Review of “From Purpose to Profit” by Erin Andrea Craske

Score: 96/100 (9.6 out of 10)

We were immensely impressed with From Purpose to Profit by Erin Andrea Craske!

Just when we thought we had a good idea of the results of this contest, a book like this comes along late in the judging and shakes everything up!

Specifically, this is a book about brands and how they can be used to generate and sustain business success. As the title suggests, it's a book about how brands and business start with purpose: a vision for where we're going, why we're going there, and how we're going to get there.

From Purpose to Profit is an incredibly insightful and extremely practical book about business and marketing success! This might be the best business book of the year!

This book is also full of actionable advice as well as tasty, compelling anecdotes, all of which we greatly appreciated! Most of all, we were so happy to have found a book that seems to support our business model, particularly when it comes to practices, vision, and values. We constantly found ourselves comparing ourselves (the Outstanding Creator Awards) to the advice and case studies the book was referring to. From what we gathered from this book, we're on the right track! Could we do better? Is there room for improvement? Are there some ideas from this book that we could try? Yes, yes, and yes!

And that's the fun of it! We found ourselves tantalized by all of the different marketing and business ideas this book threw at us!

So, where do we even begin? Well, what is a brand and why is it important? Well, according to the author:

“A brand expresses the essence of a business - the values it stands for, who it serves, its benefits and points of difference. It demonstrates why a customer may want to consider it. Proper branding shapes your audience’s entire experience with your company, product, or service... A powerful brand can transform your offering from just another me-too product into a category leader. It brings visibility, profitability, and longevity to your business.”

Gosh, we love that last part!

In other words, a brand expresses what makes you stand out, what makes you special, different, and unique. It's what sets you apart from the competition. This book provides SO MANY excellent examples of brands and how they work.

Next, let's touch on how this book discusses the types of brands, because we found that extremely interesting.

There are parent brands, master brands, organizational bands, sub-brands, endorser brands, and even hybrid brands! The book and author can probably break it down better than we can (there are diagrams outlining it in the book), but we took away that smaller sub-brands and endorser brands can and should have a complementary, reciprocal relationship with the parent brands. In other words, sub-brands and endorser brands can and should be pointing back to the parent brand in some way, contributing to their financial success, profitability, and outreach.

Marvel Entertainment and Lucasfilm, both owned by Walt Disney, attract audiences to the larger Walt Disney brand.

The Prius brand points buyers to Toyota. The Focus brand points buyers to Ford. The Amazon Essentials and Audible brands point customers to Amazon. The iPod and iPad brands point customers to Apple. Polo points customers to Ralph Lauren. The list could go on and on.

This had our thinking caps and imaginations running wild imagining what kind of sub-brands and endorser brands the Outstanding Creator Awards could create someday!

Speaking of which, our favorite brand type that this book taught us about was the challenger brand! Challenger brands take on the establishment—norms, the status quo, the businesses and corporations that are well-entrenched. Challenger brands are willing to be different, unapologetically so! Furthermore, they empower customers to be different, to think different, and to put aside preconceived notions and outdated practices. Challenger brands are pioneers, renegades, rebels! Sounds a bit like us!

The Outstanding Creator Awards was started out of strong and passionate sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment with the literary award industry, particularly literary contests that unfairly discredit or outright ignore self-published and indie authors in favor of large publishing houses and established authors. We were frustrated that you had to pay an extra fee just to compete in a second category. We were angry that these contests could provide little to no proof that they actually read the books. We were pissed that book contests were only reading the first 10 or 100 pages (if they even touched the books at all), judging these books based on... what exactly? We were outraged that there were book contests out there that were making selections based on extreme political leanings or social agendas, unwilling to even hear or consider the other side—holding the latter back, in fact. These passionate feelings inspired us to be a challenger, an alternative—to do better than other book contests.

There's a great quote in here about how “Ideally, you should know your customers better than they know themselves. Customer empathy doesn’t necessarily have to be innate. It can be learnt.”

Well, that spoke to us too. The reason we know our customers so well and have so much empathy is because we've been in the game ourselves. We're authors, writers, creators, hopers, and dreamers. We've competed in other contests. We've marketed our own works.

