Name first, product second

Now, if you put your name before what you sell, there's a fairly simple pecking order, I think, that more brands should consider when it comes to marketing themselves.

Not literally in every instance, of course, but there are plenty of occasions where explaining what you sell needs to take priority, particularly if you have a new product with an unfamiliar category that you're creating or something that requires a little more explanation with some sort of tech brands like I've worked with in the past.

It takes a little bit more nuance to communicate what it is that they offer and what they do.

and how they help.

But like any conversation that you might have with someone for the first time, you don't exactly go into introducing yourself by saying what it is you do before saying what your name is.

So when every piece of marketing leads with the product, service or category before it leads with the brand selling it, there is a risk that all the attention you're generating is helping people remember what they saw without necessarily remembering who it came from.

So it's like not being able to recall an ad for, you remember the ad, but you don't remember who the brand it was for.

Now, I recently saw a fellow brand man by the name of Mark Thoulis who put it perfectly in a video of his on LinkedIn.

And he said, if people just think about the product before you, then the next time they want it, they can get it anywhere because lots of people sell it too.

And that's really the problem.

The problem.

If you sell, say, coffee, and all I remember is coffee, you've helped coffee.

If you're an accountant and all I remember is that you do tax returns, you've helped accountants across the board.

If you're a real estate agent and all I remember from your advertising is that you sell houses, you've probably helped whichever real estate agent happens to be standing in front of them when, say, they eventually decide to sell their house.

Now, the product matters, the service matters, the category obviously matters.

But if you're spending money trying to build awareness, you probably want some of that awareness and thought of which brand comes to mind first to belong to you.

Now, the category isn't yours to own.

This is the reminder.

The category isn't yours to own, even though the idea of positioning your brand and market share comes close.

Now, there's a reason brands naturally gravitate towards showing people what they sell, because it makes it easy to understand right off the bat.

Coffee brands show coffee beans, cups, and various shades of brown coffee.

Dentists, they show smiles and teeth.

Real estate agents show houses.

Accountants show calculators, graphs and people looking surprisingly happy while staring at spreadsheets.

These cues and descriptors for the most part Quickly communicate the category that you're in and it gives customers familiar visual shortcuts and maybe messaging shortcuts as well for understanding what they're looking at.