The Real Reason Customers Choose You (It’s Not What You Think)

0:00If you've been feeling stuck in your business and wondering if you're the reason it's not growing faster, I have something for you. I'm hosting a free, no-pitch, live class called Three Money Beliefs That Made Me Millions. And I'm sharing the exact mindset shifts that helped me go from million-dollar years to million-dollar months. This isn't fluff. It is a surprising strategy that changed everything for me, and I want to share it with you. Like I said, no pitch, no fluff, just you and me talking about how we shift our beliefs around money to make you millions. Save your seat now at jasminestar.com forward slash millions.

0:32I can't wait to see you there. A brand is what somebody says about you when you're not in the room. So my question to all of us here is, are you giving people the right things to say about your brand? Do you want people to choose your business over others? Do you want people talking about how great the experience was with your business and then telling their friends and family? Do you want your future customers and clients to come directly to you? Well, the good news is you get all of this and more if you create a brand. Welcome to the Jasmine and Star Show, where I empower entrepreneurs to scale from seven to eight figures.

1:09And today we are talking all about brand. But before we do that, I need to set some ground, conversation, expectations, frameworks for what it is we're talking about. When I refer to the word brand, I am not talking about a logo. I'm not talking about a business card. I'm not talking about font or typography or colors or even your website. I am talking about a feeling. Seth Godin says it best that a brand is a set of experiences, memories, or expectations that empowers a customer to choose one business over another. And when you think about that, he's talking about stories, experiences. Like there is a reason why my mother will still to this day use Pond's facial cream.

1:53Despite people having like mixed reviews around whether or not it's actually good for your skin. She'll continue using it because that's what her mom used. Still to this day, my mom will buy Laura Shutter's peanut butter, which if you've never had it, it's kind of like it makes you shudder. It's not jiffy, okay? And it's not like your fun sugar-filled peanut butter. No, it's just like straight up peanuts ground up so that it leaves almost like a film on your teeth and on your tongue. And when I grew up, and I would go to like a neighbor's house and they would give us like a tablespoon of like Skippy or Jif, I would think nothing gets better than this.

2:29Like this is the nectar and ambrosia. And I swore to myself as a kid that when I become an adult, there is no way under God's great sky that I'm ever gonna subject my daughter to Laura's gutters or shutters or send a chill down your spine. And you wanna know what is currently in my pantry at this very moment? It ain't Skippy, ladies and gentlemen. My mom was onto something. What could be a healthier version of peanut butter? That's brand. Brand is a set of expectations or memories. A brand is what somebody feels towards your business. I once heard it described best, that a brand is what somebody says about you when you're not in the room.

3:10So my question to all of us here is, are you giving people the right things to say about your brand? So I want us to go back and like think things through. I've been talking about brand, gosh, like almost 20 years. And it's not new to me that when I start talking about brand, people start rolling their eyes and insisting that they're just, I'm so busy. You know what, Jasmine? I really need to go wash my hair. I get it. But let's think back a little bit clearer. Think about something you care about, right? Something like you really like. Things that you've done research where there's something you care about.

3:40It could be running shoes. It could be peanut butter. It could be your favorite pair of jeans. So just think about that thing that you care about. When you last bought that thing, the running shoes, the peanut butter, the jeans, you didn't just buy anything off the rack. You just didn't go and blindly choose the running shoes or the jeans. You bought those things for one or all of the following. You heard great things about it. Your friends bought it, wear it, use it. People who are the best at what it is that they do, they like it, right? So the best runners, they really love that brand. Your friends who are also runners, they really like that brand.

4:19You've heard great things about that brand. Or maybe you've worn them forever. You grew up wearing this type of shoe, that type of jean, buying that peanut butter forever. Maybe you had a parent or a grandparent or a significant figure in your life use or buy the thing that you now use, buy, or love. Maybe you like how you feel in the jeans and the shoes. Maybe you like how you feel when you eat that peanut butter. Friends, that is brand. Brand, people always say, well, how do you measure it? My response is always, how do you measure a feeling? Because brand is a feeling. I want us to think even more clearly, like how do you feel when you open an iPhone?

4:59Do you know that at the Apple store, they are instructed to let you as the consumer open the box? Why? Did you know that there's a specific sound when you rip the plastic off the cover of an iPhone? The sound when you lift the box up? All of that has been engineered for a feeling. No, really, it really has. Do you know that McDonald's has a proprietary amount of bubbles that they have in their Coca-Cola products so that every time you taste that Coke, that Sprite from McDonald's, it hits a little different? That's a feeling. Do you know that the feeling you get when you smell In-N-Out burgers as you drive past?

5:43Do you know how you feel when you take that first sip of Starbucks? That is all brand. I want us to start having conversations around, well, what are people feeling when they experience what it is that we sell? And what are they actually saying to their friends or family members if they want to endorse or give a testimonial or just talk positively about what it is that we do? I can tell you how it felt when I made my first investment investing in a Gary Vaynerchuk mastermind. I can tell you what I felt. I can tell you what I felt when I was investing in a two-day live event in Austin, Texas with Cody Sanchez.

6:19I can tell you what I felt as I was interviewing Laila Hermozzi. These are all feelings that are connotative to one's personal brand. I spent$50 ,000 in a four-month mastermind with Gary Vaynerchuk. You want to know what I felt? like it was freaking worth it before I even attended the first event. That is personal brand. So if a brand is something that somebody feels about you and your business, then all we should be focusing on is how do we make somebody feel? And then secondly, how do we get somebody to share how it is that they feel? So we're going to break this down a little bit more. I'm going to break it down with an example.

7:00So I host a mastermind for seven-figure founders scaling to eight. These women joined my mastermind. They invested$30 ,000 for eight months to go alongside these other women as they scale. Now, they could have chosen another mastermind. They have plenty of options, but they chose to come to mine, the Jasmine Star seven-figure mastermind. At some point, I am not foolish enough to think that I'm special or sparkly or so much fun that they made that investment. They made a$30 ,000 investment over eight months because I at some point in the past had made them feel something. And the more I made somebody feel something, the more inclined and the more trusting they were to make a pretty significant investment in my business.

7:50I had made them feel something. I didn't impress them with my acumen. Maybe I hope a little bit, but maybe that's just like shining my own head. I had to have made them feel something. Now, if you're wondering why you've never heard that phrase, shining my own head, it's just because I made it up. Sometimes things just come to me. It's like shining my own head. It was kind of like, yeah, you know, it's like shining my own. We're just going to, we're going to go with it. We're not going to edit it out. So when you're talking to other people, you're like, maybe I'm just shining my own head. I would see you.

8:18I would just like fist pump you for that. The whole point of this is just to say, the more expensive an investment gets with your business or brand, the more you have to make somebody feel something. So after making that investment, if I am playing out the brand strategy, after these women made that investment to come into the mastermind, it was important for me to cultivate, to further incentivize this feeling towards a feeling. I wanted them to feel as if they made the right investment. So how could I make them feel something? Well, first up, we had an online virtual meetup. So we all met up via Zoom.

8:58That's a little hard to create a feeling, right? But I wanted to first identify the feeling and then reiterate the feeling. So everybody met each other. They talked about what their businesses were doing. Then we did a flash fire brainstorming session around business growth, strategy, the things that we can be doing. It went extraordinarily well. And then at the end of the call, so it was a two-hour call, and at the end of the call, the last 10 minutes, I asked every single woman to come on and just use one word about how they were feeling. Are you following along here? Some of the women said that they were inspired, excited, hopeful.

9:32And I wanted them to identify the feeling and then I wanted to say that feeling. Why? Because later on throughout the day, if maybe their partners or family or friend had asked, how was it? They were already primed to use the word that they had used earlier in the day to connotate a feeling about an experience, which is what? Building and buttressing my personal brand. I wanted that feeling to confirm their investment. The second way I wanted to extend my brand and ensure that they felt they had made a good investment was before our first in-person event. So there are two in-person events here in Newport Beach.

