Today we are answering the question on every entrepreneur’s mind: How Does a Brand Become an Inspiration to Millions in 2021?
Let’s look at three positive impact brands who are making the world a better place while making their own dreams of prosperity and success a reality while we explore the Top Three Secrets of a Positive Impact Brand in 2021.
And at the end of this episode, I’m going to give you access to my exclusive Answer Key for How to Pass the Blink Test. Because I want positive impact brands to have EVERY opportunity to make the world a better place.
Here’s a fact: Because of the cultural shifts brought on by the internet, the expectations from brands have changed more in the past 10 years, than it has in the past 10,000 years.
So let’s jump right in. Here are the Top Three Secrets of a Positive Impact Brand in 2021.
Number One: Amplify the Voices of Your Community
As human beings, when we feel heard, we feel cared about. We feel loved. When our voices are ignored or worse—Silenced, we feel hurt and angry and misunderstood.
We are hearing a lot of unified voices right now. We’re seeing a lot of people assembling together to amplify their shared value with the hope of making their world a better place.
To become an Inspiration to Millions in 2021, be a brand who amplifies the voices of your community. Who are your ideal individuals, and where are their voices not being heard? Your brand can feel like a MEGAPHONE that made their voices loud and clear, by becoming part of the solutions your audience is seeking.
A simple, but perfect, example of a brand who is doing this SO well is a new brand called Snow Days. Snow Days’ target audience is mothers of younger children. Anyone who’s ever kept up with a household of even one kid, knows the energy levels that are required some days just to get them to school, to their after school activities, to their desk to complete their homework, bathed and back to bed—can be enormously draining. Quick meals like oven food, fried food, and processed foods— HAPPEN, okay. And most mom’s can tell you, they don’t need anyone making them feel bad for not always being able to prepare healthy meals all day everyday, because they are already hard enough on themselves about it.
There’s actually a good amount of shame that gets telegraphed to parents about proper nutrition, and for people with busy schedules or other demanding circumstances—their voices are being silenced. Who wants to be heard justifying why their kid had McDonald’s twice last week? And we all know the kid isn’t complaining! Kids LOVE that stuff, and that also makes it a lot easier to get them to eat!
What Snow Days has done with their branding, is amplify those voices of concerned parents who want their kids to eat nutritious food, but don’t always have the time to make it themselves by creating a fun solution in the form of grain-free, truly organic pizza bites that are secretly stuffed with 7 different vegetables, and even one fruit! And the best part is, you just pop them in the oven.
Since their launch in 2020, Snow Days has attracted the attention of not only a major investment firm called HumanCo, a firm dedicated to SOLELY backing positive impact brands, but Scarlett Johansson was so impressed with her 6-year-old’s enthusiasm for eating these pizza bites, and so relieved to find something so quick and easy and amazing, (And the ingredients TRULY are amazing, plus they taste like cheese pizza) that ScarJo wanted in, and invested in Snow Days as well!
Now maybe you’ve noticed that my example of amplifying the voices of your community doesn’t seem THAT controversial, especially when you look around at what is going on in the world right now—But that is actually the point.
These little delicious and truly nutritious pizza bites are solving a problem that IS controversial to their ideal audience, and DOES weigh on their hearts and minds every single day. The title of this episode is How Positive Impact Brands Can Change the World, and the answer is always at its essence: One life at a time. There are no small positive impacts. A positive impact is always a big deal.
Number Two: Communicate Shared Ideals
What is a brand, if not a symbol meant to unite a community of people with shared ideals?
Even though the first trademarked brand became legally recognized in 1876, human beings have been using symbols to help them identify with each other and the world around them since cavemen drew on walls.
Symbolism throughout all religions of the world throughout all of history has always, always used branding to convey their deepest held beliefs, to communicate those beliefs to others, and to unite themselves with the people who also share those same beliefs.
The human desire to express ourselves through symbolism, through branding, is deeply ingrained within our very natures, and it has been for as long as human beings have been capable of communicating.
And now in 2021, we are seeing the uniting power of branding more than ever, as human nature ever continues to explore more ways to express their deepest held beliefs, their convictions, and their affiliations through the brands they wear, the brands they eat, the brands they support….
