THE CUP OF COFFEE ANALOGY: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Brand in the Digital Age

By Chris Goff, Rsymond Aaron and Loral Langemeier

An entrepreneur teaches branding in concrete terms. His name is Christopher Goff, someone international bestselling author Raymond Aaron calls an entrepreneurial powerhouse, whose metaphor for branding is simply brilliant. But Chris doesn't just discuss branding. He also illustrates the five pillars on which every business is built, and creates a blueprint for starting your own company. This book is about what it really takes to launch and maintain a successful brand in today's world, and covers topics like customer avatars, brand design and communication, innovation as a constant, and Chris Goff's formula for entrepreneurial success. Chris is the real deal, and learning his coffee cup analogy is something you owe to yourself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jan 27, 2022
• ISBN: 9781772774665

Book preview

Introduction

Born in California and raised in the UK, I’ve been a successful creative entrepreneur since 21. I founded several ground-breaking businesses in a wide range of different sectors, including 3D animation, music promotion, visualization, branding, property investing and development, and circus skills training, to name a few. I’m also a writer and an award-winning designer and have been an editor on VFX industry publications such as Showreel Magazine and Reel-Show television.

In 2002, I founded a company called Render-It, which was instrumental in developing and revolutionizing the 3D animation sector in the UK and EU. The company was the first of its kind in Europe. A cluster computing company, Render-It provided animation rendering services to film and television, architectural visualisation, games, medical imaging, automotive, and aerospace engineering companies.

I left Render-It in late 2005 and founded Qbit Studios in 2011, having spent the interim years on property investing and freelancing in the CG industry. The company encompasses a design, visualization and branding studio; quantumbitz.com, an eCommerce business; and Qbit Academy, a digital education business focusing on teaching and mentoring business start-ups. With Qbit Studios, I’ve had the privilege of working on many high-profile projects for the Royal Family in conjunction with composer Olga Thomas Bosovskaya, Cruse Bereavement Care, and RBS on the Natwest and RBS retail banking brands.

As an author and entrepreneur, I’ve shone a light on the challenge inherent in the entrepreneurial mindset and set out a system to unleash your creativity by understanding the risks of Da Vinci’s Paradox (Syndrome)—a condition that may affect a highly creative person who gets new ideas and visions faster than he or she can implement, leading them to constantly start new projects without finishing the old ones.

In this new book, The Cup of Coffee Analogy: The Ultimate Guide to Building a Brand in the Digital Age, I offer you the opportunity to discover how some of the most outstanding creative entrepreneurs of all time have propelled themselves to success. You’ll also find the secret to building a successful business, learn how to exploit the magic moment of risk, and discover the truth about how to be the leader of your enterprise.

Chapter One

The Analogy

What is Brand?

When seeking to understand what brand is, I use the following analogy: Brand is a cup of coffee. And when I mentioned a cup of coffee, you probably had a whole range of ideas and memories momentarily flash before your eyes: how the coffee smells and tastes, how it sounds when being poured into a cup, the musical tinkle of the spoon against the cup as you stir in milk and sugar, and the heat and sensation you feel when sipping it. For each of you reading this, that set of experiential preconceptions was different, and that’s because brand is psycho-emotional. For example, some of you like instant coffee, some love an espresso or French press first thing each morning, and some loathe the stuff. In any case, the experiential flash was universal—unless you’ve never heard of, seen, smelled, or tasted a cup of coffee (And how likely is that?).

The point is that everyone has a different mental picture of what coffee means to them, based on their experience, which is to say the mental flash you just had is brand. So, when you’re building a brand, it’s key to understand that its value exists in the customer’s mind, defined by their interaction, good or bad experiences, personal preferences, and psychology. Your brand message, brand identity, and product offering, while influential in the brand experience, are essentially only parts of the greater whole that lives in your customers’ perceptions and preconceptions of your business.

So, your challenge as a brand builder is to take your business from the point of there being no recognition in the customer’s mind to a point at which the customer is willing to make space and time in their lives for it and you. Your challenge when building such a brand is to elicit common responses across a wide variety of people. The way you achieve that is by a principle that I call idiosyncratic consistency.

You, as the entrepreneur, and your business shouldn’t make the mistake of trying to be all things to all people, and neither should your product. If you’re impulsive, outgoing, and a people person, your personal brand will reflect those qualities. Similarly, if your business is exciting and sexy, then your business brand will reflect that. Finally, if your products are innovative, fresh, and reliable, your product brand must be the same. In other words, embrace those qualities that make you and your business unique and reinforce them consistently.

