EP12: Your Branding Sucks!

Yeah, yeah. Well, that's true. But we're going to talk about branding and more importantly, why your branding sucks.

Some of it does. Yes. No, I'm talking about the guys out there. The guy's out in Never Never Land. Never

Well, branding, advertising, and marketing all get confused.

Do your brief history, and I'm going to look up the definition.

Well, thank you, Professor Triplett, for that inquisitive back history. Now, listen, I just looked up branding and there's two versions here. One is the action of marking with a branding iron, right? Like you said, marking cattle and horses. And number two is the promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design, right? So it's not just advertising your business. It's advertising. with your distinctive design.

Well, there's definitely colors and design and all that that plays into it, right? Of course. There's actually a board game. I can't remember the name of it, but it's where you literally have pictures of brands, like the icons, but without the wording. So, for example, it would have like the Coca-Cola, just have the red with the white little swirl in the middle, but it wouldn't say Coca-Cola. And you had to guess what that brand was. So it was literally just, you know, just icons and designs. And it was, it's interesting because it just shows you how much that is burned into your brain. Right. Because obviously, you know, big companies like Coca-Cola, Apple. they have the money to spend where every time you turn on the TV, everywhere you look, there are images everywhere. Right. Sure. So that's just an interesting, you know, where you learn that. I mean, I can think of jingles and this isn't really branding, but just, I hear jingles on the radio. And as soon as that comes on, I can sing it word for word. You know, like there's like a law firm, there's like a local law firm that has a jingle. I would never hire them. But I remember the jingle every time it comes on the radio. Every time I hear the song, I can start singing it word for word.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure.

They would. If they did that, they would probably piss a lot of people off, honestly, because it's such an icon now that it's literally part of history. And if you go changing stuff and messing with it, that's whenever people throw a fit and start boycotting them.

Well, again, these companies have been around for decades and it's burned into your brain. So if you started your business last year and you're like, oh, I'm going to change my color for Christmas, nobody's even going to notice. You know what I mean? It's probably going to confuse people. You're

colors were blue. Why are they green now? Yeah.

It's trickery. They've spent millions of dollars on research and they know how to sell the emotion 100%. So let's bring it back to contractors.

i'm just flipping through i wouldn't know i wouldn't say that for sure with fedex well

That's their brand, but their service surely doesn't lead up to their brand today.

Yeah. I mean, that, I mean, we're talking more about slogans, but that is part of your brand, right? And not so much your, so I guess there's, there's really, there's two aspects to branding. There's one, which is the visual aspect, right? Again, going back to like the icons and the colors and all that, that's going to be a visual branding. You see. a truck driving down the road, you're like, oh, that's, that's so-and-so's business or whatever. And then you have the brand and sense of the reputation, right? You have the reputation of the brand. And that's where a lot of those slogans come in into that because your slogans kind of represent the, you know, your mission of your business, right? Like you said, touching, would you say what's yours again? I just forgot.

Yeah. Touching people's lives with water. That's great. I mean, that's, that's self-explanatory. It can almost stand on its own, like without even a slogan, touch people's lives with water. So some of these people you see that have like, we build beautiful backyards for people who like to enjoy on the weekends.

It's like, dude, that's, that's way too long.

That sucks. Yeah. So you get the visual and you got the emotional or the reputation side of it. I like to talk more about the visual part of it because I think it's super important. You know, your reputation, usually when you have a reputation, it's not tied to a visual aspect. It's just like if someone says, hey, do you know a good pond builder? I'm like, yeah, I know a guy, the pond digger, Eric over the pond digger. He's the guy you want. Well, I haven't seen your logo. I don't know anything about it, right? It's because your reputation precedes you. But I think the visual aspect of it, and this goes into the design itself. This goes into the name of the business. This goes into the colors of your design and your business. This goes into the graphics and the vehicle wraps and lettering and your shirts and all that and your website. All of that stuff ties into your brand image. And a lot of people get this wrong.

Well, I was thinking about this and I thought about doing kind of like a lightning round type thing, something a little bit different, Eric. We've never done this before.

