When my parents separated when I was a kid, we were broke. At that time, my dream wasn't that my parents would get back together so we could be a family again, it was that I would always have Jif peanut butter in my house.
Even though I didn't know it then, I was learning a really important lesson in branding, that can be a game-changer in your business.
Rooting for you! xo, Heather
Hey there, this is Heather Campbell with some pro marketing advice for entrepreneurs who want to build a business that makes them happy, makes them money and brings their good work to the world. And today we're gonna be talking about a good branding lesson that I learned from Jif peanut butter.
So there's a little bit of a backstory to this and the story isn't that this is the biggest jar of peanut butter that I've ever seen. I could actually like do some bicep curls with it. My husband recently got a Sam's club membership, so we have lots large sized things, but here's the backstory. So when I was a kid, my parents separated and at that time there were six kids.
My mom became a single mom and we were broke, like broke, broke, broke, flat, broke. We were on welfare. We were on food stamps. Like my older sister used her babysitting money. To buy my younger brothers and sister school shoes. Like, I mean, my mom used to make breakfast for dinner. She was a great marketer. You have to be with a huge family like ours.
And we would have breakfast, like scrambled eggs and toast. And I found out later that my mom said, "Oh yeah, cause I could feed all of you guys for like, 80 cents." But we loved it. And so one of the things is that we would have to buy because we had no money we would go to this grocery store really far away from our neighborhood because we had to use food stamps and we would buy this huge tub of peanut butter. It was in a bucket, there was a handle on it. It didn't taste very good. And it was so hard that when you went to spread it on your bread, it was, it would just break the bread.
And I had a friend at the time who was from a fairly well to-do family, and she had Jif peanut butter at her house, which was so creamy. It never broke the bread. And I used to go over to her house honestly, and just eat just eat spoonfuls of Jif peanut butter or make peanut butter on toast and just eat it all the time because jif to me represented security. It represented that life was okay. That things were okay at home. If you had Jif peanut butter. And I remember thinking at age 11, because I was that's how old I was when my parents separated that it, my dream was not that, "Oh, my parents are gonna get back together and that we're gonna be a family again."
It literally was that I would have enough money in my life to have Jif peanut butter. It represented, again, security and affluence. And what I learned at this really young age is actually a really important branding strategy, which is Jif, peanut butter... like there are a lot of different peanut butters out on the market and things ended up getting much, much better in my family.
So we didn't have to buy the bucket of peanut butter, but my mom was a Skippy gal. And even then I was still always like, no, no, no. Jif is I had this emotional connection to Jif. It represented so much more to me than just peanut butter. And what the branding lesson is in that is that you must have an emotional connection with your customers, with your brand. And a trap that a lot of entrepreneurs fall into is that they become very focused on the features it's feature, feature, feature, feature, feature, feature.
And what happens in our brains is when we list up, a lot of features is first of all, we make it hard for people to figure out how do we fit into their lives. And then we're putting them in this "Yes, no, yes, no, yes, no" sort of mentality because that's how the brain works. When you're giving up a list of features you can only pray to gosh, as an entrepreneur in your marketing, that you have more people in the yes column. Because getting people from a no to a yes is really, really hard work. That is why we always want to make sure that we are speaking not only to the minds of people, but also to the hearts of people. So I'm not minimizing the features, but we must speak to what is the emotional connection tied to our business, the transformation that we deliver to our customers.
And so one of the practices, like a really great way of getting there is who are your most valuable customers? What are their hopes and dreams? What is getting in the way of them achieving those hopes and dreams? And then what is their before story? And then they come and work with you and then what is their after story? And you really want to be able to tap into that. And it is one of the hardest things I see entrepreneurs struggle with communicating. I call this the ultimate payoff of working with you. Some people call it the transformation too, but what is that transformation? How is someone forever changed after working with you?
So when I think about working with entrepreneurs in my world, their "before" is that they're feeling overwhelmed and that, that marketing merry go round is going like a million miles an hour, and they're just like, "How do I even get on this thing?" Or they might be thinking, "I'm doing all the marketing things, but I'm not getting sales on the other side. So what am I doing wrong?"
So they're coming in, overwhelmed, frustrated, maybe even thinking about throwing in the towel, but then after working with me, they feel confident. They have clarity, they feel firm in their footing. They're able to get their message out there with the brand they're proud of messaging that works.
They start to see success. They start building their community. That makes them show up differently in the world, to their family, to their friends in the community. There's a huge ripple effect to that. Like what happens when someone feels happy? Are they healthier? Do they have more money in their bank account?
Do they have a cooler, a different kind of network of friends? Are they feeling full of possibility? And they wake up every single day thinking, "I can't wait to work on my business!" They are so clear about where they're going. That is such a good feeling, and there's not one feature associated with that.
That is all emotion. And so that is my message for you today is the best brands appeal to the hearts and minds and think hearts come first. Then the minds of their most valuable customers because as every good brander knows and write this down or make a meme out of it or post this to social media, put it in the comments if this resonates with you: emotion leads to action. Features reason leads to conclusion and we never wanna be yes, no, yes, no.
We want someone to feel that emotional connection to our business because that makes it them so much easier for them to visualize what it's gonna be like the ultimate payoff of working with you and that ultimately makes it easier for them to buy.
So Jif peanut butter will always be a always, always, always be in my world because of what it represents. And it's not, yeah, there are tons of different kinds of peanut butter out there, but I will always have Jif in my house because to me, not only is it delicious, but it also represents like, I look at Jif peanut butter in my cabinet and I'm like, "You know what things are going all right in my life."
And that is the emotional connection I have to Jif. So I'm gonna have a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch. So whatever kind of peanut butter, if you're a Skippy person, a Smuckers person, even a Goober Grape person, please know that wherever you are in this beautiful... oh wait, hold on one second.
I almost was gonna close without letting you know that I have a free three day series of flash classes are about 30 ish minutes for three days, August 2nd, 3rd, and 4th, where I'm gonna be teaching you cool things about branding and marketing.
Everything I know about branding and marketing, the exact order of marketing operations that I use with my clients to help build six and seven figure businesses. I'm gonna be teaching that same framework on those days. So I'm gonna throw a link. In the chat it's called Invincible Marketing click on the link.
It will give you all the details, but if you are like, I'm gonna learn more about branding and marketing in a way that I can understand it, like Jif peanut butter. That makes it pretty easy for me to understand the emotional connection of branding. Definitely, definitely check it out. And I'm so excited to share with you because I am so keen on helping entrepreneurs fast track their marketing success.
So again, like I say, at the beginning, they can build a business that makes them happy, makes them money and brings their good work to the world. So with that, wherever you are in this beautiful ever changing world of ours, please know that there is someone right here in Denver, Colorado, and that is me, Heather Campbell, who is 100000% rooting for you.
Take care guys, and I'll see you here next week.
