Is your plumbing business’s brand turning your customers on or off? Dan Antonelli, President Kickcharge Creative joins Richard in this edition of Potty Talk LIVE and find out the main thing you have to know to turn your customer’s heads and not turn them off.
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3 Golden Nuggets
- There are hurdles to overcome. You have to remember who you’re trying to attract to your business and brand based on what they like, rather than what you prefer.
- Naming is everything. It might sound great to name your plumbing company after yourself, but that won’t stick in your customers’ minds.
- What makes a memorable brand? It’s all about disrupting the market. You don’t want to blend in with your competitors.
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Show Notes
Hurdles to Overcome
[16:41] While Dan and his team always want their clients to love their brand, you have to remember that the brand that’s being built, it needs to be designed it for the people that you are trying to attract, that you’re trying to communicate with.
People have to realize that branding has to be designed to almost address the bias that homeowners bring to the table with them. So they have a bias against contractors, in general. They’re worried about who’s coming to their home, who’s gonna be providing service to them, are they going to be honest, ethical, treat me fairly, not rip me off? So those are all the things that this brand is trying to counter.
You need to lead in with something that’s positive, to have potential clients feel something about your company before you even get there. So sometimes clients are like, oh well, I don’t like blue or I don’t like orange, but maybe Mrs. Jones loves blue or maybe she loves orange. So you have to think about who the brand is ideally meant to attract and sometimes that’s a challenge.
Most Common Branding Mistakes
[24:15] Coming up with your business name is probably one of the fundamental first mistakes that is made in branding.
Dan’s tips:
- Don’t name it after yourself.
- Don’t use initials in your name.
- Don’t use generic names that sound like a description instead of an actual brand name.
These tend to be the obstacles that you have to try to work to overcome. When do these things, it’s so difficult to actually brand and to be sticky in someone’s mind because there’s no visual to connect these terms with anything or to then connect them with plumbing.
If you start with a weak name, you’ll be working all the time to overcome this initial obstacle. So the naming aspect in the beginning is so important. If you can nail that down, it just makes everything so much easier.
What Makes a Memorable Brand?
[29:29] If you head to kickcharge.com/portfolio/small-business-rebranding-before-after/ and take a look at the before on KickCharge’s clients, you’ll see lots of the “Before” are a white truck, with red white and blue. We would just call that blanding, not very disruptive, not very memorable.
So making sure it’s clean, it’s easy to read, and it’s impactful is definitely something that you wanna make sure that your truck wraps are deploying, and Dan recommends start with a board that has every single competitor in your market with pictures of their vans and look at what they all look like. And then you decide what approach would be more unique, more disruptive in your particular market and then go from there. If everyone else is using red, white, blue, don’t put another red, white, blue brand on the road.
It can be a little scary because oftentimes, people’s natural inclination is to do what everyone else is doing. But you’ve gotta do the total opposite of what everyone else is doing. And that’s a little scary to people sometimes too. But you gotta get over that mental fear about it.
Richard’s Call to Action
If you want to learn more about numbers that matter and how to best run your plumbing business, why not schedule a free 30-min strategy call with us? Let’s talk about your goals and where you want to be this time next year, and we’ll help you create a path to make that happen. Schedule your free strategy call here today!
