27: Make Your Branding All About Them with Bruce Turkel

We have the great pleasure of speaking to an amazing person today! Bruce Turkel, the Guru of Branding, is joining us as our guest!

Bruce Turkel is entertaining and educational! He plays the harmonica, and he is a Hall of Fame Speaker from the National Speakers Association. And today, he shares several different points that you can apply in your business to ensure that you connect with your audience on an emotional level before you connect with them intellectually. He tells us about three things that need to happen when you’re speaking publicly, he explains how to make your scar your star, and he also tells us about the latest book he is writing.

Bruce Turkel’s bio

Bruce Turkel has helped create some of the world’s most compelling brands, including Hasbro, Nike, American Express, Charles Schwab, Citicorp, Discovery Networks, Bacardi, Sol Melia Hotels, Partnership for a Drug-Free America, HBO Latin America, Canyon Ranch, and many more. You might have seen Bruce on TV. Bruce has worked with valuable brands for more than 25 years and is a frequent guest expert on the national news. He appears regularly on CNN International, MSNBC, and NPR. You may have read about Bruce. Bruce has been featured in The New York Times, Fast Company, Communication Arts, AdWeek, and Speaker Magazines. You might have heard Bruce speak. Bruce has spoken at MIT, Harvard, TEDx, and hundreds of corporate and industry conferences. In 2017 the National Speakers Association inducted Bruce into their Speaker Hall of Fame. You may have read one or more of Bruce’s five books. Bruce’s most recent book, All About Them, was chosen by Forbes Magazine as one of their best business books. Perhaps you heard Bruce playing his harmonica. Bruce fronts the popular Miami R&B band Blackstar.

You’re about to meet Bruce Turkel, he’s sharing some of his simple yet powerful brand-building techniques.

Great brands make people feel good about themselves

In Bruce Turkel’s most recent book, All About Them, he explains that good brands make people feel good, but great brands make people feel good about themselves.

Good marketers are talking about their consumers

In the days before the internet, you had to tell people everything they needed to know about you. Today, however, people have access to all the information they want, and anyone you’re dealing with can find out anything they want to know about you. So, today’s best marketers are no longer talking about themselves. They are talking about their consumers.

Three options

Bruce explains that if you want to become a professional speaker, you have three options. The first is to land a plane on the Hudson River and save 150 people. The second is to be the President of the United States. If you can’t do either of those, you will need to put in ten years of hard work.

Chosen for who they are

People don’t choose speakers, meeting professionals, and event managers for what they do. They are chosen for who they are.

The point of any talk

The point of a talk is to do three things: To be entertaining, to be educational, and to be enlightening. Ultimately, the audience should leave the room transformed and aware of how that happened.

Making your customers feel valued

Everything you do should be to make your customers, clients, and employers feel valuable. The more valued you make them feel, the more they will want to work with you.

The one question event planners need to ask the host

If you, as an event organizer, want your job to be easy, just ask your client, “When this event is over, how do you want your attendees to feel? And how should they be thinking?”

Making an emotional connection with your audience

As a speaker, Bruce advises you to connect emotionally with your audience before making an intellectual connection with them.

Bruce gets inside information from people in the audience about their businesses so that he can connect with them emotionally. He does that by taking the time to get to know them, chatting with them, and asking them why they are at the event, what they think of it, and if there is anything about the event that they don’t like. This feedback is strategically gathered for the sole purpose of connecting emotionally with the audience.

Talk to people about them, not about you

Bruce points out that in those conversations, he talks to the people about them, and not about himself. He takes people on emotional highs and lows throughout the conversation so that they feel something because when that happens, they pay attention.

Make your scar your star

Your liabilities can become your assets. In learning how to turn a negative into a positive, what you consider to be your biggest liability could turn out to be your most endearing quality.

Bruce Turkel’s next book

The title of Bruce’s next book is Is That All There Is? The concept of it is that people who have reached a relative level of success and hit a hurdle in their lives need to make a change.

In writing the book, Bruce interviewed people who have made a shift in their lives and could tell the story of what happened and why they did what they did, so that the readers can learn what to do when they want to make a change in their lives.

Bruce Turkel has a gift for you!

Send Bruce a message, and he will send you the audio version of his previous book, Building Brand Value. Just hit the contact button on his website to get your free copy.

Links and resources:

Bruce’s Website

Bruce on LinkedIn

Bruce on Twitter

Bruce on Instagram

Bruce on YouTube

All About Them by Bruce Turkel