Dan White of Smart Marketing On Five Things You Need To Build A Trusted And Beloved Brand

Never launch a sub-standard product. If customers ever feel let down by your product or customer care, they are unlikely to come back. Worse still, they may damage your brand image through word of mouth.

As part of our series about how to create a trusted, believable, and beloved brand, I had the pleasure to interview Dan White.

Dan is a marketing and insights innovator. His career includes a decade as an insights professional, another as a brand advisor and a third as a Chief Marketing Officer.

Dan co-developed BRANDZ, the world’s biggest brand equity measurement system and his thinking has shaped the design of leading copy test and brand tracking methodologies. As a brand and communications guru, he has advised famous, billion-dollar brands on how to thrive.

Today, Dan’s goal is to make the best marketing knowledge accessible to everyone. His summaries and trademark visualizations have earned praise from luminaries in the marketing, advertising, and media industries. He is the author of three best-selling business books: The Soft Skills Book, The Smart Marketing Book and The Smart Branding Book.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

I’d say it has been a combination of chance, intellectual curiosity and the desire to understand everything from first principles. I stumbled into the world of marketing because I wanted to live with my fiancé when we left university together. I had no idea what I wanted to do so I simply applied for jobs within striking distance of where my future wife was studying for her PGCE. I interviewed for jobs including graphic designer, computer programmer and accountant. Advertising research sounded like the most interesting by far.

Can you share a story about the funniest marketing mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

Well, I worked within market research for twenty years before moving into marketing, so I thought I knew it all. I didn’t, of course. There are things I did that I find amusing now but didn’t at the time. I used to think that if you develop a strong enough product, it will find its market. That assumption is completely wrong. I loved product development, but I hadn’t a clue how to estimate how much a product might sell.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

I don’t technically have a company. I’m a sole trader. My focus is to build a unique brand that attracts enough business to keep me busy and intellectually stimulated. In fact, I charge less for projects that sound most interesting. My brand is all about bringing complex marketing ideas alive through illustration. Throughout my career, which spans 33 years, I have made doodles, drawn sketches, devised diagrams, and taken note of examples and anecdotes to help me remember everything I have learned about effective marketing. By the time I left corporate life 4 years ago, I had amassed 50 notebooks full of this material. Since then, I have been organizing and refining it all and sharing it to build my brand identity. It’s my illustrations that make my brand unique. I try to find the simplest, clearest, most memorable way to make a point and then create a hand-drawn illustration to convey the idea. I can only draw in one way which has turned out to be an enormous boon. It means that all my illustrations have a distinctive and recognizable style. I always use the same three colors in my illustrations which also helps to make them easily recognizable.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I am working on a third book. It’s the last of a trilogy. The first was The Smart Marketing Book which covers all aspects of marketing. The second was The Smart Branding Book which is a deep dive into brand building. The new book is about advertising. I can’t confirm what it will be called yet but let’s just say I have a title in mind! I receive a lot of comments about how much people appreciate my approach so I’m confident the new book will help people understand how advertising works and how they could leverage it.

Ok let’s now jump to the core part of our interview. In a nutshell, how would you define the difference between brand marketing (branding) and product marketing (advertising)? Can you explain?

I don’t think I can. The distinction doesn’t make sense to me. I define branding as ‘the efforts a company makes to shape consumer perceptions to make its products more likely to be bought at the asking price’. Advertising plays an important role in branding. I prefer to think of it this way — for marketing to work, it needs to get people predisposed towards your brand (i.e. ‘brand building’) and it needs to activate this predisposition at the right time in order to trigger purchasing (i.e. ‘sales activation’). Advertising has a role to play in both of these. In fact, the same ad can have both effects — although it’s true that many ads are much better at one or the other.

Can you explain to our readers why it is important to invest resources and energy into building a brand, in addition to the general marketing and advertising efforts?

Brand building is important because it’s usually a good long-term investment. An analysis I devised when I was working at Kantar is a good illustration. Between 2006 and 2015, brands with a clear identity grew in value by more than five times more than brands without. Strong brands allow you to charge higher prices and are more resilient in the face of new competitors or an economic downturn.

