Spice Up a Boring Brand by Creating Your Own Special Sauce

Whether the products or services you provide are totally unique or could be classified as commodities, you can’t hope to build a strong, sustainable business if you have a boring brand.  

Spice Up a Boring Brand by Creating Your Own Special Sauce

Few brands enjoy a competitor-free marketplace for any length of time. Give people reasons to choose your business over the rest by making sure you don’t have a boring brand.

In the 1970’s, the McDonalds fast food franchise did a masterful job of demonstrating the marketing power that a special sauce could bring to the table – if you will forgive the pun. Kids all over America learned to recite the list of ingredients found in a Big Mac, cementing the burger and the marketing campaign into the hearts and minds of fast food lovers forever.

Scroll through the news feeds of popular social networks like Facebook and Pinterest and you are likely to come across not only recipes but recipes supposedly providing a list of the secret ingredients found in signature food and beverages at popular restaurants, coffee houses and bars. The Nickelodeon© cartoon Spongebob Square Pants even has a running story line where the perennial villain unsuccessfully attempts to steal the recipe for Crabby Patties over and over again.

If your business appears to have a ‘secret sauce’ giving it a competitive advantage, you can be sure that your competitors are trying to figure it out, too.

Fast food hamburgers are a commodity; consumers have many interchangeable options when it comes to choosing where to buy a burger on the go, but McDonalds used its special sauce and outstanding branding and marketing to build an empire. Coffee is a commodity; in fact, at one time people thought it was crazy that consumers would be willing to spend $3 on a cup of coffee when it could be made for pennies at home, but Starbucks’ founder Howard Schultz turned a vision into not only an empire, but a whole new segment within the restaurant industry.

The point is, just because a product or service is easy to obtain from more than one business, doesn’t mean you have to have a boring brand.

4 Ingredients that Could Take a Boring Brand All the Way to Bold and Memorable

A Hard-to-Replicate Organizational Culture

Many business owners cite their employees as the most valuable corporate asset but fail to back up that claim by fostering an organizational culture in which employees are rewarded, supported, educated, trained and otherwise-valued in a way that differentiates from competitors.

Organizations that want their employees to truly set them apart, must establish and protect an internal culture designed to attract the type of employees that will do so.

You might also like: 5 Reasons Employees Hate their Jobs (and 10 Ways to Fix It)

Strong Shared Values Driving Operations, Policies and Procedures

Nothing reveals the real values that underlie the driving forces within a business as a customer transaction-gone-wrong. Ironically – and perhaps this is one reason why it’s a special sauce that is difficult to replicate – organizations that commit themselves to customer-centric values out of the gate are not likely to have many customer transactions-gone-wrong to evaluate.

You might also like: The Link Between High-Performing Organizations and Shared Values

A Bold, Inspiring Mission and Vision Statement

To be bold and inspiring, an organization’s mission and vision must go “where no man has gone before,” to borrow a phrase narrated by William Shatner (a.k.a. Captain James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise) in the opening lines heard in every episode of Star Trek.

A corporate mission and vision has to go beyond the idea of building a sustainable business or even leading an industry. To inspire employee and customer support, it must point toward the building of something beyond the business; something that will make the local community and the world a better place.

A Bigger-than-Life USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

As opposed to becoming something that has not been seen before, a bigger-than-life selling proposition (or USP) is about doing things in a way that they have not been done before. If a customer’s experience is roughly the same in your business as it is in competitor’s, you have failed to develop or failed to deliver on those customer promises that should set your organization apart.