10:12So before that first in-person event, I wanted to send a personal note and a small gift. So what I did is I have these personalized note cards. They have my name and they have my face on them. It was like somebody had drawn like an illustrative sketch. Now, you might be hearing that and being like, gosh, you must be really into yourself. I'm actually talking about creating a personal brand. And if I'm creating a personal brand off my name, face, and likeness, well, then I'm going to have that on my stationery. That's not for everybody, just a personal decision I made. So I wrote personal note cards to every single woman on my personalized stationery.

10:45And then what I did is I commissioned a candle maker here in Newport Beach to package up candles and include this personal note card. As a side note, I commissioned these personal note cards from a small business owner on Etsy, and I also followed her on Instagram. And I really like supporting small female business owners. And if I'm having a mastermind for seven-figure female entrepreneurs, it felt like a nice extension. So just imagine I had these candles commissioned that's a Jasmine Star mastermind on them with a small business owner here in Newport Beach with the Jasmine Star personalized stationery and a personalized note.

11:22But here's one thing they didn't know. So they got the package with my note and the candle before coming. When they arrived to Newport Beach for our in-person event, they each received a Jasmine Star Mastermind notebook, but they received their own personalized stationery with their illustrated faces and their names on those note cards. Why? I wanted to encourage them to continue as an extension to build their personal brands. So I want to make sure that since we're talking about this mastermind and we're talking about a brand and a brand is aka a feeling, the women in my mastermind have all built seven figure businesses and they're scaling to eight figures and they know the power of a personal brand, but they might want to learn ways to scale it.

12:09What I'm about to share with you is a portion, a small tiny bit of a behind the scenes look at the mastermind where I gave a conversation and a presentation around building a seven figure brand. And you can also hear a few of their questions at the end of it that I think is going to be super helpful as you build your personal brand. Before I share that video, I want to take a second. If you have found this conversation at all helpful, maybe you pass it to somebody you really care for, another business owner or a friend, as you learn how to scale your businesses together. It would mean the world to me.

12:39Thank you so much. Let's get into that video now. So we're going to be talking about the power of personal brand for business growth. We're also going to have Q &A, two parts of Q &A, one focused on one element and then the other. Okay. I know that Seth Godin's definition of a brand is my favorite. It's a series of stories and opinions that collectively empower a consumer to choose one business over another. That's a brand. A brand is a series of sentiments. And to me, I've loved it and I used it for years, but I couldn't actually set my teeth into it because what are the stories and sentiments that I could create?

13:20And somebody once told me that a brand is what somebody says about you when you're not in the room. And for some reason, that hit me in such a way that I was like, it's a light bulb. And then I started asking myself, well, what do I want people saying about me when I'm not in the room? And so if we don't write our stories, they will be written for us. So there was a, JD and I went to New York and we watched Hamilton. And of course the play and the music and all of it, the pomp and the circumstance was so moving. But my biggest takeaway from all of that was Alexander Hamilton was a content creator.

13:57He buried his competition with content. That there were other people like factually and historically in the United States of America who had stronger and differing opinions, but Alex outwrote them. And to me, I thought to myself, there has been a lot of crap that has been said about me. And I'm just deciding to Alexander the situation. Young, hungry, and scrappy, anybody with me? Okay, so the truth is, a brand is a feeling. And it's very hard to determine the ROI. and nearly impossible to measure. How do you measure a brand? It's impossible. So when you're talking to your team or you're talking to investors and you're like, I need to build a brand.

14:45And they're like, but how much do we get from your brand building? This is a conversation I have with my COO often. It's just like, but how do we measure it? And what I have come to is while we can't measure a brand, what I am certain of, we can grow a brand. So today, instead of us trying to measure the effect of building a personal brand in addition to building the business brand is we can grow it in one of two ways, deposits and withdrawals. Fawn Weaver had said to me that when she walks into a room and it makes me sound like, I gotta be careful, it makes me sound like me and Fawn are like BFFs.

15:19I interviewed her on my podcast and what she said on my podcast was she walks into a room with only one of two intentions. I'm here to deposit or I'm here to withdraw. I am here to give to others so that what they say about me in the room later, there will be no questions about it. And I'm here to withdraw. If I walk into a room and I know I'm here to learn, then I make no mistakes about it. I'm gonna keep my mouth real quiet and I am just going to take and learn from others. So if we are to use this philosophy of deposit and withdraw from Fawn Weaver, then I sat back and I said, okay, what is a deposit?

15:54For the sake of this conversation, a deposit is giving to other people, businesses and organizations, without expectation of return. Your time, knowledge, and expertise. It's giving your time, knowledge, and expertise to other people, not expecting anything in return. If you want 1 % return, people smell it. We've gotten real good online smelling BS, smelling what's in it for them. So your brand is only to give and share without expectation. That is a deposit. it. So I want to walk through a few deposits of how I build my personal brand. I do it in four main ways. On my podcast, it's a deposit.

16:37Industry-specific conversations that highlight your expertise. There was a time that when I created the podcast and I was interviewing, I felt like I was interviewing instead of using it as an opportunity for me to flex what I'm really good at. I'm really good at synthesizing and I'm really good at strategy. So if it was only a conversation where I was getting responses, that was great for the guests, but it wasn't great for the audience listening and hearing how I could be positioned as an industry authority, leveraging my skill set. So the conversations on the podcast shifted a little bit so that instead of an interview, it was more of a conversation.

17:11What I wanted to do was deposit and share unto others everything that I have learned without expectation. The second way is speaking events, long form presentation that shares your insights and your tips. So what I'm doing here is I go in and I know that there's very powerful ways to get lead gen. Very powerful ways. We have a group of people with clipboards in the back and your credit card. I know that that works and I know it's effective. For me, I've always looked at stages as a brand play and not a sales play. I don't have an opinion about it. It's just my decision that I'm going to always play brand more than I'm going to play sales.

17:47Third way would be interviews. Answers to commonly asked questions that position you as a thought leader. We make time every month to ensure that I'm doing interviews, even though they don't pay, and even though the outlets might be small. I'm making sure that I'm doing that because the internet always remembers and it's indexing. I'm trying to get my names and my words out as often as possible on outlets that are not my own. And lastly, content. Sharing your views or helpful education about your industry, skill, and experience. Content and educating people will build brand faster than anything else.

18:24Talking about your business will not build your brand. It might contribute to the bottom dollar, but when you have people talking about your brand and validating it, that's the thing that will 10X what those sales are. But the issue here is that it takes so much longer. When people say, I wanna build my personal brand, I love it. And I'm like, great. So how about we talk in a decade? Like literally building a brand will take about a decade, a personal brand. Now, if you would like to build a personal brand in five years, great. I need you to 10X what everybody else is doing. And if you want to build it in a year, I need you to 30X what everybody else is doing.

19:04That's just the fact. So if you're like, I post every day on social media and I want to build my personal brand in a year, great. Let's change that 30 to 90 and then let's see how people respond in 90 days. And that's a tall order. So let's talk about how to make the deposits. I'm excited to make deposits and you are excited to make deposits about your expertise, but you want to know how. Let's break it down with a little bit of a framework. Clear, consistent content. Consistency is going to be like, I know I say this again and again, there's no magic to this. Speaking another language, learning to write a bike, building a personal brand, going to the gym.

19:44Results come on consistency. I want you to have a clear point of view. I want you to do it your own way. And here again, again, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche, niche. Own your niche. Earn the right to expand the niche only after everybody in that niche. You have become the undisputed heavyweight champion of whatever it as you do, until you are that, do not pass go and collect$200 because it gets diluted and diluted and diluted. And soon, five years later, you're like, my personal brand is representing what? They don't know. What did Amy Porterfield say on day one? If you walk into a room, she is the undisputed heavyweight champion.