Apple was a challenger brand once, being a challenger to Microsoft which debut only a year later yet took a while to climb out of that shadow. It had to differentiate itself under the leadership of Steve Jobs with gimmicks like more portable devices (like the iPod, iPad, and Mac book), synchrony between devices (which Microsoft still seems to lack), and a reputation for being less vulnerable to viruses.

You could argue that even Amazon was a challenger brand once upon a time. It had to compete with the big, established retail stores, namely Walmart, K-Mart, and Target. You could add Toys R Us, KB Toys, and other brick and mortar stores to that list. Ebay was even more established than Amazon once upon a time.

Amazon is also heavily discussed in the section of the book about targeted/niche marketing. Amazon is now a bit of an exception to the rule as it arguably sells to everyone. However, it wasn't always like that. Once upon a time, Amazon focused only on selling books and only online.

Anyway, Red Bull and Under Armor were also challenger brands. We're assuming they were challengers to Monster Energy and Nike.

Lululemon is another challenger brand with a niche market (yoga practitioners), serving as an alternative to other athletic wear brands.

This book also talks a lot about customer experience.

According to this book: “Experience - what people experience when they engage with a brand. When a brand consistently does what it promises, people trust it more. They feel closer to the brand and use it more often.”

Customer experience isn't just about a buyer interacting with the seller (or vice-versa), although that's part of it. Customer experience is about sights, sounds, smells, and—most powerful of all—tastes.

You can smell Subway and McDonald's when you're in their vicinity. You pop a cork before drinking tequila, it's part of the experience. You break a Kit Kat bar in half, it's part of the experience. You unwrap Hershey's chocolate bars from foil, it's part of the experience. You recognize a familiar jingle, song, or tune related to a piece of media.

Look, we have about EIGHT PAGES of notes about this book. It was that awesome and insightful. If we wrote about all of it, this review might never end.

So, here are a few of our favorite takeaways and quotes:

- "The key to success in launching a challenger brand is to religiously stick to your beliefs."

- "Goals are transient by nature; having achieved one, we tend to immediately set a new one. It’s a never-ending process of putting ourselves under pressure to seek more, achieve better results, or reach ghostly satisfaction. Such goals are toxic.

Replacing ‘goals’ with ‘destinations’ and ‘achievement’ with ‘concentrating on the process and journey enjoyment’ will help you avoid stress, self-flagellation, and disappointment.

It doesn’t mean that your business becomes aimless. It means you don’t let goals rule your business and life."

(As an aside, this quote kinda reminded us of the idea of the concepts of the “Pusher” and “Perfectionist” selves from LASTING Transformation Abby Rosen, PhD)

- "Some entrepreneurs, supported by a solid moral foundation, have a strong sense of mission, aiming to make a positive impact. They tend to prioritise values over profits, often leading to undervaluing their business. Additionally, they may face difficulties with scaling, financial constraints, and conflicts between growth and the original purpose."

(This quote makes us feel like slightly raising our prices because our services are undervalued, which is something that several business book authors have told us)

- "You have to explore existing demand. First, learn what people want and then why they want it. And finally, why hasn’t this desire been answered yet.

The money you may care about doesn’t come from selling your products or services. It comes from people willing to pay you for them.

- “Customers don't come cheap. The only free cheese is in the mousetrap.”

(SUCH a GREAT QUOTE!)

- “A BRAND WITHOUT VALUES IS LIKE A BOAT WITHOUT A STEERING WHEEL, LOST IN A CHALLENGING SEA OF UNCERTAINTY.”
- "A seeded launch may run for several months...if you seed for too long, the mainstream market will forget about it. The key to the success of such a strategy is to generate continuous buzz.”

(This reminded us of how we're constantly trying to create hype and buzz with the Outstanding Creator Awards by introducing exciting, new wrinkles like different prizes and different gimmicks)

- "People can adapt their decisions based on their needs and the EVER CHANGING context of what is happening around them and within themselves. So, if a brand shows up in the right way at the right time, a customer’s decision about a brand can be influenced."

(And this is why we should try to be ubiquitous. Advertise everywhere, constantly.)

- "CUTTING ADVERTISING TO SAVE MONEY IS LIKE STOPPING BREATHING TO CONSERVE AIR."

(We restarted our Facebook ads IMMEDIATELY after reading this)

One last thing we loved about this book was the formatting. It wasn't just plain prose. The information is presented in numerous different ways including blocks, bullet-points, charts, and diagrams.

Check it out on Amazon!