A Few Strong Words…

In this series, we have looked at how perception affects buying habits – particularly whether or not they buy what you are selling.

There are many, many ways that you can influence this choice, and paint yourself in the best light. In this post, we’ll look at specific things that help shape that perception, and how you can harness that power.

Colour

We all realize that colour has meaning. Some are obvious: red means passion, green means envy, blue means cool and soothing. Some are not so obvious: prisons use a certain shade of pink on their walls to help calm inmates. Some meanings change over time: ten years ago, if you said “green” then someone would say “envy” back but now they are more likely to say “environment”.

Here’s a short-list of colours and their associated meanings:

Red – passion, attention, excitement
Blue – trustworthy, professional, peaceful
Yellow – happy, intelligent, “visible” (as in “grabs attention”)
Orange – bold, cheerful, adventurous
Green – harmony, soothing, flexible
Purple – regal or stately, spiritual, eclectic
White – pure, fresh, clean
Black – refined, powerful, mysterious

Of course it is not just what colours you use, but how you use them. A totally black room for example would more likely convey foreboding and evil than refined. And interestingly, orange and red in restaurants seems to say “eat up and get out” – which is exactly what the fast-food restaurants want you to do.

If you are unsure of what colours would work well with your business, take a look at the competition. McDonald’s and Burger King use similar colours to each other – reds and oranges. Coffee shops tend to used dark rich browns and creamy colours. Banks and financial institutions seem to favour blues.

Finding out what colours your competition uses might put you on the right track. Then look up what the colours mean to find out why they might be using them. Brown for coffee is obvious, but why blue for banks?

Name

The expression “a rose, by any other name, would smell just as sweet” is not true. It is scientifically proven that your name can deeply influence how people perceive you. That’s why air fresheners have names like “Country Fresh” instead of “Country Barn”. It’s also why Shaggy changed his name from Orville Richard Burrell.

Then there are names that get lost in translation: the Chevy Nova that means “will not go” in Spanish, and the Toyota MR2, which sounded out in French becomes (phonetically – and roughly at that) “emm, err, duh” or “merde”, which equals that barn smell mentioned above…

Michael McDerment has a few suggestions on how to name your company. His approach is a little basic, but his reasoning is sound.

I think you can treat names like colours. If you are operating a bank, solid “blue” names like Morgan and Chase are good. If you are aiming your business at kids, then “orange” names like Chuck E. Cheese and Hannah Montana fit the bill.

No matter what your business, come up with a few names that you like and shop them around your friends and family to find out which will help people’s perception of you most.

Font

This is a small but important consideration. The font choice you use in your logo and banners will have a huge impact on your business.

I’m not going to reinvent the wheel here: Kelly Erickson already had a great take on this subject.

I will add this though: try to look at the fonts you use like colours again. The “blue” IBM logo. The “red” Chili’s logo (which actually is red, and uses an image rather than words – how fun is that?).

In my own case, I used a hand-writing script for my name, trying to convey “artistic” and “creative” with a straight font for the “Freelance Writer” sub-name, conveying professionalism and reliability (you can let me know if I missed the mark by leaving a comment below…!)

Style

Style is very difficult to tackle. It covers many different aspects of your business, from the way you use colour to your content, your customer service, your storefront, your website layout, and more.

My last name is not Gucci, so I am not going to go too far down this road. But I will say this: I did try to consciously put together a basic style for my own website using all of the points including the blue colours to represent professionalism and reliability, the fonts as mentioned above to convey both professionalism and creativity, and the simple layout to represent “easy to work with”. The image I chose of the piled rocks also represents all of these attributes (I believe) as well as give a calming image – to represent that I’m in control and can take the stress off my clients’ shoulders.

Once you get into things like Gucci and Ferrari where style is their business, you need to have a very sophisticated palette. But for the average business, the most important thing is consistency. Again, I’ll compare it to colours: match your style so that everything works together to give the perception you want to convey.

