themselves, to be fragrant, to be what they are. Does the DNA of your business express itself in honest ways, true to its origins?

Second, adapt to conditions or plant yourself somewhere else. “Somewhere else” may not mean a physical re-location. It might mean positioning to reach a new market, or developing a new product or service. My petunias have no control over where the seeds land and germinate. Nor do you have control over many conditions surrounding your business–recession, competition, changing technology. But you can adapt and thrive by embracing the reality around you.

Third, attract, then fulfill on the promise. Marketing your business is  like the scent of my petunias. It should attract someone who has been appreciating from afar to come closer, to take a whiff of the real thing, maybe return time after time to enjoy. Don’t disappoint. Ever been under-whelmed by the absence of scent from a picture-perfect rose? Marketing with its beauty, it encourages you to come close, only to let you down by not fulfilling on the promise of a wonderful fragrance. Reminds me of the saying “All hat and no cattle.” Okay, I’m mixing my metaphors here. (Hmmm, that does bring another olfactory experience to mind.)

Honoring our roots, being adaptive, and fulfilling on the promise–they make for a business that doesn’t just look good, but smells good, too. And I can’t wait to discover where my petunias–and my business–will crop up next summer.

I’ve worn glasses since third grade and contact lenses since my early twenties. Considering that AARP has decided I’m in their demographic, that’s a lot of squinting at eye charts. I’d choose an optometrist based on proximity, visit once a year, get my lenses, and I’m good to go until the calendar flips.

Sometime during the Clinton administration, my eyes became a little more complicated, and the dreaded word “bifocals” became part of the conversation. However, the optometrist of the moment–good for him–suggested I try something called “mono-vision,” with one lens correcting my near vision, the other my distant vision. The principle is that your brain adjusts so you’ll use, in my case, the right eye for distant looking and the left eye for close-up. It took almost a year to adjust. But it wasn’t too bad, and it beat the heck out of using bifocals. However, if I wanted to work on my crossword or read with more comfort, the best solution was to remove my lenses completely and read with bare eyes. Yep, my uncorrected near vision was almost 20/20.

Visits to the optometrist followed that routine. Did I want to continue with mono-vision. Yes, I did. Eye chart. Look up. Look over there. Better. Worse. Prescription. Order lenses. Done. Then the optometrist disappeared, who knows why, and so did my records. When the folks in the office wouldn’t take my word that I had actually had an eye exam within the past year, I decided it was time to move on.

Taking the recommendation of a friend, I ended up in one of those no-appointment, cut-rate assembly line places where everyone behaved exactly as trained, with no personality, no variation and no consideration that I might be a person who believes that robots have their place, just not when it comes to caring for my eyeballs. I did this for three or four years. Okay. I deserve better than this. Time to find a new vision care provider. But who?

Meanwhile, PILL (Partner in Love and Life) has been on a different vision care path. He comes home with high marks for his optometrist, Dr. Kory Cummings. And she’s moving her practice to our ‘hood, which checks off the convenience benefit. I make the appointment and show up. Short wait, people with pleasant personalities up front. So far, so good.

Dr. Kory performs the exam, asks me about the mono-vision, and says something like, “Your eyes are almost perfect mono-vision without correction. Would you like to try correcting just your right eye?” She wasn’t surprised I was more comfortable reading without lenses. During all those years of eye exams, she’s the only doctor who ever offered that option. Yes, it’s possible my eyes have improved, but that dramatically in a year? I doubt it. And I’m enjoying the benefits of her astute observation. I can see my computer screen better; there’s no need to remove my one lens to read or dive into a crossword because my Super-Near-Vision Lefty takes over nicely–nekkid! I can read Doonesbury over my granola, even when the dark type is printed over a dark color. And one lens instead of two means half the price! Am I happy or what?

Marketing? What Dr. Kory did may not seem like marketing. She was doing her job, caring for my vision. But I contend that marketing is your business, and your business is marketing. Compelling ads, a great website, reward programs, email marketing, whatever–they all play a role in raising awareness and ferreting out prospects. And yes, you’ll need to spend some money on them. But the experience is the clincher. In this case, the experience was an unexpected solution to a problem I didn’t even realize could be dramatically improved.

Not marketing? Well, just in case you’re on the lookout for a new optometrist, click here to check out her website.

No. Of course you don’t. But judging from the daily robo-calls I get on the direct line at my office, there’s a lot of this going around.

