My most recent client interactions does nothing to dispell my long-standing opinion: branding projects are typically done incorrectly from the start, because the wrong premise is used.

First, if a brand isn’t developed in such a way that it makes perfect sense to SAY OUTLOUD TO SOMEONE ELSE, it’s wrong and should be re-developed. An example is Fidelity and their “Turn here.” campaign. If you said to someone over there, “Hey, why should I care about Fidelity?”, and they answered by saying, “Well, because…turn here!”, you’ve justifiably run in the other direction.

A brand isn’t a tag line only; a brand has to do with a differentiated and positioned OFFER. Ask the same question of the online insurance brokerage, Select Quote, and they’d say (as all their advertising reminds us), “You should care about us because We shop. You save. That’s their offer to us.

What’s Volvo’s offer? Safety. What’s Walmart’s? To Save money and live better.

Do you notice how simple and conversational these are? Do you see how they are explicit offers to their audience?

Once an explicit and differentiated offer has been made, the brand can then be used to unify the entire organization to Think, Speak, Act, and React according to the brand positioning. This is also called getting everyone on the same page.

Trust me - hardly any branding companies actually understand how to do this, especially the Speaking part, where everything should begin. And unfortunately without it, a brand is guaranteed to underperform.

Do you have any idea how many companies develop a nice logo and tag line, and think they’ve done sufficient re-branding work?

It’s quite literally scary.

Aside from the much ballyhooed rhetoric, it seems these firms are actually trying to do branding the easy way. “Let’s make our web site and materials better looking, and throw our tag line around as much as possible, and get everyone ‘on board’ and motivated!”

Hmmph! That’s it, huh? Not nearly good enough, IF you take your brand 100% seriously.

My upcoming book, “Verbal Branding and the New Business Simplicity” goes into full detail on this, but here’s the starting point:

Your brand is incomplete unless it begins with brand positioning, making a differentiated offer to the market (in plain, conversational language, not “slogan-speak”), drives nearly every operational function within the enterprise, and informs management on how to make C-level decisions.

The secret to all this is, making a suitable, fully differentiated OFFER to the market. Without this, your brand is guaranteed to under-perform at best or be a complete waste of time and money at worst.

Future posts will go into the components of “taking your brand seriously“, but for now, take a shot at figuring out what you do that’s actually different (and better) than anyone you compete with.

Sound easy? It isn’t!

Branding often ends up being a bizarro-world endeavor. It doesn’t follow regular human logic, or so it would seem.

First, people don’t think in terms of the small concepts that branding requires. People think in terms of longer descriptions.

Second, just about everyone in the world has a certain amount of integrity regarding how much they know. Branding requires nearly all of that be discarded for what others can absorb and easily remember.

That’s bad news for most people.

Third, in order for a brand to succeed it has to be constructed from the ground up to be “verbal”. In other words, it has to be conversational in nature. Brands hardly ever actually tackle this, except sometimes by accident.

So, what’s it all mean.

This: if we decide to think about branding - about the adjustments WE need to make as businesspeople to have our brands actually perform - we’re forced to admit, most branding projects are destined for failure because they have little or nothing to do with the conversational nature requirement inherent in all business pursuits.

So then, let’s think about thinking. Let’s in fact act and react to what’s real, not what we wish were the case.

Be sure there’s a conversational nature inherent to your brand development. I suppose you could do without it, but only if you’re OK with your sales, management, operations, culture, and brand in general under-performing to an alarming degree.

I must admit, I love watching politics. Can’t say why, ’cause it’s usually boring and stupid.

Alas, I watch anyway.

Tonight is the first presidential debate between Obama and Romney. Will it be fun? Boring? Informative? Revealing? All or none? We’ll see.

But here’s what I absolutely guarantee: By Friday or so, you won’t recall more than a thing or two about the whole thing.

By the time we cast ballots in November, you probably won’t remember a single thing. The only way to deal with this reality is through Verbal Branding philosophy. Have a theme (Positioning). All other information supports the theme (Validation).

George W. Bush’s theme was, “compassionate conservatism”. My feeling is, at the end of the day, it won him the election vs. Gore. It gave people something to remember; something that seemed valuable. Barack Obama’s theme was “change”. My guess is, it won him the election vs. McCain. It gave people something to remember; something that seemed valuable.

If either Obama or Romney can convey a consistent, valuable theme tonight (and for the rest of the election cycle), and support it with validating and logical facts, they’ll win the debate.

In other words, if either uses Verbal Branding, they’ll win. It’s as simple as that.

All the best Sales use branding, not sales!

Do you follow? To sell really well, sales tactics alone will leave you naked in our hyper-competitive markets. Nearly everyone uses the same sales tactics - good questioning, finding pain, rapport building, take-aways, going negative, etc. - and so, instead of the ability to truly differentiate, most lower their prices and go for a personal relationship to make sales.

This is the wrong way to do it.

First, differentiate with a more valuable and explicit offer. Second, validate the offer is real through details, examples, and stories. Third, qualify if the prospect is a good fit FOR YOU!!! Forth - post sale - execute on what was sold, and build the relationship based on THAT relationship dynamic.

