Can you be trusted? Can you trust the person you are doing business with? Gregory V. Diehl, in his excellent Brand Identity Breakthrough, emphasizes the role of trust and integrity in allowing businesses to succeed.
Commerce involves an exchange of things or services of value, and if either side is cheating, the other goes home hurt. Sometimes the exchanges are not simultaneous, and one trusts while waiting. We pay my wife’s nurses the week before they work. If something happened to me, I’d want them to be sure to get paid while things were sorted out. In most jobs, workers do the work, and trust their employers to pay them after.
Sometimes the trust revolves around quality. When we buy something, we rely on the seller to have provided what was promised and not to have covered up hidden defects.
Diehl’s highly informative book is divided into five sections, with twelve chapters, five case studies, and three appendices…a wealth of material. The section titles are below, with my comments following them and with Diehl’s words in quotation marks:
I. Why Identity Matters
In a country of over 300 million people, we have lots of choices with whom to do business.
We have to identify those who have something we want and can be trusted to deal with us fairly.
We have to make ourselves stand out from the others who seem much like us, if we are to get the deal. We have quality, price, reputation, convenience, appearance, and many other elements to use to create our “brand,” the shorthand mental description of how our potential customers see us.
Diehl urges the entrepreneur to ask repeatedly, “How do I create value today?” Not, “How can I get them to buy today?”
Creating value should precede exchange.
II. Creating Your Brand Identity
In the Wild West, the cattleman’s brand on his cattle indicated they belonged to him. Today, a company’s brand goes beyond that: firms use it to indicate that they stand by their products’ quality. Microsoft, Apple, IBM, Google, Facebook, Twitter, Cadillac, BMW, Audi…all represent sets of values attested to by the brand owners.
For the small business entrepreneurs who are Diehl’s primary audience, the challenge is to find their Unique Selling Proposition, their USP, and then use it to find their “tribe,” their most likely customers, buyers who prize what the seller is offering. It is like fitting the key in the lock, or finding the right niche.
“Know thyself,” Socrates advised, and so does Diehl. Easier said than done, but Diehl gives probing questions to help one find out what is of paramount importance, what is to be emphasized to oneself and others.
Socrates did not follow up with “Know thy customer,” but Diehl would. To create something of value for another person requires finding out what that person actually values. Diehl gives examples of entrepreneurs who had at best only hazy ideas of what the customers wanted.
Steve Jobs famously believed that sometimes the customers don’t know they want it until you create it. Focus groups are thought by many to be the solution to this, but they fail, for understandable reasons.
So: figure out what you have of value to offer to others, then tell them who you are and what you are selling, and find out if they want it.
III. Telling Your Story to the World
Whether Aesop’s Fables or parables from the Bible, stories have long been used to carry messages: “slow but steady wins the race,” “don’t look back,” etc.
Stories stay in our minds the way brief adages do not. To sell yourself or your products or services successfully, tell a story.
Diehl, a world-traveling teacher for part of his life, would rescue a homeless cat, then cuddle with it in a busy location, telling mildly dramatic stories about the cat to those who asked him; inevitably, a listener would volunteer to give the cat a home.
What you have to offer is almost certainly in greater demand than an bedraggled and emaciated cat, so if you learn how to tell an engaging story about yourself and your products or services, you are likely to make the sale.
I joined with millions of others in purchasing the recordings made by Susan Boyle, after her dramatic up-from-obscurity victory in the British television talent show. Her beautiful singing voice was almost unheard before this. There’s a story!
Diehl notes that a strong narrative will appeal to more than just those who recognize the basic elements of your offer; it will raise your own emotional involvement in your business and the involvement of your employees. Furthermore, your saga can help you outshine competitors having mere lackluster stories of their own. It shapes the direction and goals of your business and raises a banner to attract potential allies and partners.
Critical to your success is to define: your core idea, your marketing target, and what your target needs; then ask yourself squarely, “Why should they buy it from me?”
That last question is particularly difficult, Diehl notes, as the entrepreneur is likely not able to see his (or her!) own value, He cites examples of the dissonance between what his entrepreneur clients thought their customers wanted and what they told Diehl they wanted or how they saw these businesses.
In sum, “Mastering the art of communication will make people want to work with you, and customers want to buy from you.” Sounds important, no?
IV. Brand Identity Case Studies
Diehl gives five case studies of people he helped greatly increase their marketability with the benefit of his counseling. This is an example of “social proof,” evidence for his claims.
V. Resources for Prospective Entrepreneurs
The principal components of this section are: a set of definitions for the most important entrepreneurial terms and “50 Useful Starting Questions for New Entrepreneurs” and “Making Money Online.” The 50 questions are indeed most useful.
*****
I really like Diehl’s emphasis on the moral basis of commerce. He notes that we get money either through stealing it (through force or fraud), being given it, or earning it, the latter involving exchanging value for value, admirably. He has no patience for those who cheat, and he tells how he made his displeasure known effectively when someone failed to treat him fairly in the preparation of this book.
As Diehl notes, books can give us solid grounding in the ideas needed for success, but often we require one-on-one training and counseling to translate those principles into successful action. This wonderful book will get its readers much of the way there. If you are like me, you will wrestle with whether to spend big money to be coached, but you will be glad you read the book.
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![Brand Identity Breakthrough: How to Craft Your Company's Unique Story to Make Your Products Irresistible by [Gregory Diehl, Kyle Gray]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/41BOB+O5PAL._SY346_.jpg)
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Customer Review: Can't recommend this book enough
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Greg is a talented writer and coach!
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2019
Greg is a talented writer with strong brand identity background. I am glad to inform everyone that his book has been translated into Armenian and hopefully it will become a bestseller in our country too. Thank you, Greg, for collaboration and writing such helpful books!
Reviewed in the United States on December 13, 2019
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does what it says on the tin ...
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