Honey Parker - Billion-Dollar Branding: Brand Your Small Business Like a Big Business and Make Great Things Happen

Billion-Dollar Branding

Brand Your Small Business Like A Big-Business And Make Great Things Happen

HONEY PARKER & BLAINE PARKER

Foreword by Dave Lakhani

New York

Billion-Dollar Branding

Brand Your Small Business Like A Big-Business And Make Great Things Happen

2013 HONEY PARKER & BLAINE PARKER. All rights reserved.

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ISBN 978-1-61448-272-7 paperback

ISBN 978-1-61448-273-4 eBook

Library of Congress Control Number: 2012935463

Morgan James Publishing

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In an effort to support local communities, raise awareness and funds, Morgan James Publishing donates a percentage of all book sales for the life of each book to Habitat for Humanity Peninsula and Greater Williamsburg.

This book is for all the small businesses owners with whom weve worked who have been brave enough to commit. Theyre much happier and more profitable for it. (As a result, so are we.)

This book is about a very controversial subject: branding a business. There is a tremendous amount of disagreement about what branding is. There is also a tremendous amount of disagreement about what branding does. That aside, there is plenty of protected brand imagery. This book deals with the creation of brand. It does not deal with the legal ramifications of branding, infringing on registered trademarks, and other areas of brand liability. As with any such endeavor, you require the services of a good attorney in order to stay out of trouble. Do not expect this book to help you in that regard. Do not call us when George Lucas sues you for infringing on the rights of his Star Wars franchise when you open alien-themed Wookie Cookies in your local strip mall. We are not lawyers. We are marketers. Get representation. May the force of good legal know-how be with you.

Just about every day, Im asked to write the foreword to a book. Most days, I simply say no, even to friends. The answer to why is that I dont want to be branded as a professional foreword writer. When Blaine and Honey approached me and asked me to consider writing this foreword, I said, Maybe. Let me read the book.

They sent it and I started reading. I consumed the book in a day and set it aside, but kept coming back to it. There was something that I couldnt immediately put my finger on, but it kept pulling me back. I had to know more. I could sense there was magic in the words that I hadnt read before; and I had to understand what the magic was, and if it could be profitably and universally applied to small businesses.

Then it hit me. This book is the antidote to everything that is wrong with the plethora of marketing books on business owners bookshelves today. It doesnt offer plug-in, fill-in-the-blank worksheets that promise you a fantastical brand and tagline that is sure to appeal to the ethos, pathos and logos each of us are silently craving. It doesnt give you a detailed analysis of the worlds biggest brands simply to demonstrate what can be done if you have a big enough budget.

The book tackles, head-on, the idea that branding is a waste and direct response marketing is the only answer to attracting a buying consumer today... Blaine and Honey also demonstrate how brand can make direct response more responsive.

They pull out the holy grail of small business advertising and they crap all over it.

There, I said it.

The thing that kept pulling me back was their very direct confrontation of the status quo. But not just confrontation for the sake of being provocative. Blaine and Honey lay bare the consumer influence genome. Most importantly of all, they give you the tools through both rhetoric and example to discover it in yourself (and your clients) to affect you profitably and forever.

Inside this book, youll experience an onion being peeled back layer by layer. Youll learn through examples of large businesses you know, but more often small businesses like yours that you dont. Youll learn exactly how brands are discovered and translated into an experience that the consumer can embody and extol.

What you wont find in this book is a list of colors and how they make you feel.

There is no long discussion of the relative merit of dozens of font styles.

You will find a discussion about why making your logo bigger in an ad is mostly stupid.

For the last few years, pundits have been talking about the eminent demise of traditional media and the dominance of social media. Ive been writing and preaching that social media is the media, too. It isnt any differentits simply a different distribution channel. Inside these pages you wont find a long love affair with social media. But they do demonstrate exactly how your brand can be most effectively distributed through the medium. This is a great departure from the hundreds of books being published today about social media and the godsend it promises to be. Dont get me (or Blaine and Honey) wrong: social media is a force to be understood and mastered. But it follows a set of brand rules that Blaine and Honey lay out which remain unchanged, regardless of the medium.