Yeah, man. Why not do it on the fly?

So I just thought it'd be a little fun if we just kind of go back and forth. So, for example, your branding sucks. If your company uniform is a Metallica shirt.

That's awesome. Yeah, your branding sucks if you have a magnet on the side of your vehicle.

That is, yeah, that's good. Your branding sucks if your domain is not even remotely close to the name of your business.

You mean like one's one truck's red and one's green and one's blue?

Yeah, your branding sucks if your hat is your favorite beer company.

You have like 80,000 different hats.

That was way too complicated.

Well, mine's kind of

sucks because the word is the logo. If you take the name out of it, there is no logo. You may have stumped me there, man.

That's a good one. That is a good one. Your branding sucks if people can't even pronounce the name of your business.

Yeah, but no one will ever know how to spell Hebner. Literally, my entire life, no one's known how to spell it or pronounce it. If they can't pronounce it, then people aren't going to know.

Yeah. I mean, you have Anheuser-Busch.

But I'm saying that's the name of the business, but their beer is Bud Light, right? Budweiser. It's easy to say. It's easier than Anheuser-Busch.

Did they like completely get rid of them?

Well, they're not even an American company anymore.

I don't drink beer at all, but I've been to the... I'm sorry. Yeah, I've been to their theme park. You know, Anheuser-Busch has a theme park.

No, they have an actual amusement park, Anheuser. It's called Busch Gardens.

Yeah, well, there's actually one standalone. Like, it's literally just theirs. They have Clydesdale horse. And they have actual horses. The horses for the companies at that park. You can go up and look at the horses. This went way south real quick.

Look how great their branding is. It literally got us to talk about their brand for 10 minutes on our podcast. That's excellent branding.

Yeah. So listen, back to branding. The one thing in, in, I was giving you some crap last week about this and that is your vehicles. Yeah. Like this is, this is literally, in my opinion, if I could only do one type of like print advertising, it would be a vehicle wrap. I would, you would, I would have my whole vehicle wrapped. I wouldn't do signs. I wouldn't do yard signs. I wouldn't do brochures. I wouldn't do mailers. I wouldn't do, I wouldn't even do billboards. I would literally have my vehicles wrapped. So if you're not doing that, it's a huge opportunity that you're missing. Sure. Now you and I talked about this last week a little bit. And you mentioned that you had your big old face plastered all over the side of one of your trailers. But you also just got a new truck done and you went real simple and clean on that. So why don't you talk to me about why you did that?

Yeah, I mean, you can afford to your truck to not get as much attention. Because you've been around. You've established your brand. You've established your reputation. And so literally, even if you didn't have any lettering on your trucks, people would still be calling you. Right? True. You have other sources too. Your social media, your Instagram, your YouTube channels. People know you from all kinds of channels. For sure. If you didn't do any of that stuff, if you didn't have the social media, the YouTube, all the other stuff, and you didn't have anything on your vehicles, it may be a little bit more difficult to get business.

When you can't even see the dashboard because it just has receipts and trash and all kinds of stuff.

I want to come back to that real quick, but I just want to do a totally separate thing. I don't know if you saw, but Tom Silva's TikTok. Have you seen his TikTok?

Tom Silva, Ask This Old House.

He's on TikTok now. Okay. And literally there was a TikTok where his daughter was coming in, like getting in his truck and he hops in or she opens the door and it's just covered with Dunkin' Donuts, like bags and trash and the seat and the floorboard. He's like, what? I like their coffee or something. He was like swiping all the trash off the seat.

It was just a joke, but it's still funny. It's kind of like what you're talking about.

