Aging deals with the choice to either grow old with your current customer base, or continually renew your customer base at the same age. A business doesn’t face this issue until around the 5 year mark or so…10 years in some cases. Here’s how the issue arises: out of the gate, you experience great success with your market. They love you…they are loyal to you. Well done. But, that base doesn’t remain frozen in time. They age. With age, comes different tastes, different demands, different priorities. At that point, you have a choice to make. Do you listen to their demands and evolve your business? Or, do you stick with what made you successful to start with? What’s wrong with growing old with your market, you ask? Well, eventually they will retire and your brand will be irrelevant.

One person’s money is as good as another’s, right? Well, obviously speaking…yes. From a not-so-obvious viewpoint…maybe not. Now, let me say up front that this topic is all about brass tacks and tough cookies…ok? The object of branding is not to offend the consumer, but to engage the RIGHT consumer. That implies that you won’t want to engage EVERY consumer. Some will be left out. Some SHOULD be left out. My focus here is the danger of NOT leaving out the ones that SHOULD be left out.

In branding, tough choices often have to be made. You want to sell to those who reflect your core values. This requires a certain degree of arrogance. Yes, your brand is too good for some, and not good enough for others. Find that sweet spot, own it, and attack it without compromise. Yes, you will likely offend some. But in the offense lies the perception of exclusivity: we, as humans, want- even idolize- what we cannot have. After all, if everybody has it, it really isn’t special, is it? At the end of the day, branding is not about selling whenever and wherever the opportunity presents itself. It is about being relevant to a small subculture.

Traditional advertising mediums are designed to interrupt, and good salesmen are masters of interruption. A good salesman can walk into a store cold off the street and close the deal, regardless of how distracted and busy the shop owner is. That’s the golden standard for good salespeople. Social media doesn’t work this way…it isn’t commercial, by design…IT IS SOCIAL. The object in this space is to engage, not interrupt. It’s about having a conversation with your consumer, not about inundating them with your message. Brand managers and marketing gurus that don’t get this eventually all become irrelevant in the new marketing world.

Social media is not the only medium in which consumers insist on being engaged and not interrupted. More and more, as consumers become more educated and more inundated with pointless hype, it is becoming vital to engage the consumer in a fruitful conversation rather than take the hard sale approach.

Beginning with your social media strategy, evaluate how good a job your brand is doing at the whole “engaging versus interrupting” thing. Visit your public profiles on Twitter and Facebook….are you having a conversation with yourself? Is anyone talking back, asking questions, seeking information, or inquiring about your products? Or are your company profiles a history of a very one-sided conversation? The answer to this pop quiz can be a key starting point in realizing where some of your brand’s weaknesses can be found.

In a prepared statement today, GM vice president of sales service and marketing, Mark LaNeve, said, “GM’s viability plan calls for fewer, stronger brands as well as fewer, stronger dealers. We have taken a very difficult step by identifying those dealerships we’d like to keep in the GM dealer network and those with whom we will have to wind down our business relationships.”

This seems to support the notion that good things happen when you narrow the focus. This is contrary to the train of thought that in order to build a book of business, one should dum down products to appeal to as many people as possible. Salesmen might insist that it’s good strategy to extend the success of one brand by investing in another.

History, as an impartial judge, tells a different story about what happens when this manner of good salesmanship is used to define brand strategy.

A good salesman will take a good product to as many people as possible, flooding the market, inundating prospects with his/her message. It’s unheard of…near treason…for a good salesman to run out of supply or pass on an oppotunity to make a sale or to cut himself out of a segment of the market. However, scarcity is a fundamental tenant of our economy. It impacts supply and demand. This is difficult for the master salesman to swallow. From a sales perspective, it’s important to push as much as possible…build a store on every corner…open 24/7…yada yada yada. But when you’re brand-building, there’s alot to be said for scarcity. In fact, scarcity can be your greatest ally. Scarcity creates perceived value and drives demand. When something is everywhere, then the perceived value is less, and demand begins to lessen.