Brands don’t make decisions because they saw someone else do it, or because it “seems like a good idea.” Brands don’t let the popular winds of broader culture dictate their calendars and strategies. Brands don’t react. They act. Brands don’t follow. They lead. JoshuaOneNine works with local business owners who want to act like brands and lead like brands... because that’s how you grow.

But to avoid mission creep and Shiny Object Syndrome, you need roots that firmly plant you in place. To know you’re going the right direction, you need a map. To properly define boundaries, you need a Constitution. To avoid wandering off into irreverent, silly myths, you need a Bible.

At JoshuaOneNine, that Bible is called the PVB, which stands for Purpose, Vision Brand, and it’s clear, concise language that identifies who you really are, and once established, every future decision is measured by it. It is the rock that keeps you disciplined, and allows you to determine the difference between a good idea and a should idea.

The JoshuaOneNine PVB
Practice what you preach. Here’s the JoshuaOneNine PVB:

To grow, you need new customers. This might seem obvious, but it’s not. Try this: when you peel back the marketing project list and see what everyone is working on, how much of it turns out to be about retention, up-selling, email lists, merch, newsletters, listening to regulars, fundraising, event planning, or developing a “content calendar” for organic social media posts on InstaTwitTokBook? None of those are growth strategies. You want to think they are. They aren’t.

As a local business owner, you’re often so enamored with the input, thoughts, and opinions of the people you already know that you forget you only grow by finding people you don’t know.

The path to growth is not what your family thinks, nor what your regulars think, nor what your colleagues in the industry think. These people’s opinions are valuable in other areas, but not to growth…because they no longer think about your business like new customers. They can’t think like strangers. To grow, you need to care how strangers think.

So...how do strangers think about you? They don’t. That’s the point.

Even in a small city, and no matter how long you’ve been there, thousands of people have never heard of you, have no idea what you do, and absolutely do not care. And yes, this includes locals who have lived there all their life, not to mention the hundreds of new people who move to town every year. You are not even the slightest blip on their radar. And yet, reaching these totally apathetic, disinterested newbs is your only ticket to growth.

Seem complicated? Actually, it’s super easy. Barely an inconvenience.

Marketers often refer to the Customer Funnel, or the Marketing Funnel, or the Content Funnel, or the Sales Funnel, or the Sound Smart by Naming Your Process Funnel. At core, the idea is that a customer’s relationship with your brand is more like a journey than a moment. Which means different people get different content at different lengths with different calls-to-action on different platforms for different reasons. The trick is knowing what to say where, and why...and also when, and how long for how much, based on who.

Catch all that?

JoshuaOneNine developed a proprietary version of the funnel to keep track of everything. It looks like this: