Book extract: Diane Foreman on selling

See also: NBR Rich List 2015 profile: Diane Foreman

Extracted from Diane Foreman: In the Arena by Diane Foreman with Jenni McManus. Published by Random House (NZ). RRP $40.00. Text copyright © Diane Foreman 2015

Right from the start of your business, right after you’ve sorted out your idea and your funding, you need to begin work on your branding. This begins when you write your BMC – your branding, marketing and communication plan.

Branding is not just about business cards, packaging and signage. It’s also about you. Everything you do and say reflects – and impacts on – your brand. You are, in fact, your major asset.

You need to ask yourself, “What is my brand exactly?” How will you define and build it? How will you market it and guard its reputation? And how will you use it to communicate with customers and get those all-important sales? What do you want people to think when they see you and your business? What are your brand values? You must give this a lot of thought because it’s critical to get it right.

Here’s what can happen when it goes wrong. When I was building the New Zealand Natural brand, I wanted people to see clean, green New Zealand, but I went too far. We had some amazing creations like “Strawberry Boy” – a boy sitting on a giant strawberry eating an ice cream, with Lake Tekapo and the Southern Alps in the background – but in the end I confused the brand. People told me they were not sure what to think when they saw a New Zealand Natural shop. Was it a travel agency, selling New Zealand, or were we selling strawberries? Somewhere in the branding, we lost sight of the fact we were selling ice cream. So we had to strip it back to basics.

After a lot of research – mainly just plain old-fashioned talking with people about what ice cream meant to them – we discovered what it really took to sell an ice cream. Children. People love to see children having fun eating an ice cream, and everyone remembers happy times eating ice cream as a child.

So we had to shift our branding away from landscapes, and from pretty pictures of New Zealand and cows, and focus on children’s delight in eating our product. Fortunately I have a very cute granddaughter, Chloe, and she became our “ice cream girl.”

Your company name is also critical. It must be something you feel proud of. It’s great if it has an association with something important in your life but I don’t think you should ever put your own name on a brand.

If the company is a success, you are pointing an arrow at yourself for jealous people to shoot you down. Conversely, if your idea fails, your name is inextricably linked with failure. Another problem arises if you sell the business: you are effectively selling yourself and will have no control over the way your buyer markets your name as a brand.

Use of social media
The old days, where marketing involved simply buying an ad in the New Zealand Herald or a women’s magazine, are dead and buried. There are now so many ways to engage directly with customers and people want to be part of a community. Now people want an experience, not simply a product. It doesn’t matter what your product is: today, social media is usually the best way to sell it.

These days, people research as much as they can before buying anything – and that includes brain surgery. Your website is your shop window to the world.

Emerald Group does not have a website because we are a private investment company and are not trying to market a service or product. But www.newzealandnatural.com was crucial to the success of our global ice cream business.

Your website is one of your best brand ambassadors and a decent portion of your start-up capital should be spent on building it. Always think of your website as your front door. If it’s not welcoming, the world won’t walk in. Make sure your site is easy to navigate and interesting to use.

Regularly update your website and mystery-shop your competitors’ sites to see whether they are doing it better than you. Make sure all the basic information is there. For example, I get frustrated when I can’t find a phone number on a website. Sometimes you just want to talk to a person rather than wait for an email response.

I really enjoy working with young, energetic people with something to prove. While you are building a new business, contracting out your brand-building and social media work is a great strategy because if the ideas aren’t floating your boat or rocking the market you can terminate the contracts and move on quickly. When you spend anything on marketing, you must have a way of measuring its success and obviously that’s the improvement on your bottom line. If a campaign is working, you will know immediately. Sales go up and you get market engagement.

We launched New Zealand Natural in supermarkets eight years ago with a television advertising campaign – something we would never do now because a TVC is an unnecessary expense for a small FMCG brand, when web-based campaigns work so well. I

It featured a ‘natural hunk’ (he was hot) stacking our ice cream in supermarket freezers. It was an immediate success and within hours of it screening the phone was ringing. That’s what social engagement is – it’s simply about getting people talking about your product. People can’t buy something they don’t know exists. Invest heavily in your message, know what you want to say and get it out there.

