Case Studies

Case Study: Why is an Accounting Firm Like a Bottle of Aspirin?

It was a hot summer morning. I was giving my Brand Boot Camp Workshop to group of female accountants. Now let’s be honest – most accountants look the same. This particular group had come to learn how they could describe their firm’s value to potential clients and generate new business. I looked around the table. If you were a ‘thing,’ I asked them, ‘what would you be?’

They looked at me with a mixture of confusion and “what does this have to do with branding?” disbelief.

One brave soul raised her hand. “This is going to sound ridiculous, but I would be a bottle of aspirin.”

I asked her why.

“Because what I do for my small business clients is to take the pain away. That’s why people hire me, so that they don’t have to worry about financial management and its headaches.”

BINGO! A perfect “here’s what I can do for you” example of solution marketing – pinpointing the overriding client problem and offering her firm’s services as resolution.

Moral of this story: the aspirin bottle is now Cindy Brandt’s marketing icon: she gives out bottles of mint, made-up to look like aspirin bottles, with the tagline “certified pain relief” on the label. Her monthly enewsletter is called “The Aspirin Chronicles“.

Case Study: Getting Under This MarComm Writer’s Hood

When one of the best, most successful, marketing communications consultants I know called one day to say she needed my help, I was surprised. The problem, as she described it, was that she couldn’t adequately describe to potential clients what it was that she did and why it was qualitatively different than the legions of other “marcomm” writers on the planet.

Everyone thinks they know what marketing communications is, she told me, but they really don’t. How can I differentiate what we do?

As we talked she mentioned that one of her passions in her early twenties was her Volkswagen Beetle; that one of the reasons she loved it was that she could ‘get under the hood,’ take it apart and put it back together. And that one of the great moments for her, back then, was putting the keys in the ignition and hearing the motor start humming after everything had been in pieces just days earlier in her driveway.

EUREKA! Of course. This is exactly, I pointed out, why she was so beloved by her clients – what she does (that few others do) is to “get under the hood” of her client companies. She labors diligently to truly understand how all of their pieces fit together and is able to put them back together in new and surprising ways, so that the engine of their businesses start humming.

Pretty soon, every time anyone in the Northeast sees a VW Beetle on the road, they’ll think of Dianna Huff.