Can you share 5 strategies that a company should be doing to build a trusted and believable brand? Please tell us a story or example for each.

I’d rather talk about strategies for building a profitable and resilient brand because I don’t think trust and love are the most important goals…

1. Never launch a sub-standard product. If customers ever feel let down by your product or customer care, they are unlikely to come back. Worse still, they may damage your brand image through word of mouth.
2. Make your brand famous. Brands achieving phenomenal growth usually do so by becoming more memorable to a broad audience rather than becoming better appreciated by a narrow audience.
3. Invest in a set of Distinctive Brand Assets. These are the words, symbols, sounds and even rituals that become connected with your brand in the long term and help make it salient when people are deciding which brand to buy. In the long term, these effects have a bigger impact on your brand’s success than the content of individual ads.
4. Embrace creativity. When it comes to marketing ROI, original and remarkable ideas will always do better — provided they showcase the brand well.
5. Use a combination of media channels. The most effective media plans include ways to build brand predisposition amongst a wide audience as well as ways to nudge people in the brand’s direction close to the purchase decision.

In your opinion, what is an example of a company that has done a fantastic job building a believable and beloved brand. What specifically impresses you? What can one do to replicate that?

It’s too hard to pick just one! Brands that I admire include Dove, Red Bull, Nike, Comparethemarket.com, Hendricks, KitKat, Starbucks, BMW to name a few. A major theme is consistency. Many brands chop and change their advertising message, style, slogan and other assets as CMOs come and go. Companies that understand how branding works and appreciate the value of consistency make sure that valuable brand assets are not discarded before their time.

In advertising, one generally measures success by the number of sales. How does one measure the success of a brand building campaign? Is it similar, is it different?

It’s similar. Brand building investment should generally be judged against financial returns. Profit is probably a more relevant metric than sales since a benefit of brand-building advertising is its ability to increase the price people are prepared to pay. Also, the time frame that needs to be considered when assessing brand building activity is much longer than sales activation. The financial benefit from effective brand building can last years or even decades. When I think about the brands, I always buy without seriously considering any alternatives tend to be ones I can remember from years ago. Beanz Meanz Heinz. It’s almost a fact. I still buy the ultimate driving machine. Why would I settle for less? I haven’t bought a coffee maker yet… but I know which one I’m going to buy. I’m pretty sure it’s the best one; George Clooney has impeccable taste.

What role does social media play in your branding efforts?

Social media should play a major role in your branding efforts if you are a well-established brand. If you’re not so well known, however, you should probably turn to TV, cinema, or YouTube for brand building. Some of the biggest social media platforms such as Facebook provide very short ad exposures — typically just a couple of seconds (and often without any sound). This can be enough to quickly remind people of a brand they already know well in order to keep the brand salient. But it’s not long enough to tell a story that would establish an unknown brand in people’s memories.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

What a great question! I love the phrase ‘Keep it Simple Stupid’. I don’t know how to parse it properly (should there be a comma after the word ‘Simple’ or is qualifying the word ‘Stupid’?) but it doesn’t matter. I think the world would be a better place if we kept things as simple as possible and explained things in terms everyone can understand. The BBC’s ‘Newsround’ programme was devised in 1972 to explain news events to children in the most accessible, objective way. In my opinion, it remains the most important programme on British TV, informing the next generation about the issues they will need to tackle without making them too scared to do so.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

That’s easy. I wrote ‘The Soft Skills Book’ with my (grown-up) children very much in mind. I wanted the book to help people in their 20s/30s understand how important soft skills will be to their career success and how to develop them. When I finished the first draft, I noticed that I had back-referenced an early chapter about ‘listening skills’ way more than any other chapter. If I could go back in time and give my twenty-year-old self one piece of advice it would be this: learn how to listen properly!

We are blessed that very prominent leaders in business and entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world with whom you would like to have a lunch or breakfast with? He or she might just see this, especially if we tag them. :-)

Sir Martin Sorrell. I worked in companies that he owned for most of my adult life, yet I only spoke to him once, I think. For less than 2 minutes. I was too nervous to be worth talking to back then but I’m finally confident enough to have a productive conversation with the great man!

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn so you can reach me here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danwhite1000/

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.