Interview: The 3 M’s to Building Sticky AF Brands
Ciao Amici,
In this excerpt from the Branders Magazine Talking with Branders Podcast, I interview Jeremy Miller, a marketing strategist, branding expert and bestselling author who really is making it his mission to help leaders and companies grow sticky brands. Jeremy shares lots of great insights here, so I hope you enjoy.
Check out the full episode on YouTube or Spotify.
This episode was originally published October 12, 2023.
STEVEN: Jeremy, welcome to the studio!
JEREMY: Thank you, Steven. It’s such a pleasure, and I'm a big fan of Branders Magazine and the work you guys have been doing over the years. It's an inspiration. As you mentioned, I run a firm called Sticky Branding. We are strategy consultants who help companies grow their businesses and brands to the next level. So, how do you grow from a million in revenue to 5 million, 10, 25, 50, 100, and so forth? For us, it's more than just the brand. It really encompasses business strategy, sales, operations, and all the pieces that go together to create that experience. For me, the definition of a sticky brand is how do you get your customers to know you, like you, and trust you so they choose you first? I think any business of any size can do that. It's really a choice: how do you create that first choice advantage? Just got to do it.
STEVEN: I think we can end right there because that was gold and dynamite. You just got to do it! I love what you said there. Like, it's based in business strategy, and brand and business are two sides of the same DNA helix. They need to be aligned, they need to be talking with each other; they can't be created in silos.
JEREMY: Exactly. Your path to branding was a family affair. Tell us more about that journey.
JEREMY: Sure. I think, like all careers, our careers are squiggly. If you had asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, I would have no idea that I'd be writing books, speaking, consulting, and doing the work that I do today. For me, I was a sales guy who had lost his competitive advantage. I grew up in a family business, and in 2004, I joined my family’s business, which was an IT staffing or an IT recruiting company. And it sucked. It was bad; it got so bad that we, me and my sales team, were doing “pit time,” which was six hours of outbound cold calling every single week. I remember sitting down with my parents at the end of that first year and saying, "If this is what it's like to be in a family business, you can have it. I don't need to do this. I’m going to go back to where life was easier."
STEVEN: Yeah.
JEREMY: And my dad said to me, “It’s not about the business we’ve built; it’s about the business we’re building. What are we going to build next?” That gave me permission to study our customers, our market, and our competitors. What I realized is I didn’t have a sales problem like I originally thought; I had a branding problem. Our customers couldn’t distinguish us from anyone else. But I was a sales guy, so I didn’t know what to do. So I just started reading everything I could get my hands on, from positioning to, uh, just going down all the classics in the branding world.
STEVEN: Between your bookcase and my bookcase, we probably have all of them, 100%.
JEREMY: But the problem I had, especially in the early 2000s, was all the stories were about big companies like Apple, Nike, and Amazon, and others. And I was a small family business, so I was really trying to figure out how to apply these ideas, and it worked. We turned the business around. I was able to sell it a few years later, and after the sale of that business, I asked the question, “What’s the book I wish I had when I went through that process?” And that's where “Sticky Branding” came from. So, I took my experience and then I combined it with case studies and profiling of over 150 companies from around the world that were all mid-market, privately held businesses. I didn't care how the big guys do it. I wanted to know how do you challenge the giants of your industry to get your customers to choose you first and use a brand as a sales machine? And that’s really been my mission and my journey since I was 24 years old.
STEVEN: Wow, incredible that you came upon this aha moment so early on in your career. I mean, it took me many more years to figure that out, but you were in a boiler room type of setting just making cold calls day in and day out, right? I get that. I worked for a higher education institution—I'm not going to name any names—but I had to make 150 phone calls a day. They were tracking everything, and I learned so much more about what I would never want to do again from that position, right?
JEREMY: It's humbling when everybody doesn't like you. We had awful tactics. We had to show up to work and start making calls at 7:30 because the boss was at his desk, but the reception wasn't. It worked, but you know what? Sales is the most blue-collar business activity out there. Nothing replaces activity, and sales is activity and process and doing the work. You put your work shoes on and your hard hat and your shovel, and you just start digging. And that's where marketing brand is—is that we can actually affect change, whereas the actual sales work, it hasn't evolved very much in 75 years. It is still belly to belly, knee to knee; maybe we use the phone or Zoom, but it's person-to-person working to solve and facilitate a buying process. And if you have no marketing support and all you got is a telephone, you do it because you gotta. That's the only way you're going to move the needle.
