From the Yellow Chair
From the Yellow Chair
The Gift of a Good Brand
Want your marketing to feel smoother, your sales to close faster, and your decisions to get easier? We dig into the real gifts of a strong brand and why it’s the best investment you can make heading into a new year. Forget the myth that a brand is just a logo. We break down how clarity, trust, and consistency shape everything from first impressions to lifetime value, and we share practical ways to make your message unmistakable and your execution repeatable.
We start by redefining brand as a promise people can recognize and rely on. Then we explore how consistency across uniforms, truck wraps, phone scripts, and ad creative builds trust before you ever shake a hand. You’ll hear why “being remembered beats being noticed,” how mascots and taglines create recall, and how that recall lowers your lead costs by shifting searches from “who can fix my AC” to “call you by name.” We also pull back the curtain on tracking and spend: without a cohesive brand, your advertising dollars work harder and deliver less. With it, you spend smarter, not louder.
You’ll walk away with clear action items: audit your message for clarity and uniqueness, pick a specific brand pillar that guides behavior, clean up visual assets across every channel, and map the customer journey from first sight to follow-up. We also cover recognition, differentiation, and demand as the three compounding gifts great brands deliver—turning your marketing into a memory machine and your business into the default choice when problems strike. Ready to build a brand that outlives algorithms, seasons, and platforms? Hit play, take notes, and then put the plan to work.
Special offer for listeners: mention you heard this on the podcast in the intake form at lemonseedmarketing.com and get $1,000 off a brand package. If this helped, follow, share with a friend, and leave a review so more builders and owners can find it.
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From the Yellow Chair is powered by Lemon Seed, a marketing strategy and branding company for the trades. Lemon Seed specializes in rebrands, creating unique, comprehensive, organized marketing plans, social media, and graphic design. Learn more at www.LemonSeedMarketing.com
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We'll see you next time, Lemon Heads!
What's up, living heads? Welcome to another episode of From the Yellow Chair and Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. It is definitely a nice little gift. We wanted to still drop our podcast episode right here at this holiday season. And if you're listening past holiday season, I hope you had a great one. But today we are going to talk about the gift of a good brand. So so many of you actually think, like, oh my gosh, I really don't know. I love my brand. People know who I am. And they really don't. And when you have a good brand, it is like the perfectly wrapped, most beautiful gift under the tree. Let's talk about it. Let's dip some lemonade. All right. So listen, let's talk about what a good brand gives you when you're when it's done correctly. Okay. So brand is more, we talk about this all the time, friends. Come on now. If you've been a listener of the show, you know brand is more than a logo. Definitely more than a logo. Logo is a crucial, vital, very visual point that we need, but it is not what a brand is. It should be the depiction of what your brand is. So when you have a good brand, you get a couple of things. Number one, clarity. Clarity is so that people know who you are and what you stand for. So listen, if you like being considered very basic and, you know, not very innovative and very, you know, let's go with the word traditional. So traditional and basic can be very different. But if you don't want to have something sticky, if you don't want to have something that's unique and stands out, right, then then stick to things that are super, super basic, okay? Because that's not memorable. A lot of times it's extremely hard to stand out and be memorable. So what I want to talk about is clarity comes from people knowing who you are and what you stand for. So that needs to be determined. And if you don't, if you don't determine it and you don't document it, someone else will do it for you. Someone else will do it for you. Okay. The second thing I think you should do and that a good brand would give you is trust. It builds trust with people when you look professional and you look organized. And before you ever shake their hand, you have made an impression on them through the entire customer experience. The entire customer experience is doing nothing but building trust and authority for you. And it is making it to where people can, they know what they're going to get. Do you know what my biggest best stories about this is? Do you know why when I go on vacation, I don't like to choose somewhere that we have to eat at home? I want to choose somewhere else. But you know why it's risky? I have no idea what I'm getting versus I could drive through all those