How To Create a Distinctive Brand Online with John Dye

Overview

In his presentation, John relates a story of Tom Sawyer to explain how he has created a distinctive brand online and a system so others naturally amplify it.

Speaker

John Dye is Senior Director of Marketing at doTERRA, the world’s largest essential oil company. 

Quotes

“Who you are, and what you represent, is exuded through that personal brand.” 

“You want to be real, relevant, responsive, and if you do those three well you end up with the fourth which is the relationship. Again, that is the highest goal that each of us reach for, as we create our personal brands online and actually create those relationships online.” 

Key Points

  1. Creating your own personal brand pillars
  2. The highest goal as we create personal brands are the relationships we build
  3. Amplify who you are and what you do

Transcript

Hey everyone.

This is John Dye, Senior Director of Marketing for doTERRA. We are the world’s largest essential oil company and I’m located in Utah.

Very happy to be with you guys today. Thanks for taking a few minutes to spend some time with me. I’ve got a few things I want to go over with you. And I think hopefully this will be a fun time for all of us.

I’ve entitled my presentation the Tom Sawyer principle, creating a distinctive brand online and creating a system so others naturally amplify that brand. And I’ll talk more about that in just a moment. But if you’re familiar with Tom Sawyer, you might be familiar with this- what you see in front of you, if you remember, in chapter two of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, one of Mark Twain’s classics, you might remember that Tom is directed by his Aunt Polly to paint her white picket fence.

Right. It’s a Saturday morning, and the very last thing that Tom or any other young person wants to do on a Saturday morning is chores, right? He sees all of his friends out going on expeditions and doing other things. He doesn’t want to do these chores. So, you know, he’s an enterprising young man, Tom is, so he sets out to convince his friends to do the painting for him. So, he feigns complete engagement. He just absolutely loves this task. He thinks that he is just so enthralled by it. His friends pass by and see him focused on this and enjoying his task and eventually, you see, that proves contagious. So each of his friends then want to try their hand at this task, and they all end up actually trading valuables to Tom for doing this work, which is very interesting, right? Something that he didn’t want to do. Eventually he gets other people around him, his posse, so to speak, they want to do this task. And at the end of the day, they actually ended up giving him some of their valuables so that they can do the task. So, it’s a win win for Tom.

So today, we want to talk about some of the principles that he employed. But first of all, you know, creating a distinctive brand is where we need to start. So, let’s maybe start there.

So today, I’m going to cover a few things and then share a tool set. You’ll notice that under number three below that will kind of help us amplify this and get people sort of speak under our wings who will help amplify our brand online. So, we’ll talk about passion, purpose, the four R’s, and then tools.

So first, let’s talk passion and purpose. That’s key to anything that were involved in. What’s in a name? Or a mark? When we think about branding, what is the implicit value in the name of the mark? Specifically, when you look at some of these logos, what first comes to mind some of them will be very apparent, right Apple, Instagram, target and Amazon. But there is obviously implicit value in a name and a mark that it’s important that we all have as well as we’re as we’re doing things online.

So when we talked about personal branding, who you are, and what you represent, is exuded through that personal brand. Just like any corporate brand, there are brand pillars that you create, and we’ll talk about that specifically. When you think of this individual. What do you think of Mother Teresa? I’ve put four pillars of her personal brand that I think of when I consider Mother Teresa, charity, love service and selfless. How about when we look at Abraham Lincoln? He’s honest, he has integrity, very determined, and he’s passionate. Again, who he is and what he represents.

So, the question for all of you is this. What words would you want others to use when they describe you and your obituary or epitaph? How do you want to be remembered? When you consider that that has a lot to do with your own online and personal brand? Also consider what four adjectives or nouns best describe you as an individual. What are those four pillars that best describes you? You know, some of the people that I work with, specifically when I think through who they are and what they do, and what they represent this individual, for example, transparency is important to her, faith, health, and Mompreneurship partnership.

Another individual, she is very authentic, but her faith is very important. She’s very mindful, and wellness is important to her. Myself, when I think of myself, these are the things that I want to be remembered for, my legacy, so to speak. I want to be remembered as a good husband. And a good father, for my beliefs and my spirituality and my health and wellness my attention to those aspects of my life. So again, that is exuded in my social media, what I put out there for others to consume. So again, it’s interesting to think about for yourself, what four adjectives or nouns best describe you.

Which four best talked about you? Figure that out, and then create your own personal brand pillars. When we talk about the four R’s, this is important to remember as well and social media. You want to be real, relevant, responsive, and if you do those three well you end up with the fourth which is the relationship. Again, that is the highest goal that each of us reach for, as we create our personal brands online and actually create those relationships online.