STEVEN: Absolutely. You mentioned choice earlier, and like brands today, there are customers today who have a lot of choices. And I'm sure this is the foundation of sticky branding, but how do you approach, you know, a CEO comes to you and says, “Jeremy, my customers aren't choosing us, but we have a great product, we have great customer service, but they're not choosing us.” Where, what's the first thing that you start to educate them on?
JEREMY: Great question. We call it the 3Ms: Market, Message, Method. “Market” is who and where are the customers that will drive your next stage of growth. “Message” is, what is the brand messaging and story that will provoke a customer to buy. And then “Method” is, how do you deliver the right message to the right person with the right call to action at the right time so that they buy.
Chances are, if you look at most sales problems, they say, “Jeremy, the sales funnel is not working. We just don't have enough inquiries.” Well, the problem actually is most likely that you have the wrong positioning or you have the wrong messaging value proposition. If all you can sell on is relationship and price, and you just don't have enough volume, usually it's symptomatic of other problems, especially in the mid-market. If you've got the right value proposition for the right customers, they will just gobble it up.
So, most sales problems actually get solved with operations. So, what we actually have to look at though is what are the issues, and I think the first place to start is messaging. Do you have messaging that sells? Do you have a value proposition that sells? Because if you don't, all those marketing dollars don't mean a hell of beans because they're not going to actually deliver anything. So, the way Sticky Branding approaches things first is sales, then marketing, then brand. Sorry, I'm setting my phone off. So, if you've got your sales dialed in first, then market it. Amplify once you've got leads coming in, you've got a system there, then build your brand. Brand comes last, not first.
STEVEN: That's really interesting—counterintuitive to what a lot of the branding gurus out there say, that everything starts with the brand, but it makes sense. Let me challenge you on that. Look at their lens, so if you're coming from advertising, you're coming from agency world, you're coming from academia, then you want to talk about the theory, the smart stuff, the cool stuff.
But if you're an entrepreneur and you got to meet payroll, who gives a shit about that stuff? Let's sell, let's get cash flow, let's drive stuff, then let's talk about the fun stuff. I used to have this analogy that I used when I consulted a couple of years ago with this brand out of Boston, where the sales team thought that the marketing team were just playing with arts and crafts the whole time, and the marketing team thought the sales team was a bunch of pricks and they were just not aligned.
But what you just said is so important, Jeremy, to anyone out there thinking about building a brand or working as a brand manager or anything like that—you have to look at it through the lens of who you're talking with. That's important because, no matter what, if brand is, of course, foundational, it's important, but if you need dollars like what you just said, then you need to sell and you need to sell quickly and you need to sell right. I want to go back to what we talked about—message—and we just hit upon message just a little bit. I come from this, like the majority of business leaders out there, they think about branding, they go design first, of course. But messaging is so important. Messaging is equally, if not more important than design is because if you can have the right message that is empathetic and authoritative and just pulls at the right strings of your customer, you can get them to do anything. Talk to me about how you approach messaging and how you make messaging sticky for your customers.
JEREMY: It's really simple. So we have a... The first thing is, I think messaging is the foundation of your brand. All your marketing, design, every choice is built off your messaging. And the first message is really what I call Simple Clarity. That is the ability to describe your brand and what makes it unique simply, succinctly, and in the language of your customers. Ideally, you should be able to do this in 10 words or less. Take a brand like Big Ass Fans; in three words, you know exactly what this company does: they make really big fans. Or Patriot Software, they are prolific advertisers on SiriusXM, but in every single ad, they say the same thing: Patriots software is accounting and payroll software for companies between 1 to 100 employees. And what these messages do is like putting a label on a file folder in your customer's brain. It allows you to categorize the brand and know where it fits, so that you can then understand everything that comes on after the fact. And that's really what brand messaging does; from the lens of persuasion science, when a metaphor comes first, when somebody's able to categorize you and understand it, every experience after that is then informed by that lens.
So, when we take the category positioning, that becomes our first step. Then the second step starts to go, “How do we articulate that value proposition so someone can understand us?” And that's where design, questions, storytelling, advertising, and other pieces start to come in because now you can express what that customer experience should look like. But if you don't know what you are, if you can't say, “This is who we are and who we serve, and how we are brilliant at what we are doing,” and you don't have clarity there, everything else comes off wishy-washy. You talk in big terms, like you use “artisanal” and “world-class” and “innovative” and all these abstract terms that mean nothing. Big Ass Fans, three words—that to me is brilliant brand messaging. That's also their name, isn't that the best part?"