For this positive impact branding secret, I want to shine a light on Mable Bamboo. This wonderful brand not only encourages people to make the switch from plastic toothbrushes to sustainable and ethically sourced bamboo toothbrushes, but for every tooth brush purchased, one US child in need receives a new toothbrush as well. This brand is checking two boxes for communicating shared ideals. They are creating products that are safe for the environment, and they are contributing to the health and welfare of children.
The “buy one, and we’ll give one to someone in need,” business model wasn’t invented by TOMs shoes, but TOMS really brought it into the public’s awareness better than any brand has in a long time. In fact, TOMs became SO successful with their initiative so fast, that it had a domino effect on brands all over the world. The result wasn’t brands feeling like other brands were trying to imitate them, or copy off their success strategies. The result was the formation of a Buy One Give One coalition of brands who stood together, even if they are competing brands, and said, “Look at what we are doing! Yes, please copy us! We are making a real difference in people’s lives, and we are succeeding in business. Imagine if every brand did this! Imagine how the world could change…”
When your brand Communicates Shared Values, you unite a community of people who are passionate and enthusiastic about making the world a better place, through the expression of your brand.
Number 3: Be a “Bottom-Up” Brand
In the earliest days of entrepreneurship, the innovations being brought to the people were FOR the people. For making their lives better, easier, healthier, safer, more fun…whatever it was, it was for the greater good of society. The products and services were being developed from the bottom-up, meaning they were created by a person FOR the people. For the purpose of uplifting society.
As business evolved to become more and more corporatized, more and more products and services began to be developed from the top, down. Meaning they were being manufactured, designed, and distributed by corporations, for the purpose of making money, and then pushed down on the people through promotions and advertisement. This is where consumerism has picked up negative connotations. It’s the stores being packed with a hundred different varieties of the same potato chip, or 80 different varieties of bottled water.
In 2021, we are seeing a huge shift in this dynamic, and a major return to brands that are people-centric. A dramatic and outstanding recent example of this return to “Bottom-Up” Branding is CEO Dan Price, a tech entrepreneur who developed a credit card processing company called Gravity Payments. In 2015, it came to Price’s attention that an employee of his was secretly working a 2nd job at McDonalds to maintain her single-parent household. He responded by slashing his own $1.1M pay package to fund a minimum living wage of $70k to all employees of Gravity Payments.
At first, Price was heavily criticized. Guess by whom? The CEO’s of other multi-million dollar companies, who didn’t want a light to be shined on their own inflated salaries, and underpaid employees.
Price made this decision FOR the people, and since then he has been hailed a success by the likes of Harvard Business School, and Inc. magazine, which called to light that since the change in wealth distribution at Gravity, the number of employees had doubled, and the value of payments being processed by Gravity went from $3.8B a year to $10.2B!
And while other corporations resent that Gravity is becoming a blaring example of how doing good for the people is actually good for business, this CEO isn’t staying silent. A tweet sent out by Dan Price in April of 2021 reads, “6 years ago today I raised my company’s min wage to $70K. Since then our revenue tripled, we’re a Harvard Business School case study, and our employees had a 10X boom in homes bought. Always invest in people.”
Wow. How inspiring is that? Talk about a best-kept secret for success. And now you have 3 of them! Let’s. Re-cap The Top Three Secrets of a Positive Impact Brand. They are:
1. Amplify the Voices of Your Community
2. Communicate Shared Ideals
3. Be a “Bottom-Up” Brand
And as promised, don’t miss out on the exclusive link I’ve included in the descriptions for you to gain access to The Answer Key for Passing the Blink Test. I want you to use it to Come Out Nowhere and start making people’s lives better.
Thank you so much for joining me! If you enjoyed this episode, follow me on FB and IG, and don’t forget to subscribe to my YouTube channel, so you don’t miss a single thing. I release new videos every Tuesday and Thursday, so treat these episodes as a masterclass for becoming an Inspiration to Millions with Branding. And as always the way to becoming an Inspiration to Millions starts with our motto: Love What You Do and Love How You Do It.