SUMMARY BY CHATGPT

Tom Antion discusses the pros and cons of branding for small businesses, sharing practical insights and personal experiences to guide entrepreneurs in making informed decisions about whether branding is right for them.
Key Points:
Pros of Branding:
1. Recognition and Reputation:
o Branding builds recognition (e.g., McDonald’s, Coke, KFC).
o Established brands attract employees due to their reputation and stability.
2. Value and Perception:
o A strong brand can increase a company's financial valuation.
o Customers often associate brands with higher quality and trust (e.g., clean facilities at McDonald’s).
3. Customer Loyalty:
o Branding fosters repeat business and loyalty (e.g., McRib fans waiting for its return).
4. Competitive Advantage:
o A well-known brand has a significant edge over non-branded competitors.
Cons of Branding:
1. Cost and Time:
o Small businesses often waste money on expensive branding packages before selling a single product.
o Building a successful brand is time-consuming and requires resources that could be better spent on direct sales and customer service.
2. Limits Expansion:
o Overbranding in one area can hinder diversification into other niches or markets. Example: A successful sales speech led to missed opportunities in customer service because Tom wasn’t branded in that area.
3. Creates Competition:
o Strong brands attract imitators and knockoffs, as seen in cases where products were cheaply replicated and outsold.
4. High Risk for New Ideas:
o Branding an unproven idea can lead to financial losses if the concept fails, especially for businesses with limited funding.
Tom’s Personal Branding Journey:
• Early Businesses: Tom avoided branding for the first 20 years of his entrepreneurial career, focusing on selling quality products and services.
• First Brand: His "Butt Camp" seminar in 1996 became his first semi-brand after years of proven success.
• Trademarked Brand: In 2023, he trademarked “Screw the Commute,” after decades of business success.
• Other semi-brands include Fatso Tennis, Brutal Self-Defense, and Protection Dogs Elite.
Tom’s Advice:
• Don’t Prioritize Branding Early On:
o Start by selling products and solving customer problems. Let your market define your brand through their loyalty and purchases.
o Avoid costly branding initiatives until your business has proven success and stability.
• Flexibility over Branding:
o Tom attributes his success to staying flexible and focusing on topics rather than personal or company branding.
Final Thoughts:
Branding can be beneficial, but for most small businesses, it’s better to focus on direct sales and customer satisfaction. Branding should evolve naturally as your business grows, rather than being an upfront expense.
Resources:
• Automation Book: screwthecommute.com/automatefree
• Mentor Program: greatinternetmarketingtraining.com
• Internet Marketing School: IMTCVA.org

===

Episode 942 – Branding Pros and Cons
[00:00:08] Welcome to Screw the Commute. The entrepreneurial podcast dedicated to getting you out of the car and into the money, with your host, lifelong entrepreneur and multimillionaire, Tom Antion.

[00:00:24] Hey everybody! It's Tom here with episode 942 of Screw the Commute podcast. Today, we're going to talk about branding pros and cons. Hope you didn't miss episode 941. That was the new feature on Facebook called Auto Clipping, where you can really save you a lot of time with your videos. So make sure you pick up a copy of our automation book at screwthecommute.com/automatefree and check out my mentor program at GreatInternetMarketingTraining.com. One more thing. Hey, if you want to give the greatest gift ever to your kids or your grandchildren, or even to yourself. Check out my school, the Internet Marketing Training Center of Virginia. It's IMTCVA.org where you will get a marketable, a highly marketable skill and as little as six months. In fact, people are making money before they even graduate.

[00:01:18] Let's get into branding pros and cons. Well, for years, you may have heard me say this over and over again. If you've been listening to me for a while, that small businesses typically brand themselves into the poorhouse, right? The example I always give is somebody says, oh, I want to make my website look exactly like my the colors of my printed brochure. And I tell them to go down to Best Buy and pull up their website on ten different laptops and then see, see how that's going to work out. It's going to look different everywhere. I mean, some people have come to me. They spent $15,000 for a branding package kit or something that was totally worthless.