STEVEN: And that’s also their name. I was gonna say, that’s the best part. And I love their fans, number one. And it has a donkey as a logo, which is just brilliant. So, clarity, right? It's so important. We don’t have a lot of opportunity to make a lasting impression with our customers, and so we have to get to the core point, you know, as soon as possible, so we can be remembered.
Even before messaging, you mentioned Big Ass Fans, let's talk naming for a second. You know, naming is, in my experience, a lot harder than a lot of people realize. People think it's easy to come up with a brand name, and I can recall many war stories in agencies staying up way too late, drinking way too much, with hundreds of names, trying to name Tom Colicchio's Steakhouse in Las Vegas. What are we going to name it? We went through hundreds of names. Is there a method in your eyes that is tried and true when it comes to naming? Are there principles that you need to stick with?
JEREMY: I think there is. The first thing is naming is treated like this black box creative process, where you need to be the genius wordsmith or whoever, and I think that's a mistake in that it actually clouds what naming is, which is a process. And there are multiple processes to get there. I’ve developed one, just through our client work, and it's written in my book “Brand New Name.” And what we do, and what I have found very effective, is through the process of employee co-creation. So, if you’ve got an organization with five people, 500 people, 5,000 people, if you can unlock the creative genius of your team to generate lots of ideas, then you can help whittle your way down to find a great name. But it is a process, it is discipline, and it takes work.
And so in “Brand New Name,” what we guide people towards is essentially what design thinking is. So you frame your strategy and what the need is, what are you naming, what are the criteria for success. We put together a sprint team, which is your key employees involved in this, and then you over the course of five days generate as many ideas as you can. And the reason why you need to do that, and the reason why naming is so hard today, is that we’re experiencing a naming drought. Think about this—for the first time in human history, we are running out of names. We have trademarked the entire dictionary. Good luck getting a dot-com for less than a hundred grand. We have gone through and consumed everything. And what makes it even more difficult is we used to have localized businesses, so you could have a business in New York and a business in San Francisco with the same name. Now that we put everything on the web, now we’re competing with companies not only in our own country but across the world for the same name.
And so, between domains, trademarks, and global competition, naming has become a nightmare. So the answer to it, in my mind, is you need a process to generate lots of ideas, so that you can find trademarkable names. You need to be able to have discipline in that process, so it doesn’t take months or years to do it, that you can do it within a contained amount of time. But you also have to be pragmatic enough to go, when you go down to trademarking, chances are, you’re not going to trademark just one name. You’re going to send in your entire shortlist, say, 10 names because the Trademark Office might go, “Nope, nope, nope, nope, nope,” and at the last minute, you’re left with something else, and you just go, “I gotta move,” and you choose it and run.
STEVEN: How do you deal with—and you’re absolutely right, you know, it’s a discipline, it is a process. But how do you articulate that to CEOs or the C-Suite, that they are crunched for time, and paralysis by analysis is their best friend? How do you help them navigate this process?
JEREMY: We have two techniques that we prescribe in the "Brand New Name" process. The first one is just a recognition that a brand name is the longest living artifact in any single business. Your business will change, your products will change, your people will change, but the names don't. You might have a brand like Colgate, which started out as a soap manufacturer, which is now the global leader for oral hygiene. Names evolve and take on different meanings over time, but that name stays the same. So, it's not something that you do like a website or something else that you throw away and replace every three to four years. You want to have that time and attention because when you do change it, it's a big deal. It's like taking a chalice and pouring all the contents from one vessel into another, and if you don't do it right, you can lose a lot of brand equity.
JEREMY: So, importance is one factor, and then the short circuit is you make the CEO part of the naming process. If the CEO is not there every step of the way, going through the grind and helping to make decisions and being part of the creative process, the projects will generally fail because if they come in at the last moment and go, "I hate it all," and you go back to the drawing board, it's awful.
STEVEN: You lose morale, it hurts culture.
JEREMY: So, involve the CEO from the first step and make them participate. I guarantee you'll get a name.
STEVEN: Is it a red flag for you if the CEO doesn't want to participate in the first step?
JEREMY: If I'm facilitating the naming sprint, that would be my moment to tap out.
STEVEN: Has that happened before?
