Marketing advisor Harry Beckwith summed up the challenge of marketing services with the title of his book, Selling The Invisible. If you can’t see it, touch it, feel it, how will you know what it is? This is the first challenge of branding a coach, and it’s certainly not the only one. Coaches, more than consultants and analysts, have the added difficulty of providing an unknown benefit to their customers. Someone will come to a coach for one thing, and get something completely unexpected. While they’re usually very grateful for what the coach gave them, as far as wisdom, insight, perspective, etc., it’s not easy to explain up front, and the concepts involved are not easy to grasp. In this way, coaches have their branding work cut out for them.
In this series, I’d like to share the common challenges, and some solutions, that have come from building the brands of more than a dozen coaches and speakers over the past several years. We’ll start with the question most on the mind of a fledgling coach:
#1 What Do You Call Yourself?
You’d think that a bunch of bad coaching would make it easier for a coach of quality to make a mark for themselves. While that is ultimately true, the problem with swimming in a sea of crap is that the prevailing perception of the entire industry is tarnished. Because it is quite easy to quit your 9-5 job and start telling others what to do with their lives, without much regard for results or process, the term “life coach” is almost a dirty word. It doesn’t carry a badge of quality with it. The conversation about what my clients will title themselves is inevitable. The solution to a sullied, industry-wide reputation, is to differentiate from that industry completely. My clients, therefore, are typically not “life coaches.”
When other factors come into place, like paring down the audience, unique offering, and so on, “life coach” doesn’t accurately describe what they do, anyway. For example, a client, whose audience is primarily top-level executives and policy makers, is an “advisor to exceptional leaders.” Another client, who works with corporate executives in the midst of transitions, is an “executive coach and consultant.” My client who tried on several titles before being comfortable with the title, “relationship coach,” needed to discover her unique style and delivery of a specific set of skills. Once she did, however, what she called herself became less significant, and she could concentrate on the wonderful relationship skills she had to offer. Reciprocally, the relationship skills she developed gave substance to her title.
GET CLEAR
This last point is essential. In brand strategy, I play with the boundary between the physical and the energetic. What I’ve noticed is that the more clear and passionate the company is on what it’s offering, the less significant the window dressing becomes. Coca Cola needs to work very hard on its appearance, because it’s just fizzy brown sugar water. So it spends billions of dollars on its image and position in the marketplace. Betty Burger in Santa Cruz, CA makes great burgers with quality ingredients and great service. People flock to Betty Burgers daily, without much help from their signage or advertising. People are telling other people about the great burger they had, and where to find it. People are returning because they liked what they got last time, and feel good after eating a Betty Burger. I don’t know how often a person feels actually good after drinking a Coke, but I know it’s not that many. So they need to be convinced by advertising to come back. With Betty Burger, the advertising is built into the product itself. This is great marketing – what I call an “internal” approach. It has a little to do with image, and a lot to do with principled strategy. Focusing on appearances has its place, but it is the tip of the marketing iceberg.
So it is with a coach, who begins marketing efforts very concerned about how they will appear to others, what to call themselves, what their slogan will be, and how to show up with graphics. What ends up the real meat of the work is what they are offering and how they will deliver it, who they will deliver it to, and how to clearly communicate it. Graphics play a part, but it is only some colors and shapes. A title is important, but it’s only a title. Very few of my coaching brands use a slogan, because adding one is unnecessary.
AUDIENCE FIRST
I mention it here and at the end: focus on your audience, and pare it down so it can be told to others in a matter of 3 seconds. If a description of your audience takes longer than that, or if it has “and,” “or”, or “also” in it, you’re thinking to broadly, and people will get sleepy listening to you.
Foremost, a title is suited to an audience – the more specific, the better. One of my clients found new business soaring when he pared his audience down to men only. That’s a bold move, and it works for his style of coaching. And guess what? Some women choose to be his customer anyway, though it’s rare. It’s a mirage that you’re giving things up when you pare down and simplify your offering. See it like water coming out of a faucet: By paring down your audience, you’re creating a hose for your flow of business to pass through. A big, wide hose ain’t going to water the plants, and your flow is going to look like a weak trickle.
Just so you know, that client who works with just men doesn’t really have a title, it’s just his name, but under it, he puts “empowered leadership,” which is a description of what he offers to the men he works with. That’s a friendly end-around for those who just can’t settle on a suitable title.
A SIMPLE SCIENCE
So what do you call yourself? Well, what are you offering, and what is the name of a person who offers that? Moreover, who are you delivering it to, and what would they feel comfortable calling you? Figuring out your title is not brain surgery… it’s more like rocket science. You’ve got to know where you’re going before you plan your trajectory, and there’s a lot of calculation involved. But much of the variables drop away when you become clear on your mission, and the unknowns come into focus vwhen you know what’s waiting for you out there.
What’s waiting for you out there, as a single person offering a complicated, hard-to-describe service with a hidden benefit in a sea of crappy competition, is the customer group suited just for your product. Focus on the audience, and the product becomes clear.