[00:02:06] They hadn't sold a thing to anybody in their 15,000 bucks in the hole before they even started. So I'm very much against this. But anyway, I'm going to give you some pros and cons of branding and then a little bit about when maybe you might want to brand. And from examples in my life and you might, might say, well, let's forget branding. Tom didn't do it for 20 years anyway. Some pros of branding. Well, you get recognition. People notice and realize, oh, that's the company I dealt with. So. And to do so and so. The simple examples are McDonald's, Coke, Pepsi and KFC. Everybody knows if they instantly see those what they are. Even I was making a cross-country trip to Idaho, and I would look for either a pilot or a loves. These were truck stops that had each one had certain amenities that I wanted on this cross-country trip. So I would watch for their signs. See? So so that's a good thing. Now, when it comes to hiring. Yeah, people like to work for established brands because many people do because they know there's a reputation and also that there's somebody to sue. I guess if that has deep pockets, if they get screwed over now, your brand also can have value in itself when they go to evaluate a company's worth. So besides just your physical assets and your sales and so forth, the I mean, I think they call it goodwill because of that brand.

[00:03:48] So it can have a financial value for you. It also has a perceived See value in that. People kind of think that the product is better. I know if I'm traveling with somebody and they got to go to the bathroom and I'm going to look for a McDonald's because pretty much they're going to be clean. Okay. So so you had nothing to do with the hamburger taste, I guess. But still, that brand has created that. Oh, that's a better place to go now. Also, there's a loyalty thing to it and repeat business thing to it. If you just love a McRib sandwich you're waiting for that to come out. It doesn't. It's not there all the time. Or if you love Big Macs or Quarter Pounders, you know, you just have that feel or chicken nuggets. I'm using McDonald's as an example because pretty much everybody on earth knows what McDonald's is, but somebody else might like, oh, the the cheese sticks at Burger King. I just love them. Or the Whopper is my favorite. I'm always going to go for a Whopper, and the Whopper is a brand, right? See? So yeah, you can get loyalty to to yourself with a brand, a strong brand, and it kind of gives you a competitive advantage. These are all these things add up to the fact that a non-branded place that's a similar has a similar product.

[00:05:17] Then you have an advantage because you're more well known and all these other things. All right. So what are some of the bad things? And these are what I got to tell you. For most small business people this is where I hone in. You know, they come to me and they want to make a fortune online, right? Or they want to be a professional speaker, and they've never done a paid speech and they've never sold a thing online. They got some crap stupid website that they got off of major national TV, which I always say to stuff on natural national TV. With regard to internet marketing is designed to take advantage of people that don't know any better. So that's the bottom line on it. All right. So they come to me with with that and and they start asking about branding. Well should I buy this this this company or for 10,000 will give me a, you know, a printed PDF. I mean, I mean, just I mean, I'm laughing because it's just so stupid, right? They'll give you a PDF and they'll give you a folder with this printed with your name on it. And, and they'll give you a website template that's got your colors on it. I mean, just nothing a logo. Yeah. They'll get you a logo too, which I covered. And by the way, episode 939. So yeah, it's kind of stupid when you have no idea what you're doing.

[00:06:46] Maybe limited. Probably limited funding if you're listening to this show and you can't waste your money on that kind of crap because it's costly, it's time. And, you know, besides the cost of creating the the things you think you need, the it's time consuming. Even if you had them to build a brand over time. And where do you hear what I got my first brand, how long it took. And another thing, it can hurt your expansion. You know, when you're brand new and you get this harebrained idea, I call them, you know, a CSI. You know, that's not the crime scene investigation. It's crappy. Stupid idea. Right? And everybody's ideas are crappy and stupid, including mine. Until you can prove they aren't with real sales and real numbers. But anyway, you get this, this harebrained idea, and you try it out and you do all this branding around it, and then it fails. It fails, and then you wasted all that time and money. So I always tell people your brand will find you. Sell good stuff to people that really want it and let them build your brand for you. Don't just just don't come up with an idea. This is what happened with the the.com bubble. A long time ago. Those of you old enough to remember it. These stupid kids had these wild ideas and got enormous amounts of funding by even stupider adults. And. And then they spent the money on pool tables and given free massages, rather than the idea being any good.