20:25When somebody says, I want to build a course, her name is dropped, period, the end. That level of work has earned her the right to expand into two other things. Until we are all there, you're not deep and wide enough in your niche. I was having a conversation with Deanna and we'll just be candid and honest. When you see another consistent creator, you're going to ask and expect more. I can ask for more from Deanna because she's consistently creating the type of content that has a very big deal flow and funnel. And she's like, okay, I'm doing all of these things. And I'm like, great. You earned the right to be great.

21:00Now you got to be interesting. Consistency is the hardest thing and 98 % of people will not do it. If there's somebody who is that level of consistent, then great, you got over the smallest hurdle. Now you have to do something different to be seen in an entirely different way. And this then begets the opportunity for your names to be mentioned in other rooms. Because to be totally honest, what somebody in the dietician world might say is like, it's saturated. We all do the same thing. And you're right. Everybody's regurgitating the same content and information. And very few people are regurgitating the same content and information on a daily level.

21:36And the minute that you've done that, then great. Now have your own stinking opinion. Now, cut to the cultural zeitgeist. So if President Trump signs the health fitness challenge for children, hop on that the next day. Put up your phone, put on a green screen, and give us your opinion on it. It doesn't have to be right. It has to be yours because other people are going to say, I really appreciate it that somebody broke this down. And what does this actually mean for my kid? What does it actually mean for me? And what does it actually mean if the president who enacted it can't run the mile? I'm not saying he can or he can't.

22:10These are all just questions that people are going to be asking. And you want to know what? That's the actual, that's the hook. That's the hook. And so once we earn the right to consistency, then we have to be interesting. That's personal brand. But that's personal brand 2.0. So until you're consistent, please don't try to be interesting. because you're going to pop off and people are like, what in the world? We don't know enough about you. So the second way to make a deposit is to follow and engage. And this has been very intentional. I want you to leave forward comments. It wasn't at all happenstance that I'm spotting and collecting seven figure founders out in the wild.

22:50Y 'all are literally unicorns. If I see a unicorn out in the wild, I'm putting you in my pocket. I'm going to cultivate that relationship intentionally and strategically. I'm going to be responding to your stories. I'm going to be responding to your post. I'm going to be watching the way that you work. And if you are of the flock of these unicorns, I'm going to extend an invitation to apply to the mastermind. That's intentional, but that's a long-term play on personal brand. I want you to perhaps share their stories and tag them. If I want to build relationships. So I followed, I'm not going to say this person's name, but there was a woman in the tech world, very big in venture capital, was CEO of big, major, major, major companies, kind of creating content.

23:36I thought she was really interesting and I followed her and I started engaging and I never got a response. And that's fine because I'm going to still follow and engage. And I don't know what had happened, but yesterday she said on a DM on the ride home, hey, I went to follow you and I noticed you follow me. I'm really happy to connect. And I'm like, huh? And so that was two years of silence. And then she DMs me her phone number and says, we need to connect. I know. So maybe she'll be a guest speaker at the next mastermind. Yeah. Watch me work that. we're recording this. Wow. I'm going to shoot my shot.

24:17So you want to cultivate people with no expectation and no attachment. Whatever content that you're creating, let's say you have a podcast or you're doing connective content with somebody else and they don't collaborate or share with it, that's okay. They're not reposting your stuff. That's okay. Your personal brand is only controlled by your actions without attachment. And I say without attachment with specificity because there was a while I was like, well, why aren't they reposting it? Like I create, it's good. Why aren't they doing it? I can't control you and I can't control what anybody else does.

24:53My personal brand is about me and the intention behind it is to serve other people. So if I'm so concerned with that other purpose of sharing, the intention was off and people smelled it. So I create, I put out and the person it's supposed to find, it will find. I really, really love the feature of repurposing or doing a duo stitch with somebody else. That's really, really, really powerful. We've seen it work extraordinarily well in other industries. So to do it in the education space, like taking a hot take on somebody else is a really great way to get attention and build alliance. When you highlight somebody else's work with your perspective, that person likes you more.