Leah Komaiko

Creating Compelling Brands For Grown Up Women

YOU WERE BORN A BRAND
Are you struggling to figure out your brand? Here’s a tip to make it less complicated: You were born one. With unique fingerprints, qualities and gifts to bring to one big united world of unique people.

Flash forward and most of us have spent decades working hard to be different so we can keep relevant. But fact is people rarely pay good money for different. But they’ll pay for unique. Different is scary. Unique is intriguing. Branding is about being relevant and unique.

To remember what makes you unique, here’s a strategy for going back to your brand beginnings:

l. Find an old picture of yourself preferably from grammar school the latest. Can you remember who you were then? Were you joyful? Were you exceedingly curious, creative or a daydreamer? Did you trust yourself and your wisdom? Were you kind? The class clown? Did you secretly believe you were plopped down onto the wrong planet?

If you look at where you are today then back at your kid picture, you may realize your intriguing and relevant qualities today are many of the ones you had when you were eight- the good and the bad. Makes no difference.

I have a client who started her first company making fun, luxury quality Italian leather handbags with stunning designs. The fact that she had never made a handbag before was not her biggest brand problem. It was she didn’t know how to compete with big name handbag lines that had a consistent identity season to season. My client wasn’t good with consistent. She feared she was “too unpredictable.” She had been criticized for that forever. I helped her realize her “bad trait” could be her excellent news. It was and it in fact inspired her entire brand. Each season she produced entirely new looking designs that were, as her tagline said “predictably unpredictable.” Women could emotionally relate and couldn’t wait to see and own what came out next. In five years her brand became an industry icon and earned more money and joy than she ever imagined.

Use what you were born with. Don’t throw your branding out with the bathwater. Over the years I’ve been a consultant to some of the largest brands in the world and amazing small businesses. I have also listened to and spoken before 125,000 kids. I know how to bring out the kid in you. That’s something I was born to do. How about you?

Please contact me and let’s take your brand to the next level.

Let the good times roll.

Leah@LeahKomaiko.com

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copyright unpublished 2012

MARKET LIKE A CAVEWOMAN

By: Leah Komaiko

For those of us afraid we don’t have what it takes to compete in the daily new world of marketing, here comes words of comfort. You’re wrong. The tools may have changed forever but the principles remain the same. The first is that marketing is all about story. And it has been since the dawn of business or roughly speaking, since a few years after the cavewoman. Stories are going nowhere. And neither are our businesses without them, So, do you know your story?

Fortunately for us we don’t have to try to find our way with sticks or grunts or smoke signals. We don’t have to discover language. We just have to make it work. We have to know our story, our message – the ones that have what it takes to start the spark that lights a flame that leads the path to a business becoming a brand.

Story is the bedrock that does that. It is so much more than a nice tale to tell your customers. It’s the blueprint and key to your bottom line. And this is true for brands I have helped from Fortune 500’s to start ups. Story is bigger than budget – regardless of how big or small yours is. Really! You can have a million dollar budget to buy the best and the most marketing tools on the block. But if you don’t have a solid story to build with them, what’s the point?

The point is to stop throwing money at our brands wondering why they don’t work and take the time it takes to create or recreate our authentic story. Build your brand from the story up. Many experts tell us “first, just be authentic.” But how? In my experience being authentic, genuine and true is not always just so easy. If it was, wouldn’t every brand be doing it?

Here are four questions to ask yourself about your story that can begin to inspire everything from your products and services to how you stand out from the crowd.

l. If you are telling a story now, does it include who you are? What you do? Who you do it for?

2. Is there a story nibbling at your brain that you are sure if you told, they’d drop a net over you and your business and take you away because you had gone way too over the top?

3. Is there a story you know you should never tell? Not in a million years?

4. What if you’re wrong?

What if that’s the story you should be telling? In my next blog I’ll tell you about a wonderful woman I helped start a first business who was afraid she couldn’t succeed because she was too unpredictable. We turned her feared flaw into the foundation of her story, products and strategies and what became an iconic industry brand in less than five years.