And get rid of colours that clash. Your jewellry shop can be bathed in regal purple, well-lit, and have the most smudge-free display cases. But put up a poster with a snowboarder on it, and you will negate everything.

The “Easy” Way to Do All This

These are just a few basic ways to help influence other people’s perception of you. There are countless more. But if you start by identifying your keywords (as discussed in the last entry in this series) and choose colours, fonts, names, and style to reflect these, you’ll at least be going in the right direction.

It’s important to have a strong sense of self, but often you can save yourself a lot of anxiety and trouble by getting someone else to create your visual identity. A graphic designer understands how colour, fonts, and other design elements work to convey your image. An experience designer can help your storefront business (and perhaps even online business) create a better customer experience using these techniques and more. Find one you trust and who seems to have the same style sensibilities that you want to reflect in your own business.

In the next installment in this series, I will do a case study on a company that does it (mostly) right: Apple.

Until then, chime in with your comments! Am I right? Am I wrong? Am I blue? Let me know…

~Graham

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In Part I of this series, we discussed how perception can affect buying habits. In Part II, we saw specifically how this works. You don’t want to buy a Ferrari in a dirty back alley for example. The environment and the way you do business needs to reflect the product or service you are selling.

As you may know, it is easy to look objectively at someone else’s decisions and judge their effectiveness. Yes, Italian marble fountains in the showroom and oak desks mean prestige, trust, and Ferraris.

But what represents your product or service?

For Starters…

It is important to realize that every aspect of your business influences perception. The way you dress for a business meeting, the design of your website, the look of your business card, the colour of the drapes in your office, the way you recycle. Even things like the car you drive or the places where you eat.

For some of us, like the work-from-home freelancer, we aren’t likely to be “seen” at any particular restaurant. But imagine what perception customers would have if they saw Ronald McDonald standing in line at Wendy’s for a lunchtime burger…

So for starters, consider every aspect of what your customers/clients see of you, including:

• Logo
• Tag lines and slogans
• Business cards
• Website and/or blog
• Advertising (print ads, banners, Google Adwords, etc.)
• Phone message recordings
• Brochures and other marketing materials
• Store front
• The way you dress and groom yourself for direct contact with customers/clients

Develop your own list, and consider every point. Also try to keep an objective eye here, if at all possible. What would you think if you saw all these separately? What would you think looking at all of these together?

In short, what perception do you have of yourself based only on these items?

Chances are, there is room for improvement. Even companies like Microsoft and GM must constantly work on customer perception. Decide:

1. How you want customers/clients to perceive your business.
2. How you can achieve it.

What Are Your Keywords?

Deciding how you want customers to perceive you can be deceptively complicated. It is no secret that even the best marketers out there freeze up when they try to decide how to market themselves.

So crafting customer perception is no small thing. It helps though to start with the basics. Jot down in one sentence exactly what your company does. Think in terms of benefits, not features. For example, if you sell WordPress plugins, then your sentence won’t be “sell WordPress plugins”, it would be “make it easier for people to use WordPress”.

See the difference? Not only is the second more colourful and descriptive, but it focuses what your core business really is (i.e. helping people, not just selling products).

If you feel it is important, add a couple more sentences to describe the nuances of your business. But don’t write an essay. Boil it down as much as possible until you have the essence of your business.

Now we boil it down even further. Create a list of keywords based on this sentence, just as you might a blog post or an SEO web page. If you are a florist, some obvious keywords would be “flower”, “arrangements”, “gift ideas”. But what about words like “fun”, and “happy”, and “celebration”? These are even better because they deal with emotions, not objects or ideas.

And we all know from Marketing 101 that connecting emotionally with your customers will make all the difference.

One More Easy Tip

If you want an objective assessment on how your customers perceive you, why don’t you ask them?

Recently, James at Men With Pens asked their readers what people thought of the look of their blog, and what they could do to make it better. That post and the comments opened a whole can of worms. Many people chimed in with suggestions for a website redesign.