For example, Elon Musk is an atypical CEO: he smokes weed, lives a playboy lifestyle, and demonstrates an erratic personality type, but because he’s honest about these behaviours he has chosen not to hide them and has been able to capitalize on these idiosyncrasies. His companies are cutting edge, attempt to solve significant challenges, and are named in ways that convey humour, energy, and an almost childlike awe of the core challenge they’re formed to solve (consider The Boring Company, which is a pun). This is consistent across all his brands and with who he is as a person. He hasn’t attempted to be all things to all people, wear different masks for different crowds, or position his brands to attract everyone.

Why is Brand Critical?

•Brand helps your company and products stand out from the competition, which helps customers make a buying decision.

•Brand helps you build credibility and establish trust.

•Brand raises your offering above those of your competitors by showing that you have a unique product. An example would be the fact that people are willing to pay 75% more for a Coke than a generic version of that drink.

•Brand helps you to grow your business by word of mouth. As mentioned, customers who emotionally connect to your brand will learn to trust you. They will also develop loyalty. You can be sure they’ll tell their friends about it.

•Brand is an integral strategy for your business, as opposed to marketing and sales, which are tactical. There’s an adage in the military that says your strategy should define your tactics rather than the reverse. That’s as true for your business as it is for battlefield generals. It follows that the function of brand is to define marketing and sales.

•To achieve any sort of longevity in business, you need to establish brand.

•If you want to sell a business you’re building, you don’t have anything unless the incoming management team or purchaser can adapt your brand. For example, suppose you’ve built a business that revolves around tactical marketing or high-pressure sales and a limited network that’s directly linked to you, the entrepreneur. In that case, anyone looking to buy the business is going to tell you that it actually rests with you, the entrepreneur, and therefore they won’t be able to buy the company. So, if you wish to make a business saleable, you have to be able to build a brand that stands out from the network or entrepreneur that built that business.

The Three Types of Brand (Personal, Company, Product)

The trick for someone attempting to create a brand is to elicit common responses across a wide variety of people. Steve Jobs did that very well when he created a personal brand by always appearing in public in black horn-rimmed glasses, a black long-sleeved jersey and blue jeans. Because of this, when people thought of him, they invariably remembered him as wearing these things.

Similarly, Honda, which has The Power of Dreams as their company brand message, also emotes a response in people rather than creating an action.

I gave you an example of a personal brand when I spoke about Steve Jobs. He also managed to effectively brand the company (Apple) and their products (iPad, iPhone, etc.). He did something unusual, though. Consider that most people will think of the stylized apple with a bite taken out of it when asked about Apple’s company brand. Whatever the colour or background, that apple has remained the same for the company’s entire history. It’s the company’s logo.

But what about the product brands? Well, the Apple laptop and iPad are almost always plain, with the company apple logo appearing in the centre of the top cover. The iPhone, when shut off, will always also display the logo. So, while both company and product brands are different, the logos are the same. Brilliant!

This might be a little confusing, so for branding purposes, remember that Apple, iPad, and iPhone all represent a brand; Apple is the company brand, and the iPad and iPhone are product brands. However, they all share the same logo. I chose the Apple example because the co-dependency between a company brand and a product brand is very important.

Let’s look at another example: When Samsung is promoting the range of their phones, it’s always a Galaxy, so they have the Galaxy, Galaxy Note and Galaxy Tablet. People are used to seeing the company brand, Samsung, next to the product brand, Galaxy. Yet, you can take away that company brand and just say Galaxy S20—the product on its own has a different set of core values and relationships with users. But … people will automatically associate the phone with Samsung because they have this pre-existing impression of the company or their relationship with it. You have people who will swear by Apple phones but love Samsung whiteboards. So, Samsung has a different set of perceptions for different kinds of people, depending on the product range and how the users interact with the company.

The previous example is similar to the interaction of the Panasonic/Technics brands. Technics is the high-end audio product brand that was purchased by Panasonic, which represents the company and their lower-end brand of electronics. It’s also an example of exceptions in branding where Technics (company brand) has branded products but is owned by a larger branded organization—Panasonic.

You also experience this phenomenon with Heinz and PepsiCo. On the one hand, you’ll never see the Heinz brand next to the Burger King brand (which they own). Burger King is always treated as its own brand. Whereas PepsiCo has an advertising campaign where they allow some of the major companies they own to appear next to the PepsiCo brand (Tropicana, Gatorade, Frito Lay Canada