But no, back to the dashboard stuff. I mean, this can also hurt your image, right? And this is a totally different thing that I want to talk about too. But you can have a good logo. You can have a good website. You can have all of this stuff that you need to have. It can be perfect. But if you have trash on your dashboard and you pull up to Lowe's to get some material and someone's walking up and they're looking for a contractor and they just happen to be there looking at paint colors or whatever, and they see your truck and they're like, oh, wow, this looks really nice. And they kind of walk up to write down the phone number or whatever, and they see trash all over your dashboard. Like if it was me, I would not be calling that contractor. For

So this goes to your social media, too, as far as like talking about politics and religion and hot topic things. You know what I mean? I actually got it's a funny it's not really a funny story because it pissed me off. But. A 2016 election, a friend of mine, a mutual friend of mine posted something about the election. And there were several people on there commenting and I responded to one another person. I didn't know the person. He was a friend of my friend. So he had a mutual friend and there was a little bit of back and forth, you know, a couple back and forth, nothing crazy. And then it started escalating. Right. Because that's politics on social media. That's where it always goes. And I was on my personal page. And I said something and I wasn't like super insulting. Like you're a dumb ass and you don't know what you're talking about. It wasn't like that. It was just like I was stating my facts and it probably made him look stupid. About 10 minutes later, I get a notification. You have a new review on your Team Andy page. And I go and look and it's him. And he left me a one star review. I didn't even know the guy. Never even did work for him.

Well, wait a minute. Here's the thing, though. This is part of your branding. This is part of your brand image, right? Because I have a certain image of my business. And I even responded to him. And then he responded to me. On the review? It was like, on the review. Oh,

I wasn't even fighting with him. I was just like, we don't know this person. He's not a customer of ours. Just basically saying like, this is a bogus review. And then he responds with more information about how I said this and this on this other page. And I was doing this and I'm anti. The funny thing is, he's like, he's anti-veteran. He's anti-military. That's what he said. I was like, you are a complete moron.

Whatever. Yeah. But yeah, I was just like, whatever, dude. So that can hurt your brand image is what I'm saying. Sure. All of that.

All right, now take it away.

Yeah, I literally get more compliments about how clean we keep our workspace than I do about the actual quality of the work that we do.

Anytime I hire a new person. I have them come in and sit down and read through the reviews. And I say, look, what do you notice? That's the reoccurring theme in all these reviews. And they're like, oh, you're professional and you're clean and, you know, organized and blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, yeah, you don't see people saying, you know, their craftsmanship is impeccable and they do great quality work. Some of them do. But that's not the majority of the majority of them. They took care of our house. They were super clean. They were here on time. They, you know, they communicated well. It's the service side of it. It's not the actual act of doing the work.

Yeah, that's part of your image, right? That's part of your brand reputation. And, you know, so going back to the trucks, I want to tell the story. When I first started, I had a just a white. Ford truck and I didn't have a bunch of money because I was just barely starting out with a little bit of cash. And, but I knew it was important to have lettering on your truck and I wasn't going to do a magnet and care what it costs. But I just had very simple, kind of like your corporate look where you're just, just on the door, you know what I mean? Just on the tailgate, very simple. And I had that for like three or four years, the first three or four years in business. And then it got totaled and had to buy a new truck. And. I couldn't find a truck to save my life that was in my price range. I finally ended up buying a black pickup truck, but my colors are red, white, and blue. And I really wanted it to be white. And I was like, well, I can just wrap the truck, right? Because I had a friend of mine that was doing the graphics. He's like, why don't you just wrap it? We can make it white. It'll look like a white truck because I don't have like crazy colors all over the whole truck. So it's predominantly white, but then my logo is real big down the whole side of the truck. And so we did that and people started calling. Hey, I see your trucks all over the place.

Trucks, plural. I see your trucks all over the place. I'm like, no, you see me. I only have one truck. You see me driving all over the place. So, but here's the thing. When I had my other truck, I never got one single phone call from someone saying, I saw your truck because it wasn't big enough.