But what I think surprised James was the fact that different readers saw different things. Everyone knew them as bloggers, and many knew that Men With Pens was a business name as well, but few knew exactly all the services they offered. (In fact, this is the case for many bloggers — I found out recently that few readers know exactly what I do as well!)

Just by asking for customer feedback, you can find out exactly how some of them perceive you right now. You can do this by emailing them for a quick impression of your website, sending a “How Are We Doing?” survey, or if you have a blog, simply asking them like James did. However, I would recommend making it as easy for your clients to respond as possible. You don’t want them to start thinking that they are now working for you!

Armed with this new-found information, you can decide what holes are in your customers’ perceptions, what you need to stress better, and what you should fix. We’ll discuss this next in Part IV of the series.

Until then, have any tips for discovering customer perception? Let us know by leaving a comment below!

~Graham

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In Part I of The Art of Perception series, we talked about how perception can affect our buying habits. As experienced consumers, we have opened and entered many doors in our lives, some good and some bad. Now we can usually tell where a door is going to lead before we get to it.

On the other side of the equation, as marketers we can try to understand what the characteristics of that “ideal” door is, and then design our door to match.

In this installment, we talk about why perception is so important. If our customers get to the door and hear hooves on the other side, they’ll expect horses. Usually it is vital that when they walk through that door, we show them horses.

Why Give Them Horses?

Let’s back up a step. As we know, the most effective marketing is targeted marketing. The better we can identify our “best” customers (repeat customers with the highest sales, etc.) and create marketing that speaks directly to their wants, the more likely we are to make that sale.

In terms of perception, this means setting up a buying environment that will make people comfortable. For example, if you are going to buy a Ferrari, you’d expect the showroom to have marble floors, perhaps a fountain in the showroom, and fine leather furniture.

But what if this wasn’t the case? What if there were plain concrete floors, wood panelling, and florescent lighting throughout? You would likely get nervous. Alarm bells would go off. You would probably wonder if this “dealership” was actually a chop shop.

Now this doesn’t just hold true for high-end items. Think of McDonald’s. Their key to business success has been consistency. Go to any McDonald’s in the world and order a Big Mac, and you’ll get exactly the Big Mac you were expecting.

What Are We Trying to Convey When We Give Them Horses?

In simple terms, giving them horses nurtures the same thing whether you are selling Ferraris or Big Macs.

Trust.

Customers who want to see horses are expecting reliability and consistency. There are two reasons for this.

First, this helps the type of buyers who don’t want to think too much about their buying decision. They are relying on some other aspect of your business (your brand, your presentation, your professionalism, etc.) to help guide their decision. For example, people in a hurry don’t want to make a huge dinner choice, so they go for a Big Mac, knowing that it will be a safe and reliable choice. Other examples include:

• Any type of franchise operation
• Everyday items like dish soap, toothpaste, razor blades, etc.
• Branded clothing like Nike runners, North Face winter wear, and Joe Boxer boxers

Secondly, this covers buyers who are carefully scrutinizing their purchases. Someone buying a Ferrari wants to feel like those hundreds of thousands of dollars are well spent. Buying it from a trailer office just won’t convey that trust. Other examples include:

• Financial services like banks, investment consultants, etc.
• Jewellry stores and other luxury item shops
• Country clubs and similar social clubs
• Real estate agents

Nurturing Trust

Perception plays a large part in conveying that trust. That’s why banks are solid, conservative structures with vaults and bars and secret rooms. We want to protect our money in a fortress, so they give us a fortress.

It’s also why McDonald’s puts such an emphasis on cleanliness. Seeing a spotless restaurant conveys the perception that the food you are about to eat is good too. (Okay, you know what I mean…)

So how do we as marketers convey that trust by creating perceptions?

We’ll look at that next Monday.

Until then, join the discussion! How does perception affect your buying (or selling) habits? Share your experiences!

~Graham

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