JEREMY: Oh yeah, for sure. It's like, at the end of the day, you can buy my time. Naming is not Sticky Branding's core business. It was something we created for our customers because it came up so frequently. Our strategy work is our core business. But when we facilitate these, if the CEO is not there, we know it's a red flag, and we don't want to take on a project with a high risk factor that isn't going to work well for the client. That's not good for anyone. So, the easier thing is, here are the books, here's the process, you can have it on your own. But if you want our team to go in, we're going to show you the best practices and the best process that's going to get you to the outcome you need.
STEVEN: Before we talk strategy and more about the bread and butter of Sticky Branding, how big is the firm, and when did you guys start?
JEREMY: So, we were born out of my family's business in 2009. We spun off a Salesforce design consulting business to create Sticky Branding. At that point, I then packaged the family business and sold that in 2013. Sticky Branding as an incorporated business became its own entity in 2011. Today, we are five people globally, so we have staff all over the world. We're a small team, trying to do some big things.
STEVEN: I love small teams trying to do big things because there's a hunger there, and every day, there's an equal amount of excitement and possibility that comes through the door. We touched upon strategy a bit earlier. If that is a core offering of Sticky Branding, as we look ahead, we have a new calendar year in a couple of months, 2024—not to date this, but I'm dating it anyway. How, in your opinion, Jeremy, are brands needing to differentiate to stay relevant? There's a lot of clutter, a lot of commotion, a lot of shiny, bright new objects. What works?
JEREMY: You know, it was funny, I was reading the Sticky Branding book proposal that I wrote in 2011, and it is basically—I could take the same book proposal and write the same book again today. I'm finding the business problems are the same, and the rules keep changing. Marketing especially has this shelf life where your brand positioning and your strategy have a shelf life of anywhere from 18 months to five years, depending on your industry; it moves fast. So, we have this constant pressure to reinvent ourselves because the way we generated leads, the way we connected with our customers, keeps getting reinvented, or the cost structures keep getting changed, and we have to rethink ourselves.
But the side of it is, there's still a truth that there's a need for your products and services. So, I think the basics are actually really where we overcome differentiation. It's not on the marketing tactics; it's actually on serving our customers really, really well. So, if you look at where you are today and you look at your customers, what do they need, how can you serve them brilliantly, how can you be the business they need, and then how do you create that architecture to support them? If you are brilliant at serving your customers, you'll differentiate yourselves. It's not going to be in your ad creative; it's going to be actually in the day-to-day boring work that makes you a business that makes you successful.
Yeah, so I think there are major factors going into '24. AI is one of them, for sure. We are seeing another transformation in marketing that is potentially bigger than Google. So, as marketers and as strategists, we need to be looking down the horizon, at who and where are the customers that are going to drive our next stage of growth.
STEVEN: Need to be looking down the horizon of who and where are the customers that are going to drive our next stage of growth. How do we connect with them? How do we serve them brilliantly? What are our competitors doing, and being nimble and adapt to that? But at the same time, it's what are the constants? What won't change? Because chances are, what won't change is actually where your business is going to be the most successful.
I really enjoy your position on the operation; sometimes the basics is how you're going to win, and just doing that really, really well. I feel, my hypothesis Jeremy, if I may, is that too many people are looking at brands like Liquid Death, or Oatly, or even Dude Wipes, who I have intimate knowledge of working with. They're looking at them as the outliers, and they're looking at them as like, we need to replicate their playbook, right? We need to just be so polarizing or just so against the grain, and that's the only way to differentiate. But what I'm hearing you say is like, no, that's not the only way to differentiate. Focusing on what you do really well and servicing the customer to the greatest of your ability is enough of a differentiation. Is that—did I hear you right?
JEREMY: Yeah, 100%. Let's just take a step back. Liquid Death is, in basic terms, a consumer brand that's an anomaly. It is a challenger brand by its DNA that just hit the brand lottery. The average company doesn't look like that, doesn't have aspirations like that, right? In most of the mid-market, all we're trying to figure out are revenue plateaus. So how do I grow my business? Let's just look beyond the small business. How do I grow from 10 million in revenue to 25 million, 50 million, 100 million, 250 million, a billion? Each one of those questions, you are changing your entire business, and the reality is, you are not creating market; you are serving market. So, at anything less than a billion in revenue, you are not a market maker; you are a market server. So how do you go about creating the capacity to serve your customers, whether that's at a price point, a distribution point, a product or feature capability, and how do you build the infrastructure in your business to get there? What often drives revenue growth is not marketing; it is actually your capacity to serve that market, and the market just gobbles it up, and everyone goes, "We're a genius, we grew by X percent." It was just deliberate work to build your business like that.