Tattoos are taboo
As you assess all the elements that impact on your brand, don’t forget staff. It’s important that your staff reflect your brand values. Recently I interviewed a young woman who wanted a sales role in one of my companies. I had heard she had a tattoo on her leg. I told her she was fantastic, she was everything I wanted, but I couldn’t have her with that tattoo. She would be visiting corporates as part of her job and when she walked in with a tattoo on her leg, they would think that represented me. Tattoos are not my cup of tea.

If she wanted the job, I told her, she’d have to wear trousers every day. Well, she took the job and has been fantastic. She tells me now she has seen the calibre of our clients, she understands exactly what I was saying, and as her self-confidence has soared she now wants her tattoo removed.

You also need to show your staff (through your fantastic training programme, which you also need to be developing at this early stage) how they can upsell on behalf of your brand. The most basic form of marketing is sampling. It’s so easy to give away product and once people get used to it, they want it. Surprisingly we had real problems getting our franchisees to understand this because they thought giving something away was losing money.

Sampling in an ice cream business is so easy: just offer customers a taste of another flavour, then offer them a scoop of that as well. Nine times out of 10 they’ll say yes because they’ve just tried it and think it’s fantastic. When a customer asks for a scoop of vanilla, I wanted my staff to ask if they’d like a second scoop (just as David Levene upsold to me 35 years ago) then ask if they’d like chocolate sauce and nuts. All the time, of course, customers are buying more of what you have to sell.

It’s the most basic form of marketing – and it works, no matter what business you’re in. If you go to a plastic surgeon wanting a facelift, any plastic surgeon worth his or her salt will ask you whether you want your eyelids done as well. There is always something else you can sell to your customer – even if it’s only the fact that you’ve done a great job and they’ll come back and recommend you to their friends. It’s about constantly loving that customer and getting that customer to buy more than they ever thought they would from you.

Find your target market
When branding and packaging your product, find someone in your target market. Don’t be seduced by the big-name advertising or design agencies and think you have to go there and pay a fortune. Of course sometimes you will want to be working with the best and you may decide the fees are worth it for the outcome if you find someone who has “brand built” companies you admire.

Ask them to pitch for your business. You may need to sit through hours of presentations but you’ll know you have the right one when your strong, clear inner voice tells you so. Only you know what looks and feels right for your brand. Don’t be swayed by rafts of data and fancy slideshows. Branding and packaging is about you and your vision.

How do you expand that vision and make sure you are keeping up with the trends? Conferences and trade shows are becoming a thing of the past with the advent of fantastic web-based research. You always need to know what your competitors are doing – the best way to do this is to simply look at the market. But remember, focus on your own game because it’s the only one you can influence. Too much time looking at what others are doing can distract you from doing what you do best.

If you want to know what customers think of your product, there’s an easy way to find out: ask them! You don’t need to pay for expensive external market research when you can do it yourself. But make sure you are genuinely asking customers for their opinions – and not, as I did with my shoe business, just looking in the mirror thinking if I loved the product, then everyone else would.

Get your product in front of real live people. Sit with them, ask them questions, look at the expressions on their faces and then decide whether you have something special or not. Don’t be offended if they don’t like it. Ask them how you can change it, and listen to what they are not saying as much as what they are saying. Ask your test market how much they would pay and how often they would buy.

These are such basic questions; but so many new entrepreneurs are afraid of rejection, both of themselves and their product, that they would rather shield themselves from any bad news. The sooner you know you are on the wrong track, the sooner you can change direction. Have the guts to front your story and take the brickbats and bouquets, because you will get plenty of both. It’s called “having a go.”

Extracted from Diane Foreman: In the Arena by Diane Foreman with Jenni McManus. Published by Random House (NZ). RRP $40.00. Text copyright © Diane Foreman 2015