golden arches, baby, and I know what I'm getting because it's the same thing no matter where I go. Right? If I go into Target, I know there's going to be the red buggies. I don't walk into a Target and all of a sudden I'm like, oh my God, this Target's green. Right? No, it is it is trust. I can trust the product that I'm getting. I know them, I'm familiar with them. So I think that builds trust. So number one, clarity. Number two, trust. Number three, ease. And this one's very much missed. But I love this one, y'all. This is my favorite. This is my favorite statement right here. Marketing becomes smoother, sales get easier, y'all. And decision making gets clearer when I have a good brand. So when I have something that I, as a marketer, can sink my teeth into, right? I do not, you can have the most beautiful, plain fonted logo that just says your last name. And I'm like, there's just nothing. What can I hold on to? Versus if you have a cool color or a cool font or an icon or a mascot or taglines. There's things for me to sink my teeth into and be creative around. Right now I'm looking at your name in blue and block print. And I'm like, okay, uh, don't let us give you the blues. Like it's hard. There's nothing there. So it makes everything harder. And I have to spend more money and get more expensive because there's nothing just naturally sticking out and standing out for people in my market. I've you got to work a lot harder when you don't, when you're scared to do anything that's got a little spunk, a little, a little emerald legacy, a little bam to it, you know. So that's ease, ease. When you have a good brand, ease, ease of marketing tactic, ease of campaign, ease of naming your programs, ease of naming your technicians, your news. Y'all, I could go on and on. I could go on and on. Love number three being ease. Number four, confidence. When you set your brand, your core values, your expectations, your look and feel. People want to people want to oblige, people want to follow those rules because the expectation is. You know, with us, I said, so you showed up in some tennis shoes that look like you mowed the yard yesterday, last night. And if that was the only pair of tennis shoes you have, then you know what? I thank you for coming to work. I appreciate it. But odds are I've seen you dress up to go out. So I know that you got more than these tennis shoes. And it's because they they just kind of had settled in and we get lazy about things. We also get lazy about our personal brands and our business's brands. So you have to, you have to care a lot about being confident, setting those expectations so that your team is confident that they know how to show up and they know how to perform. They know the expectation of where to park that van. They know the expectation of offering the maintenance club. Those CSRs know your expectations of the booking rate. They know how to handle customer complaints, they know how to approach pricing objections. They know because you've set the standard and they are confident in that. And then last but not least, longevity. The more branding equity you have, the big the bigger your business becomes because no matter the season or the platform, your brand is so rich in people choosing you. You've worked on it so long and so consistency and consistently and so diligently that people can't help but know it. Right? A good brand isn't necessarily just the wrapping paper, it's what's inside that box that is the jewel, right? So wrapping paper, think of that as your logos. And listen, it's important that you look good, okay, because that is the visual rep visual representation, but it's what's inside, right? It's what's inside that really matters. So, you know, you want your brand to be able to stop competing on necessarily just like these big coupon offers, or maybe you want to get off the lead aggregator, uh, the Yelp NGE local vibe, and you want to move on from that. Well, here's the good news. Number one, those lead aggregators are a great part of any marketing strategy, but you know, when your brand gets stronger, your lead cost goes down because more people are directly just looking for you. You want people to go directly look for you, not hey, Google, show me everybody that can service my AC. That's not what we want, friends. We don't want people that are like, hey, who all can come over here and fix my plumbing? We want be we want people going and saying, I want to call spot on pest control. I want to call McWilliam City and Cooling Plumbing or whatever. Not not wild and free. Right? Not wild and free. Um, and then brand consistency. Let me tell you, when you are when you are investing in decent and healthy marketing budgets um that have lots of advertising tactics, right? So marketing is the overarching umbrella of all of our advertising. That's why they're two different things to me. Okay, so your advertising, you're gonna be spending money there because what got you here won't get you there. So every time you need to bump up to hit those bigger milestones, a lot of times you have to do things