Mackey: Find a way to fascinate your customers

"You can't stand out if you're trying to blend in." That's the message Sally Hogshead drives home in the updated edition of "Fascinate," her how-to handbook for making any brand impossible to resist.

"In any crowded marketplace, you have to make a choice," she writes. "Either have the biggest marketing budget ... or be the most fascinating. Otherwise, your messages will be ignored and forgotten."

Her research shows that a product or service can charge up to 400 percent more, without changing the product, by identifying how to fascinate buyers. She goes on to demonstrate how anyone can make anything fascinating. Her book gives the tools to prove it.

In her original version published in 2010, Hogshead explained how our brains become captivated by certain people and ideas. She shared the seven ways in which brands fascinate people, or as she puts it, "the why, but not the how."

The new version of her book includes more than 60 percent new content. Most exciting is the introduction of her Brand Fascination Profile, a process that enables you to measure the advantages of your own service or product.

Another new feature is TurboBranding, a step-by-step process that shows you how to create branding messages in about an hour.

Sound like useful information? You can't begin to imagine how many ways you can apply this advice. After all, as Hogshead writes, "Corporations don't create brands. People do."

The word "fascinate" comes from the Latin "fascinare," which means "to bewitch or hold captive so that others are powerless to resist." Fascination is the most powerful force of attraction, drawing customers into a state of intense focus.

How do you harness this fascination? "If you master the forces that influence human behavior, you win," Hogshead says. "You can win bigger budgets, more time, better relationships, greater admiration, deeper trust."

But if you don't attract people, you lose the battle. She cautions: "As a business, if you can't persuade customers to act, you might as well donate your entire marketing budget to charity."

You will know that your brand is fascinating if you are provoking strong and emotional reactions, creating advocates and inciting conversation, or forcing your competitors to realign.

The examples and stories that Hogshead shares offer convincing evidence. One describes how women who were given the choice between sunglasses with a designer logo and plain sunglasses were willing to pay more for the logo, although the functionality of the product was the same. The experiment showed that they weren't concerned about buying something that was better, but something that was different.

Fascination goes beyond rational thinking, Hogshead says, "transforming customers into fanatics and your brand's products into must-have purchases."

But what if your marketing budget is limited? "The goal here is not to spend more money on marketing. It's actually to spend less money by marketing more effectively," Hogshead advises.

"Spend less, but see better results. Outthink instead of outspend. If you don't have the biggest budget, then be the most fascinating."

The real meat of this book comes in Part II, "The Seven Fascination Advantages: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist." Here, Hogshead describes the creativity of innovation, the emotion of passion, the confidence built by power, the new standards set by prestige, the stability of trust, mystique's language of listening and the rules of alert.

She next moves into tactics, a practical system to customize your message. The seven advantages are coupled with specific tactics to position your message more effectively. She also shows how to combine the seven advantages with each other to customize your branding.

In a nutshell, "Fascinate" is fascinating. Your brand can be fascinating too.

Mackay's Moral: Big-time branding doesn't require a big-time budget, just a commitment to fascinate.