In this episode, Dr. Kevin Christie of Modern Chiropractic Marketing interviews Rick Mayo on the importance of strategic branding and how it relates to every customer experience while growing and scaling your business.
What Is Strategic Branding?
Many people don’t really understand what it is. Building a brand is more than just designing a logo and a color scheme. It’s about creating an emotional connection through every customer interaction. Strategic branding brings a brand to life by creating an image and tone of voice and conveying the message and core values to its audience. What is even more important, as you can see when you interact with great brands, is the customer experience, even before the product experience.
“The secret great brands have is to look at the product and identify the “job that needs to be done”.’ If you understand what makes a customer ‘hire’ your product, you are one step away from building a powerful brand.”
Branding Four-Step Process
- Identify The Job To Be Done
- Build The Customer Experience Around The Jobs To Be Done
- Fully Integrate The Expected Customer Experience In Every Touch Point Of Business
- Deliver The Brand Consistently
Rick suggests looking at your branding by examining every customer interaction point with your business. Rick took a course with Harvard professor Clay Christensen, who wrote a book called Innovator’s Dilemma. The Innovator’s Dilemma theory is about how large, outstanding firms can fail “by doing everything right.” It describes how a company’s success can actually become obstacles in the face of changing markets and disruptive technologies.
There are two types of technologies: sustaining technologies and disruptive technologies. Sustaining technologies are technologies that improve product performance. Most large companies are adept at turning sustaining technology challenges into achievements, but large companies have problems dealing with disruptive technologies. Disruptive technologies are “innovations that result in worse product performance, at least in the near term.” They are “cheaper, simpler, smaller, and, frequently, more convenient to use.” Disruptive technologies occur less frequently, but when they do, they can cause the failure of highly successful companies who are only prepared for sustaining technologies.
Christensen describes how to think about your product or service through the lens of what “jobs need to be done.” In an example with Burger King, research found out their milkshakes were popular for breakfast, not lunch or dinner, as they originally thought. This caused them to see their real product competition as coffee, bagels, donuts, and bananas. So think about the first step in branding is to think about jobs to be done and how would you change taking your product to market? In chiropractic care, you’re trying to get clients pain free and healthy. But in a lot of ways, you are also raising self-confidence.
It’s the same thing with personal training and fitness at Alloy. We are good at building a supportive and interactive community or a small tribe atmosphere. It puts our fitness model in competition with country clubs for small golf or tennis groups. So we need to build a machine that does that job better than everyone else. Small group fitness adds a layer of camaraderie and a tribal community aspect. Many times, it is one of the client’s only enjoyable social interactions of the day. The Alloy customer avatar is 45 to 65 years old with more discretionary income, with a busy lifestyle, and little time to waste. Even though personal training is more expensive in a one-on-one situation, the Alloy ratio of six people training with one coach is more effective and can deliver a lower cost to the client efficiently. Not only do we have the technology to make it feel like personal training, but we have that dynamic, tribal community aspect added when we put the group of six together as opposed to just one-on-one. It’s about personalization and accountability.
The next step in branding is to determine what kind of customer experiences do we need to build the community that people want. Build the soft touches around the business. Build the customer experience around the actual job you want to accomplish. Then fully integrate the branding at every touch point in your business, from the advertising that you put out there to every touch point during your customer life cycle. At Alloy, our average customer lifecycle is three years. So we have processes around the first exposure people have with us all the way through three to ten years later. For example, we have a certain way to integrate clients into our community quicker, like when we introduce a new person to the group. We integrate all the parts and pieces based on the jobs to be done and deliver that consistently throughout all the franchises. That’s when you’re recognized as a brand.
4 Business Lessons From Obvious Adams
Dr. Christie shared the lessons from “Obvious Adams: The Story of a Successful Businessman”. It was first published as a short story in the Saturday Evening Post in April, 1916. (Free PDF here) Too often we make things much harder than necessary. We try to get “too cute” when in reality we just need to identify what’s essential, articulate it as clearly as possible and then execute in the most straightforward way possible.
- The Best Answers Are The Most Obvious
- Do The Work And Bring Solutions
- Know Your Audience
- Thinking Is Hard
Dr. Christie said some chiropractors he works with spend too much time with patients and they don’t charge enough for results and getting patients better quicker. They think they’re in a time economy, but in reality they are in a results economy. There are obvious benefits of going to a chiropractor, but then there are the other benefits to consider, like how a client can get an appointment right away. As compared to an orthopedic doctor, that can be weeks or months before you get an appointment. Also, you don’t have to wait an hour in the waiting room for chiropractors. We don’t even want to call our waiting room a waiting room. We call it a reception area, because we don’t want them to wait. They can get evaluated and treated on the same day. So these are the little things. Another benefit is we can be very efficient at delivering quick results. These are our “jobs that need to be done right” and a big part of branding for chiropractors. The job is not to time and spending 45 minutes with them unless it’s needed. Spending more time than necessary is not the job they should do. So we talk about clinical efficiency and how to get there because that’s really the job to be done in most people’s eyes. Dr. Christie is really tweaking the brands from a patient experience standpoint and efficient results with chiropractic manipulation, some soft tissue work, and then some really strategic rehab. We get them in, efficiently treat them and deliver the results. That’s the chiropractic unique process and should be a part of chiropractic brands.
Listen in to learn more! Both Rick and Dr. Christie have a rebranding story and provide their process on strategic rebranding their businesses. Many chiropractors also have gyms and fitness aspects, so they can learn a lot from this podcast. Reach out and let us know what you think!
Kevin Christie– Kevin’s One sheet
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