My daughter and I went to the Mall of America last week so we could ride the roller coaster. As is our custom after roller coaster rides, we stopped to get a cup of Dippin' Dots.
You may be familiar with Dippin' Dots. If not, they're tiny beads of ice cream about the size of BB shot, formed by what the company calls "cryogenic encapsulation." The beads are firm and take quite a while to melt, so their texture is unlike other ice cream until it hits your warm tongue when it melts into creamy splendor. They're available at fairs and amusement parks and other Dippin' Dots outlets. My daughter loves Dippin' Dots.
As we sat eating our Dots, I noticed the Dippin' Dots logo with their tag line on the vendor's cart: "Ice Cream of the Future."
What a great marketing concept! What other ice cream can say they're the ice cream of the future? This is a unique marketing identity. Marketing strategies that differentiate companies from their competitors are often successful.
But as I sat on the bench with my daughter eating their product I couldn't help but notice that nothing else in the company's presentation supported their tag line.
Notice the non-futuristic font of the Dippin' Dots logo. This font looks more like something you would see on a package of doll clothes than on the "ice cream of the future." And what is futuristic about a white cart with a teal canopy? Teal may have been a future-friendly corporate color at some point, but in 2007, it looks tired.
Here's a company with, in my opinion, a great tag line, and their product lives up to it. But nothing else lives up to their tag line. If Dippin' Dots really wants consumers to think of their ice cream as the "ice cream of the future," shouldn't their logo and its font, and their carts and their corporate color and the clothes their vendors wear and the way they fulfill your order when you go up to the vending cart also look futuristic?
Words are cheap. Creating a unique and memorable corporate identity goes beyond creating clever words, though.
I'd like to suggest that you take a look at your tag line and your marketing identity. Does your way of doing business support the identity you hold out to your market in your advertising and promotions, or are your slogans and advertising just gibberish without any real meat behind them? Do your salespeople, your advertising, your slogans, your everything interrelate so that you are really living who you say you are to your market? Or are your slogans and marketing writings nothing more than hollow words?
Identify who you want to be (this applies to companies and individual salespeople, too). Then focus your energies on being that entity. Look for inconsistencies between the message you present to your market and reality. Fix those inconsistencies and you have a shot at making your business walk your talk. Customers love it when companies (and salespeople) walk their talk.
Skip Anderson is the Founder and President of Selling to Consumers, a B2C sales training and consulting firm. Subscribe to the free Selling to Consumers Sales Tips newsletter at www.SellingToConsumers.com
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