[00:08:27] And they lost. Everybody lost their money. So costly and time consuming is one of the major cons. And now back to hurting your expansion. I'll give you an example of this. I did a killer sales speech for an organization. Got massively great reviews. I'm not just blowing my own horn here. It got all the evaluations, were off the charts. Loved him. This is going to help us like crazy blow, you know, all this stuff. And so the meeting planner afterwards was saying, hey, boy, that was so great, so great. Listen, do you know any any good customer service speakers? And I and I said, oh, I have a customer service program too. And instead of them smartly saying, oh you do. Let's get it booked. They're like, ah, we're looking for somebody that's, you know, concentrates on customer service. If I'd have done the customer service speech first, I would have blown him away on that and then they wouldn't have hired me for sales. That's where being too branded can hurt your expansion into other areas. Say, okay, so that's another con of branding, then you kind of when you're a strong brand out there, you kind of create your competition. You get a lot of look alikes and knockoffs. And this has happened. I remember this guy invented this, this exercise device and these guys from new Jersey. I'm not ragging on new Jersey, although I never go there because of the gun laws.

[00:10:07] But anyway, said, hey, look here, we'll offer you this much for your company. And he said, no. Okay, well, here's what's going to happen. We're going to go to China with our people in China. We're going to knock it off. We're going to sell it for half the price at every CVS and Rite Aid on Earth, and you're going to disappear off the face of the Earth. See. So you're kind of creating knockoffs and lookalikes when you have a strong brand and and listen to this. My first brand I was in business 20 years. 20 years. This is a lot of it was before the internet started and it was bootcamp around 1996. I invented this and still to this day, it's the longest running, continuously running internet and digital marketing seminar. I don't know where the other guys disappeared to, but you know, it's it's still around, but I do them maybe once a year, uh, online now rather than in person. But anyway. But camp and it was based on if you're wondering what I'm talking about, it's not an exercise. You know, if you saw me, I wouldn't be an exercise seminar. But it was a seminar. I was making so much money online and people said, you got to do a boot camp on this, a boot camp Tom. And I said, yeah, man, I came from a comic background and I can't do what everybody else is doing.

[00:11:32] So I'm sitting there making all this money online. I said, you know, I'm sitting on my rear end making this money. I'll call it boot camp. And it caught on and I've done them, you know, 11 countries around the world, except in England. They made me call it bum camp instead of boot camp. So that was 20 years after I had been making millions of dollars in various businesses that I did my first semi branding. Didn't even trademark it. So if you want to go out there and try to trademark it, you know, be my guest. Somebody in Europe tried to steal it. And then I, you know, I kind of threatened them and they quit. But anyway, and then the other one that I trademarked, which was 46 years after I was in business, is Screw the Commute, this podcast you're listening to. I thought, you know what this this image that my good friend Kathy Dunn created for me and this, uh, you know, entrepreneurial podcast in the top 1% pretty soon should be in the top half a percent of podcasts. So I trademarked it this this year. So screw the commute. That's 46 years, but all the while making millions of dollars. So you got to think about this. Is this branding idea right for you? Or is it going to be a suck on your finances and keep you from actually making money and letting your market build your brand? That's going to work, because if your market builds your brand for you, they're spending money with you, okay.

[00:13:07] And then and so it's almost guaranteed to work. But if you just think it up out of thin air and cross your fingers, that's pretty risky unless you've got super deep pockets. So that's my pros and cons of of branding in most cases. And most of the people listening to this, you'd be better off with the cons and don't do it okay. Build. You know, start making products, sell things. And you know, it allows me to expand all these years. So I have fatso tennis another semi brand or I won't even call it a brand. It's a spin off. I got brutal self-defense. I got protection Dogs Elite, and nobody you know, knows or cares that it's me in those areas because it's not me, the brand. It's the topic that they're buying. See, the tennis and self-defense and protection dogs, all those have their own I don't want to say brands, but everybody knows what they're about and it's not dependent on me. My name say so. Anyway. You got a lot of leeway if you forget branding and you work to take care of customers, that's the bottom line. All right, check out my school. IMTCVA.org, and my mentor program, greatinternetmarketingtraining.com and I will catch you on the next episode. Catch you later.