Is this your time? If so, do you really want to spend more of it trying to brand yourself by yourself?

If not, please contact me today and to see how I may help you. Leah@LeahKomaiko.com

Together let us let the good times roll!

www.LeahKomaiko.com

Unpublished Work © 2012

“B” is for Branding
Does it seem to you that over the past five years you’ve suddenly heard the word “brand” popping up everywhere from products to politics when once a brand was only the “X” stamped on the sides of poor cows? Remember those? If only in the old film Westerns?
First, brands have been around long before the farmers branded x on their cattle so they wouldn’t lose track of whose were whose when all the farmers schlepped their cows into town for market.
But to fast forward, today there are millions upon millions of “cows” on the market that may seem to look and be a lot the same fighting for our attention. More media outlets and the internet have forever changed how as consumers we get to hear about, pick and buy what we purchase. Twenty four hours a day. So how do you tell one product or service from the next? What makes you choose? What’s in it for your customer?
That is where branding begins. And for the small business owners and Fortune 500’s I have the good fortune to work with, their “X” or logo of choice is only the beginning. And their branding is the key to their bottom line.
Here’s a few tips and thoughts about branding and how it may work best for you:
l. Branding is the most cost effective, powerful tool in your marketing kit. Your first step to selling our great product. And the one step many companies, big and small often skip over. They head straight to the sexier sounding stuff – their p.r. and social media and great looking websites and wonder all this sexier stuff is not making heads turn.
2. Branding is emotions and reason and understanding customers, and yourself and knowing what makes you meaningfully different from the others. It affects every area of your business. You may not be the first or the cheapest or the most or least expensive. But how do customers feel about you? Do they trust you?
3. If you’re having a problem in any other area of your marketing and your business, and it’s sapping the fun and sales out of you, look first to the solution to your problem in your branding. What was your original strategy? Do you have one?
4. Don’t try to do this all by yourself. The hard work of looking deep into the the soul of your own brand can be grueling and waste your time and money. I have yet to meet a successful company (including my own) who has figured this stuff out objectively on their own.
5. Discover what makes you or your excellent product or service meaningfully unique not only to you but most importantly to THEM and you will discover your audience is looking for you!
Let the good times roll!
Leah

“A” is for Authentic
If you’ve lived for 45 years, you may be finding yourself now naturally longing to be more authentic than you remember being since  maybe back when you first learned your ABC’s. And A” was for apple.” Authentic would have been too big a word.   But you didn’t need to know it. You just were it. Flash forward and today authentic is what you need to know and be in business in order to make it. It’s more than a buzz word.  It’s your bottom line. And eureka! Authentic is where you happen to come from now more naturally.
Authentic is what makes you unique. Unique and relevant is what makes you a “B” – for brand that then relies on a kit of marketing tools to build the communication that lets people know what makes you unique.  Then you can bring in the “C.” C is for cash and what you can earn a lot of from knowing your authentic persona, and then capitalizing on it. Simply, what makes you authentic is the key to your prosperity. Simple but not always so easy.
So here’s a few things I think authentic is and isn’t as a checklist for your own business:

1. Authentic is what’s true to you.   It’s not a bible to be set in stone. But it is a heart that is steeped in conviction. It’s ever growing. Fluid and dynamic. Like your life.
2. Authentic is what resonates with and motivates you, your customers, clients and investors on a deeply personal level.

Authentic isn’t:

1. Different. People will not pay you for being  different. They will however pay you well for being unique.
2. Authentic isn’t for sissies. It is for those who only want to put their hard efforts into growing bold brands that make a difference.

So here’s two questions to think about before our next blog time together. Do you know what makes your brand unique? Are you ready for this to be your time?

I’d love to hear your thoughts and any questions. If you’d like to speak with me personally, I’d be happy to. Please click on the “e-mail Leah” button and I’ll get back with you quickly about setting up a time. I am on West Coast time.

Welcome and thanks,

Leah