So again, remember to be real relevant, responsive, and then you’ll create that relationship. So let’s talk about tools for a moment. This is where I want to go into some of the tool sets, which tie back to a lot of the Tom Sawyer analogy. So again, Tom Sawyer had a brand right and specifically that was exuded in a lot of the things that he was doing. We know that when he was there, painting the fence, he exuded this all over interest and this focus that just brought people in and made them want to come in and be involved with him. So much so that they actually paid him or gave him what they had for the chance to be able to work on this thing that was so fun, quote on quote fun.

So, at this point, I want to talk about some tools that can help you amplify your own brand, whether it’s something specifically that we’re talking about in regard to a corporate brand, or even a personal brand. Specifically, in this sense, we’re going to talk about a tool set, a tool that we use here at doTERRA called doTERRA social which allows you to create the corporate assets and basically create a reservoir of assets that individuals are then able to personalize and share on their own. So, let’s go ahead and take a look at this. I’m going to jump out and show you this tool.

So again, imagine that you could create a tool set that allowed you to have corporate content on it. It also allowed you to personalize that content. And finally, it allowed you to schedule that content, and then see the analytics on the back end. If you were able to do those things, you would have a tool set similar to what I’m going to show you today. So as with any corporation, or any larger brand, just kind of like Tom Sawyer, if you can get people talking about you and speaking about you in a way that makes you interesting to them. And share that with others. My goodness, we’d all love to have the equivalent of you know, bullhorns from individuals, talking about our brands, and discussing what we’re doing online. And that’s exactly what this tool does.

So, I’m going to show you some examples of what this looks like. doTERRA as you may know, is a direct selling organization. Well, with that comes the fact that we have individual distributors or wellness advocates, working to share what doTERRA is and what doTERRA does. So, as we talk about direct selling, and a lot of the demand generation that is needed. If just like any other franchise wants to get the water to the end of the row, we of course have to have communications and messaging that we want to get to the end of the row. So this is a tool set, very similar to what you’re probably aware of when you think of a Canva or a Photoshop type tool. But imagine for example, if you were able to create this from a corporate perspective, which we had, but imagine you had the ability to give people the options to drop in their own personal logos. Can I just going to show you what a sample of this might be? This is a corporate logo. It’s not an individual logo but imagine that it were an individual logo and they wanted to personalize this. You could drop in personal logos. You can type Create your own type and say this is a test to see how that changes you can get rid of text, you can add text in. You can do whatever you want. That way it’s a personalized piece of a personalized asset that you can get out on social media. Again, you can design this just like you would in Canva just like you would in Photoshop. It also has the ability to be able to create different sizes for different platforms and different usages.

So, you’ll notice that hey, I want to do a story out of this. So, I’m going to obviously have to play with this a little bit. But now we have something that’s more similar to a story mode, an Instagram story, but you can do all of these different formats. It just gives you the ability again to personalize and do multiple different things. Again, getting people to create content, then they will amplify what you’re trying to do. Now if I were an individual, I’d also be able to type in what this looks like and I could then schedule it on my social media. You have to choose a page but then you can schedule it. And then you can go back and look at the analytics of how that post does.

So imagine to yourself, you have this rich robust tool which allows you to do multiple things specifically to amplify that content. Just like Tom was able to get people to assist him with what he was doing in painting the fence. We’re able to create corporate content, which allows our individual distributors, who are Wellness Advocates, to then personalize and get out to other people. Now this has been around for about two years, it’s had over 2 million posts that have emanated from this platform. And the goal again is to make it easy so people can share the message. When we talked about demand generation. A lot of that is just top funnel, right getting the word out there. And that’s what we’re talking about here is getting the word out, making sure that people realize what product and service you’re offering. And then amplifying that over time.

Again, it’s a top funnel measure as you start to drop into the lower levels of the funnel. That’s obviously when you get closer to getting information from that individual and getting that consummation, that purchase happening. That again, a lot of this, like anything with social media is top level, getting people into that funnel, and then helping them jump down over time. So again, that’s the message I’d like to leave you today.

Number one, the Tom Sawyer principle. Figure out a way that you can create a compelling enough message that you have people flock around you and want to help you amplify that message. share that message in a way hopefully that’s personalized, right Tom did not prescriptively say okay, this is how you whitewash your fence. Okay, start from the top and go down. Wasn’t Mr. Miyagi with all this? He let people do it anyway, they wanted to, he just wanted the test done. Similarly, we’re trying to amplify the message about who we are and what we do. Therefore, we create a tool set that can be easily edited, that can be shared on personal social media platforms. And then analytics can be reviewed. So, then the individual distributor can see what’s working. And from a corporate perspective, we also can see what’s working.

So with that, I wish all of you good luck in the future. If any of you would like to reach out to me individually, please reach out to Jdye@doterra.com Jdye@doterra.com.

Again, thank you for your time. My name is John Dye. Coming to you from Utah. Again, Senior Director of Marketing at doTERRA.

Thanks again for all of your time.