that you've never done to hit revenue you've never hit. Okay, so to do that, we've got to spend more money. Well, some of you are it's getting a little hefty, right? We're spending a good amount of money. Well, to do that, we have to have brand consistency and we have to have tracking. So if you want that to be optimized and working efficiently and effectively, get a good brand. So some of y'all out here spending buckwild money with a terrible brand and a terrible strategy or not, a non-existent strategy and no tracking, but you're like, I don't know why I can't get over a million and a half dollars. I can't get over three million dollars revenue, Crystal. I don't know what's wrong. I'm spending 10% in marketing. And I go look and I'm like, no, no. We have no tracking. We don't know what's working, we have no idea. So we've got to get some of that cleaned up, right? So there's there's three gifts that every strong brand can deliver that that makes you be tactical and memorable. Okay. So gift number one, another gift here is recognition. So being remembered is much better than getting noticed. Oh Lord, I I feel like I could be doing a Baptist preacher right now. Um, but being remembered is worth more than being noticed because in our line of work, ladies and gentlemen, we people only give two flips about you when they need your service. So no one wakes up every day wanting to get a new water heater, wanting to deal with broken pipes, wanting to deal with roaches, wanting to deal with an AC unit that's not working, wanting to deal with a leaky roof or shingles been blown off of it or damaged by hell. It's not what happens, right? So we want to be remembered so that when things show up, or those problems prop their ugly head up in your market, you are who they think of. So, yes, you love to get notice, but that notice that you're getting needs to be part of being remembered. It is vital. It is vital. They think of you first when the need hits. That's why mascots kill it. Love it or hate it, that's why mascots work because mascots make you more memorable versus Williams heating and air. Whoop do you freaking do? That's not memorable unless, but if I'm like, hey, here's a picture of this little curly-headed little boy that plays the guitar, looks like my son, and we're Williams heating and air, always strumming the right comfort for your home. And I tie it all together and I talk about why we did that, and I do all these things and I sponsor music. People start getting to know who I am and they remember me because I built a brand, not just a logo, not just a name, right? So, you know, you want to make sure that you've got good colors, good color palette, good taglines, good tone, good editorial branding, good consistency, that your wraps match everything. That's why Lemon Seed, we have full focus branding packages. It ain't just a logo, and then we're like, well, if you want anything else, it's all these additional dollars. No, our packages are inclusive of everything you need to be successful. So that was gift number one is recognition. Gift number two, differentiation. Differentiation, friends, you need to stand out. When we do our audits for our clients, I look through there all the time. You know what I'm looking for is a hole. I'm looking for a hole in the industry, in the market that I'm in that I can plug myself right into and I can own it. You stop looking like every other contractor, you stop looking like you don't have a story, and people, you know, you're just fly by night chucking a truck. You start looking legit, and your message becomes repeatable, it becomes ownable, like it's very, it's very authentic to you, like no one else can take that. Um, but that is a true reflection, though, of your messaging being on brand. And that's how you get differentiation, right? Is is you start telling the same story over and over and over and over again. I'm gonna do it again and over again and over again because I want to drive home on point. You're gonna get sick of looking at your own stuff. You get sick of hearing your own taglines, sick of hearing your own jingle. You're like, gosh, we do this over and over and over again. You know why? Because we need to do it over and over and over again. We need to do it over and over and over again. That's how branding works. And number three, the gift also that branding can give us is demand. True branding creates its own demand with not just fighting at the bottom of a barrel, right? So people kind of want to be, they want to be associated with you. This is why auxiliary products, I think, really come into play here is when you launch a new service or a new location or a new, you know, vertical that you're jumping into, um, it's it it just has so much more clout, so much more authority. But a strong brand lets you spend smarter, not louder. So listen, I'm just gonna give you a little secret. Some of y'all need to be loud. Some of us need to be loud at the beginning so that we can get softer as the years go on. Unfortunately, for some of you, you've sat on your hands for so long