The robo-call. This is the epitome of waste in marketing. I know it’s cheaper than hiring 20-somethings to occupy a cubicle and wear a headset. Maybe it’s so cheap that the ROI works. But I can’t imagine that people listen to the whole pitch, much less buy the scam–er–product. Even if these were legitimate calls, (Some are legal, some not. Just depends.) it’s obvious the companies behind them know nothing about me except that I have a business phone.

Yesterday I decided to listen past the first five seconds of a robo-call, to see where it would lead. Thought it would make good research for this post. Ms. Robo was pitching a line of credit for businesses. Nope. Sorry, Ms. Robo. If I need a line of credit, I’ll be chatting with someone I know at my local bank. You, Ms. Robo, have not invested in creating an atmosphere in which a sale can be made, and I am not a prospect.

Now I know most people reading this are not using robo-calls. But if you’re a networker, observe the behavior in the room (including your own). Is there an assumption that everyone is a prospect? Has anything been invested in the relationship? That’s what marketing does. It creates the atmosphere in which a sale can happen. It starts the conversation–or ends it, which can be good as well. Can that be done without money? Maybe. In his book The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell says:

“..word of mouth is–even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns–still the most important form of human communication.”

But you still need to make an investment, and that investment is in time. Your time goes into all the activities that promote awareness–networking, social media, phone calls, public speaking, demonstrations, etc.

Positive word of mouth is a powerful thing: people are more likely to buy from someone who has been referred by someone they trust. But it can be snail-like, barring you hit it lucky with social media sites or your YouTube video goes viral. (Social media is today’s word of mouth.)

Back to those uninterested, unqualified prospects. Most people do not wear labels on their foreheads that say “I am a prospect. I have a problem you can solve.” You have to find out if someone is, indeed, a prospect, not just a mirror-fogger. (Okay, all human beings have value and should be treated with respect. But everyone is not a prospect.) You make it possible for them to know enough about your business so they’re motivated to raise their hand and identify themselves as interested in what you have to offer. Your marketing speaks to their pain, proposes benefits and a solution, and sets you apart.

Here’s where awareness comes in. Whether you use traditional marketing tactics (direct mail, newsletters, print advertising, prospecting calls, networking) or internet-based tactics (web site, email campaigns, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, blogs), or both, your marketing efforts will first raise awareness of your business and its purpose. Second, if your message is on target, if it gives a compelling reason to do business with you, and if it’s delivered to the right market, real prospects will begin to identify themselves.

Marketing drives sales. It makes the life of the sales rep much easier because awareness precedes them. Marketing and Sales need to be friends, and it blows me away to see that often they are not. No one really wants to spend energy on uninterested, unqualified prospects. But by not treating marketing as a serious component of your business, you may be doing just that.

Reason #1: We use word of mouth. That’s it. It’s free.

Actually, this works pretty darn well for businesses like restaurants and clubs that may serve hundreds of people every week. Add a little Twitter or Facebook time, and the line is out the door. But suppose you run a company that serves (ably and profitably, I trust) a couple dozen to a couple hundred clients in a year’s time. It’s pretty hard to get traction from such a small universe, especially if it’s a B-to-B enterprise. Getting your clients to rave about you isn’t so easy, especially if A) they don’t want you to get too busy for them, and B) the only people they know who would use your products or services are their competitors.

So you’re looking at networking. Let’s look at the “free” part. What’s your time worth? What about those weekly $30 lunches? Some networking groups are free, some not. I’m just saying, look at the real cost and your ROI. You may just be meeting a bunch of nice people who are not your target market and who are pretty unlikely to rub their pinstriped shoulders with anyone in your target market.

I’m not suggesting you stop networking–sometimes you need an excuse to get out of the office–just that you be clear-eyed about it. Compare the effectiveness of spending an hour in a room with people who don’t understand your business to, say, attending a trade show where a goodly number of folks are your target market, and who all get what you’re selling. Maybe that sweet spot doesn’t exist for you, but it’s smart to look for and invest in it. And as everybody’s mom says, “It’s all about choices.”

However, our success with honey-do projects didn’t drop out of the sky. First of all, my Partner in Life and Love (hereafter known as PILL), at the age of 14, helped his father build their family’s home. There were some very practical lessons there–planning, measuring, tools, and skills, all learned from a patient, skilled and experienced mentor.