Absolutely. And I've always from day one, we wear polos. And I mean, it's basically a T-shirt with a collar. So it's not like, you know, you think like a real heavy, super nice polo. It's a cheap polo, but it looks nice because it has a collar on it. And we wear khaki pants and everybody has the same outfit. And so if there's three or four of us that show up to a job and we all look the same, I mean, and we pull up in our trucks that are lettered, decaled, and everything else goes along with it. It's just a wow factor, right? I mean, people are just, they can't help but be amazed by how, if you look good and you act good and you, do good work, like you can't not win, you know what I'm saying? But I've always said, you know, I've always made the joke. I could hire a meth head to come in and do the work and probably do it just as good as a skilled carpenter or whatever, but he's not going to have the professionalism, right? He's not going to have the customer service because that's the part people care about. They care more about the service side and the professionalism part than they do about the actual work that you're being done. And this is where contractors get hung up because they think, oh, I'm the best deck builder in the state. Nobody can build a deck better than me. And that may be true. But if you show up in your Metallica shirt with your beat up truck and you got coffee cups and McDonald's bags all over your dashboard and you got holes in your jeans, the guy across the street's not going to call you.

It has nothing to do with the quality of the work you do. It literally doesn't have anything to do with it. It's the same thing as salesmen. If a salesman showed up to your house to sell you insurance, life insurance, or a stockbroker, you know what I mean? If a stockbroker is coming to your house to talk to you about stocks and he pulls up in a beat up gremlin. and he's wearing jeans with holes in them, are you going to be buying stocks from that dude?

Not likely. Not likely. But if the dude pulls up in a Jaguar, and he's wearing a three-piece suit with Italian leather shoes, and he says, these are the stocks that made me a millionaire, you think you might invest with them? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So image is everything.

Was it brand new?

Dude, that reminds me. I know for a fact this is why I didn't get this job. I say that. I just have this feeling. I showed up to this estimate. This is before I was charging for estimates. My truck was in the shop, and I have a loaner vehicle. Well, the loaner vehicle is like this crappy old S10 pickup truck. It has the name of the auto body placed all down the side. Like I'm advertising for the mechanic, right? Yeah. So I pull up to their job. You know, and of course I'm like, oh, you know, my truck's in the shop, blah, blah, blah. And I didn't get the job. I mean, I felt self-conscious driving that truck because I wasn't in my branded truck pulling up to that estimate.

You know, a lot of that plays into your head too. There's some psychology that goes into that. If you don't feel like you're a professional, if you're not, if you don't look professional and feel professional, that affects your, you know, it affects how you talk to people, how you sell it. You're the way you carry yourself changes and people can pick up on that. That's an interesting

Yeah. I mean, I've had employees that they weren't too happy about wearing the uniforms. You know, they'd rather wear T-shirts and jeans. But, you know, I've had them move on like after a year, two, three years, whatever it is, and they move on to another job. And then I'll run into them and they're like, man, like all that stuff you had us do, like that really made a difference because the place I'm at now, they don't do any of that and it sucks. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, why aren't you buying your guys stuff? You know? Yeah. I want to leave with one final thought on kind of branding and really more along the lines of vehicle wraps. When I say vehicle wrap, I mean like your entire truck is wrapped. Like it's over the top.

Yeah, literally wrapped in a bunch of magnets. No. Vinyl wraps. I've heard people say, like, I don't like that. It looks too gaudy. It's kind of cheesy looking. It's just not my style. I want to be clean. I just want to have it very simple. And I'm not digging on you, but I want it to be low-key.

So here's the thing I want to put out there.

I just don't want people to call me. No, here's what I want to say. And this is where business owners, their ego starts flaring up. It doesn't matter what you like. It matters what actually works. Let me say it again. It doesn't matter what you like. It matters what works. and full wraps with big old letters on the side where your business name is down the entire side of the vehicle so damn big that you can see it from 100 yards away, that works. When you have it where you have to get a freaking magnifying glass out to see the name of your business and number and all that stuff, it doesn't work. A lot of us contractors and business owners are like, oh, I'm all ego. It's my business. It's got my name on the side of it. I want to do this and this, and I want this and this and this. That's fine. You can do whatever you want. It's your business. But if your phone ain't ringing.

Then your branding sucks. Exactly right. So wrap that freaking truck as big as you can. It's a mobile billboard. It works huge. Huge returns. My last vehicle I put on cost me $4,000 to wrap the vehicle. And it paid for itself in the first week I had it.

That's all I got, Eric.