and been scared of your own shadow for so long, scared to spend a dollar for so long, that now you've been in business 15 years and now we got to get rowdy. We got to get loud, we got to get boisterous, we've got to get out there into the market and we've got to get going, right? Some of you can start fresh that way, some of you need to revamp it that way. And it's a little bit more uncomfortable when we have to go from being the shy kid in the class to the ringleader. Okay, the, you know, we're we're up there being loud and proud. But when we can increase inbound, it gives us more customer acquisition, it gives us better LTV on those clients because they love the brand LTV, lifetime value. They trust the brand more and more and more, and so they don't look for other people. So let all the people come in and out of your market left and right, left new licenses left and right. But you do your job creating a brand in a culture that is inclusive of all home level, all those things, you're gonna win the game. You're gonna win the game. So here's a couple of things that I want you to do some action items. Number one, will you audit your message for me? Will you just take a listen and tell me? Is it clear? Is it unique? Can your team repeat it? Do they have their elevator pitch? Number one, audit, audit and go look at it. This is what Lemon C literally does an audit before you can get on board with us. It's a non-negotiable right now. I have to be able to do an audit because I can't give you a prescription for an ailment that I don't know that you have. But one of the biggest things that we do is this big audit of the brand itself. Look at yourself and then look at others. Number two, I want you to pick a brand pillar and commit to it. Is it integrity? Now, listen, I'm just gonna tell you we treat everybody like family, not unique, not unique anymore. Okay. We're trustworthy, not unique. We're honest, I hope so. So there's some things that you need to think through there, but a brand pillar could be like, you know, we are servant-minded advocates. That's one of Lemon Seed's core values, or we are good stewards of your money. We are pillars in the community, whatever you want that to be, and stick to it. But guys, it is time to clean up your logos, your truck wraps, your uniforms, your social media platforms, your email newsletters. Clean it up, freshen it up, reinvigorate it into 2026. Review your customer experience. I want you to go through the entire customer journey with your client from what they see when you're driving, what do they hear on the radio, what do they hear on the phones, what are your team members looking like? And listen, don't get your feelings hurt because it's probably rowdy. And then stop just buying every new marketing tactic, every new advertising tactic that jumps out in front of you, buying it, throw some money at the wall, quit it. Quit it right now. Start building a memory, right? So a good brand is something you hand down to your team, your leaders, and your future consumers. You hand it down, you keep it going, you um, you continue to mature it and let it marinate and get better and better and better and better, right? It outlives, you know, the market when it's up and down. It outlives the algorithms, right? It outlives your shoulder seasons. And honestly, your brand will outlive you and a lot of your team. If built correctly, it will outlive you and a lot of your team. But it certainly will outlive, you know, a down market, a refrigerant shortage, a labor shortage, shoulder season, an unusually hot summer, uh, well, shoot, I wish, an unusually cold summer, an unusually warm winter. It'll survive all of that because a brand is built to last, it's built to build a legacy. And if you're looking for the perfect thing to give yourself this Christmas or this new year, it is probably gonna be a brand refresh. And we would love to visit with you about it. And you know what? As a special tip, if you mention that you heard this episode in your intake form with lemon seed at lemonseedmarketing.com, I'm gonna take a thousand dollars off a brand package. We can't combine it with any other discounts for those of you that come from other things. But if not, and you're like, I just want to talk to you, but I heard you on the podcast, and I think I want to get a new brand in 2026, put that in the in the comments section. I'm gonna give you a thousand dollars off. Don't say that's on nobody. Um, but you know what, guys, I want to encourage you to evaluate your brand going into 2026. Follow along for all the free content that Emily and I put out about branding, social media lives, email newsletters, webinars, everything. Um, and then let me tell you, I appreciate you guys, each one of you that listen to the show. We love talking about marketing and branding. We could talk about it all day long, every day. Um, again, I wish you all a Merry Christmas. Hope you have a happy new year. And here is to a great 2026 where your brand starts building your business, a great legacy for you and your family. Merry Christmas.