That's the complaint I've got with the marketing side. When we look at Liquid Death and Big Ass Fans, and these beautiful brands, they are beautiful case studies that are not the average.
STEVEN: Right, it's the anomaly, right? It's the outlier, like you said. Jeremy, you're so well-articulated, and branders out there that are listening to this, like, I hope you rewatch or relisten this episode a couple times because Jeremy has dropped nuggets upon nuggets upon nuggets of gold. Alright, I'm going to flip that kind of question around and say, like, what's the biggest mistake that you're seeing brands make today? What grinds your gears?
JEREMY: Bandwagon hopping. You're jumping from tactic to tactic, campaign to campaign, trying to do too much. It's just a res, and you see this when anytime you bring in a new CMO, the first thing they do is they rebrand. And it's that habit, it's like, "We need a new name, the website sucks, the logo sucks, blah, blah, blah," and it creates a short-term sales lift, maybe you see 9 to 18 months of growth, and then it falls back to what it was. I would like people to take away this: branding is change, and it is change management. I fundamentally believe that brand has an identity crisis. Your brand is a lagging indicator of what you've done; it is your reputation of how people know you in your business. Branding is strategy; what are you trying to do? And when you talk about strategy, it's fundamentally around change. So, rather than trying to do everything or be everything, that's a recipe for not being successful. Most marketing can be solved with one or two acquisition lanes, a solid lead nurturing program, and then a whole hell of a lot of good customer service, good products, and just a good business.
STEVEN: Yeah, “branding is change,” is a great way to look at it. It's very philosophical of you, Jeremy, right? Very stoic with the capital 'S' where Marcus Aurelius talks—the universe has change, our thoughts are what we make of it, and the same thing here. But bandwagon hopping has been around since the wagon wheel became a thing, and I see it too, with companies that I work with, agencies that bring me on as a hired gun. You know, there's a lot of this going on. Do you fear that the rise of AI and the rise of some of these emerging technologies that are out there, how they’re to make it easier for organizations to bandwagon hop, and that we're just gonna have a bubble that bursts?What's your fear when it comes to all of this?
JEREMY: It's a good question. I think AI is just so big that I don't think we've wrapped our arms around it yet. It's so prolific. What search did was so transformational that it fundamentally changed my family's business. We went from a traditional relationship sales business to being a company that was found, and our website being our most important
Our website being our most important sales tool, AI is so much deeper and more prolific, touching every part of your business. So, I actually think there is an opportunity right now not to look at this as a bandwagon but as a moment of experimentation. There's a huge lift of adoption right now; there's lots of money, all these things going around. But if we can just take this to understand that this thing is actually truly transformational, how can I use this for market research? How can I use this for content creation? How can I use this for whatever—pick the topic—and take a learner mindset, then you're going to look at this not as 'How do we do this for a short win?' but 'How do we embrace this because this probably is the future?'
So, it doesn't quite answer your question on the fear of the bandwagon, and I think it's more, we do have to take potentially a learner mindset and be really humble about what's ahead of us because, yeah, we probably don't know. I think the rules are going to fundamentally change underneath our feet in the next three years, and the people who are learning, acting, and adapting the fastest probably will be the brands of the future.
STEVEN: Did you take that down, branders? Learn, act, and adopt because I just wrote that down, and that's going on my sticky notes for my notes on Sticky Branding with Jeremy Miller. Jeremy, I so appreciate you hopping into the studio and chatting with me and everyone who is listening. Again, branders, rewatch this episode; this is dynamite. Tell everyone where they could find you online, where they could buy the books. Tell us a little bit more, where you live.
JEREMY: Sure, the easiest way to find me is just Google “Sticky Branding.” The website is stickybranding.com. The book is also called “Sticky Branding.” I'm on all the social networks as @StickyBrand. We've done a good job cybersquatting there, and if anyone has questions or anything, DM me, reach out to me. I'm happy to interact and chat anytime.
STEVEN: Did you just say cybersquatting?
JEREMY: Oh yeah, we're trying to own our place.
STEVEN: “Cybersquatting,” I haven't heard this one before. So, before I start cybersquatting, you can find more on Branders Magazine at brandersmagazine.com, and more on me, you go to stevenpicanza.com. And please, leave a comment, like this, do whatever you have to do, share it with your friends, share with your pals, and until next time, peace out, everyone.