My own experience growing up on the farm gave me a pickup load of opportunities as the designated helper. “Hold this while I cut that.” “Climb up there and throw that rope down.” “Hand me the Phillips screwdriver.”

Even so, as a couple tackling the large and small projects that make a house a home, we couldn’t rely entirely on our own DIY history. We had to learn to work together as a team and share the vision for the project. We had sketches on envelope backs, drawings on grid paper, tools (Of course, every project requires a new tool, bless PILL’s heart.), a budget and the money to back it up, trips to the big box store, and the route to the urgent care clinic in case something involving fingers, bones or blood went wrong. And sometimes we depended on a skilled craftsman, just so something crucial was done right and we had something solid to build on.

That brings us to DIY marketing. Yes, it can be done. Most start-ups, solo entrepreneurs, and even established small and medium-sized businesses don’t have the budget to hire a marketing firm or ad agency for everything. But they should set aside enough money to get professional help with the crucial tools for their marketing toolbox.

Here’s a list of toolbox essentials. I’ll tell you whether it’s a DIY item or a HAP (Hire A Pro) item.

1. Business Name. Yes, a lot of the good ones have been taken. But with due diligence, you should be able to come up with something interesting that glides off the tongue. It’s your first opportunity to set yourself apart. Don’t blow this off. It’s important. Don’t default to a set of initials; they’re hard to remember. Perform due diligence so you don’t step on any trademarked toes. DIY if you’re a word person. HAP if you’re not.
2. Logo. Your branding builds on your business name and logo. It represents the goodwill you create through your business, and will serve you for many years to come. (It’s like a refrigerator, but that’s the topic for another blog.) Even with a good design sense, an amateur will probably not understand the technical issues needed in today’s digital world, nor our legacy world of print. If you’re a graphic designer, DIY. If not, HAP.
3. Business Card. Your business card is the cheapest sales rep you’ll ever hire. It stays behind after you’ve left the room, representing you and all your business stands for. Don’t use those awful perforated sheets you run through your printer. (You don’t want to look like a do-it-yourselfer.) And don’t use one of those online printers that advertises their business on the back. Oh, and it shouldn’t look like a Photoshop sampler either. For Pete’s sake, exercise some taste. This will probably be the sales and marketing tool you use most often. Give it the respect it deserves. HAP, don’t DIY.
4. Marketing Plan. This is the equivalent to the sketches and drawings. It should map out your vision and goals, and how you plan to get there. You’ll identify your target market, your competition, your unique selling proposition, your strategy and tactics. Don’t forget the all important budget. You’ll establish how many times you will “touch” your market. There are templates galore on the internet. Find one you like and use it. This can be a DIY project, but if you’re lost, HAP.
5. The List. You’ll need prospects. Always. So start identifying them. Name, address, phone, email, title, company name. Have your newsletter subscription form on your website. Without a list, you won’t be able to implement a direct mail or an email campaign. With a good one, you’ll be able to apply the many “touches” you need to get top of mind awareness. You should be able to DIY. HAP if you need to purchase a list, but you should also build one yourself.
6. The Website. This is the new front door for your business, even if you’re not an online company. It’s all but replaced the company brochure, although you still might want a simple one for face-to-face contacts. Make sure your website supports your branding and is flexible enough to grow as you grow. HAP for the website, making sure to ask for a content management system. DIY for simple text updates. HAP for e-commerce sites and anything involving private information.

Depending on your resources, your staff and your budget, there may be other tools that will make doing it yourself easier. But using the home improvement model, concrete is not my thing! I know that life’s pretty hard if I try to pour my own foundation.

A small mortgage company once contracted for our services to create a marketing brochure. The client couldn’t identify one characteristic, no matter how many ways I asked the question, that would motivate someone to choose his firm instead of a competitor. Not one! “We’re pretty much like everyone else,” he said.

O—–kay. How do you brand that?

You don’t. At least I don’t. I resigned from the project. The problem was not that the company wasn’t unique. The problem was that no one had bothered to identify and honor its uniqueness, and the boss certainly wasn’t interested in working on it. Businesses may sell essentially the same products or services, but no two companies share the same history, culture, values, experience, vision, mission, or passions.

Want your brand to stand out from the crowd? Well, a good logo helps, but it can’t overcome me-tooism. So if you’re thinking branding is just your look-and-feel, it’s time to take a step back and give that logo something meaningful to represent.