#1 Best Seller. Bryan W. Heathman

emotions (if you’re good) and user experience that your products present to the marketplace. Using these assets in all of your business communications will reinforce your brand with every consumer touch.

      The largest and most successful companies in the world all use these strategies to build their brand equity into billions of dollars. The industry giants of yesterday and today—Google, Apple, Tide, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, Xerox, Kodak, Nike, Ford, Disney, Kellogg’s, and many more—all successfully built their brand to household name recognition. Having worked professionally with 6 of these mega-brands personally, there are things we can learn from these best of class brands.

      Consumers know these brands by heart and trust the products enough to purchase them without debate. The safety, quality and dependability of the product is assumed—even expected.

      Of Rutted Roads and Grizzly Bears

      My career began working for one of these mega-brands—Kodak—and it literally changed the way I perceive my place in the world. At the time, the Kodak brand was the 4th most valuable brand in the world, with a value on the balance sheet in the billions of dollars. This brand association also has had a deep and lasting effect on my career success. By associating with a major household name, my employers, clients and colleagues look at me a little differently. Some of the brand’s magic dust brushed off on me, and it influenced the success in my early business career.

      Early in my career, I landed one of the largest Sales territories a young guy in Sales could hope for. It was also in one of the most remote areas on the planet. My job was to sell Kodak film throughout the State of Alaska. It may sound prestigious to have a territory that is a third of the land mass of the United States, but before you get overly impressed, I’d like to put this data point into perspective.

      Alaska is not an easy place to promote a brand. First, there are more bears in Alaska than people. Second, half the state’s population lives in one city, Anchorage, and Alaska is the largest State in the USA—in fact, the State is one-third the size of what Alaskans call the “Lower 48.” You just can’t drive across it in a day. In fact, most parts of the state are undrivable. One of the most popular modes of transportation is the float plane. Even these hardy vehicles have trouble reaching vast expanses in the rugged wilderness, largely because there’s just nowhere to land.

      Let me put it this way: As a Kodak man, I had a lot of muddy ground to cover in my shiny loafers, and my wide yellow tie was a little hard to miss among the fireweed on the tundra. Even the herds of caribou would roll their eyes when they saw me coming.

      I’ll never forget the time when a sales call took me to a gold mine located some half a day’s drive from the big city where I lived. I thought someone at the home office had made a typo on my sales sheet—either that or they were playing a practical joke. I mean, who sells Kodak film in Hope, Alaska? I couldn’t image a gold mine wanting anything to do with my goods.

      The road to the mine was a dirt track, now awash in runoff from the spring breakup. The farther away I got from the main highway, the more I was sure there’d been some kind of mistake as my Chevy Celebrity bounced through the potholes.

      It was more than 15 rutted miles after I left the pavement before I saw another soul. You can imagine my relief when I turned a corner to find this replica of an old western town—a fly-in tourist attraction, a relic from the days of the Klondike catering to Japanese tourists who wanted a wilderness experience. I wandered into the only open building I could find, a tavern populated with a few old salts that smelled of smoke, bacon and Jack Daniels.

      Yet even in the farthest, most remote corners of the world, the Kodak brand was recognized, and I was welcomed to pull-up a stump at the table for a hot cup of coffee in a tin cup. After talking to the bearded mountain man at the end of the table, it seemed that tourists to this gold panning paradise preferred Kodak film over Fuji film… all I had to do was show up and write the order.

      Branding does more than creating recognition. It builds trust and loyalty among the consumers in your market, allowing you to penetrate future markets with new product offerings more successfully—no matter how remote they are. Successful branding carries awareness and trust, even in a land populated with more bears than people.

      So, as you think through the marketing efforts for your book or speaking business, pay attention to your brand. You’ll discover many unintended benefits by crafting a message that will stick in the minds of your audience.

      3

       How to Get Quality Book Endorsements from Celebrities

      IN the realm of book marketing, there’s an axiom that goes like this:

      “If I say it, it’s up for debate; if someone else says it, it must be true.”

      Third-party validation is a sure-fire method of getting people to draw a conclusion about you or your book. In fact, a well-known endorser has proven to add instant credibility to books and professional speakers.

      Do you doubt this? You can prove it for yourself—try this exercise. Decide for yourself which of these statements sounds better if you say it, or if it sounds best coming from a trusted third-party expert:

      – This book is the most efficient, effective path to living up to the potential inside you.

      – No other author delivers so much yet still leaves the reader hungry for more.

      – Each delicious word lolls around on the palette like a chocolate-kissed gem—you’ll want to try these foolproof recipes for yourself.

      – The author is clearly the most knowledgeable person of our time and a credit to society.

      – Put on your thinking cap—this book is lightning in a bottle. You won’t be able to put it down.

      Got your answers? Good.

      It probably didn’t take you long to decide that if you had written these blurbs about yourself, you would have stopped at #2 (if you were feeling generous).

      But if any of these quotes about your work came from a head of State, a New York Times best-selling author or the winner of a Nobel Prize, you’d probably crack the cover on your book and read at least a couple of lines. (Chocolate-kissed gems, anyone?)

      Third-party validation is the most compelling reason to go after book endorsements for your work. It’s also a very intimidating step on the list of things that an author must do to get noticed in the crowded book marketplace. In terms of phobias, requesting endorsements is not far behind root canals, furry South American spiders and that dreaded Numero Uno… public speaking!