If you notice, hardly any (if any) sales tactics are needed when you use a brand and strategic edge to sell. And much more importantly, a decent brand strategy, communicated well, creates vastly superior results than what amounts to commodity selling and usually boring sales tactics.

I hear it all the time. The goal is to “sell yourself”.

Wrong!

If you end up having to sell only yourself, it’s an admission your product or service isn’t better than anyone else’s. And if that’s true, you automatically have a limit on how much of yourself you can sell.

Believe it or not, others beside you are likable and trustworthy. Others care. Others do what it takes. And others can be called after hours. Beyond that, to offer someone your like-ability and/or trustworthiness (explicitly or not) before they know you very well is, to my mind, self-evidently flawed.

What I want to know is, why is your product different and better than your competitors? Tell me about that!

Once you’ve sold me legitimately on your offer being better, then you can be likable and trustworthy over the long run.

If, and only IF, you do both, you can expect to more rapidly grow your business, and keep nearly all your clients (instead of losing far too many to someone else who is likeable, trustworthy, cares, but who has a better offer).

Ah, the elevator pitch! The ubiquitous, non-productive sales tactic that needs to be forgotten forever.

Fact: if you focus on and/or develop an elevator pitch, you are hurting your business. It can’t be used to sell, it can’t be used to operate, and it can’t be used to manage.

What do you think of when you think of Volvo? Safety, right? Did that come from an elevator pitch? Of course not. It came from the development of a single, ultra-simple brand positioning concept - one that didn’t have to be translated to understand, by the way.

Safety, if you haven’t already realized, CAN be used to sell, operate, and manage.

The problem with developing elevator pitches is, it puts your mind in a different place than where it needs to be. You need to consider simplicity foremost, and out of that simplicity must come differentiated, executable brand positioning.

I tell everyone, and I’ll tell you: forget the elevator pitch concept FOREVER! It works against you in very very damaging ways, believe it or not. The only reason the concept exists at all is, no one knows what else to do.

The vastly superior way to consider messaging, operations, and management is to consider them all at the same time. And the only way to do that is through brand positioning, and specifically through a Verbal Branding platform.

Verbal Branding = simplicity X conversational logic X market differentiation X unified internal culture. The result is unmitigated competitive advantage.

HP’s newish tag line seems to be, “Make it matter”.

OK!

Some questions for HP: Who did this work for you? How much did you pay them? Do you plan to use them again? Have they ever done this kind of work before? Who hired them? Why? What are you trying to accomplish with this compaign?

An educated guess for HP: This campaign will do absolutely nothing for them. Why? Because “Make it matter” means nothing to anyone; not your customers, not your employees. It apparently is designed as a contrived brand “Identity” element. That’s the problem. And trust me, this is while noise in today’s hyper-competitive marketplace.

Another question for HP: Would you like me to help you develop something that will work one-thousand times better? It’ll be based on Verbal Branding, human memory dynamics, and conversational logic.

I’ll wait for your call - thanks!

If you never get up in front of people publicly to do presentations, i.e. “public speaking”, you should.

The two biggest reasons are, public speaking is an important skill to have and frankly, you never know when you’ll have an important business opportunity that depends on doing it with reasonable confidence and comfort. Also, by presenting and fielding questions, over time you’ll learn more about what your solutions should focus on or accomplish.

But I also want to know what kind of speaker you want to be? What is the best “fit” for your personality? 

If you’re not funny, don’t try to be…please! If you feel passionate, show it. If it’s unique and critical knowledge that’s your strength, be clear and to the point.

Years ago, I spent some time with my own radio show. One of the good bits of advice I got was to, “Be yourself, on purpose“! I still remember it over 15 years later.

My advice would also be this:

Develop confidence based on your own style, your own knowledge, and your own personality. This takes dozens and dozens of speaking opportunities, but it’s worth the effort.

In the end, don’t be afraid to be yourself - just get good at being yourself. Remember, people need to know what you can tell them. But if you try to be someone your not, or tell jokes when you S _ _ _ at it, you’ll lose your message, everyone’s attention, and probably some available business. And that would defeat the purpose, wouldn’t you say?

Apple Corp has mastered offering products that no one knew they needed or wanted until they’d heard of it.

Who knew an iPhone was something many simply could not live without? No one, that’s who. Suddenly, it was created and offered, and before long, everyone (figuratively) just had to have one.

Are you able to create that buying dynamic in your business? I’m not asking if you can routinely invent world-changing products, but rather whether you can imagine the further implication(s) of your current products, and reposition them to become a different and better offer than what’s commonly available in the market.

I’d like to think I’ve done that with my Verbal Branding philosophies - both taking what has always been the domain of sales training (how to sell better) and turning it into a branding product and, creating a new ‘business simplicity’ platform to change the way all business people think and speak about what they offer and how they operate.

But that’s me!

What about you? For instance, are you able to combine services (i.e. personal financial planning and business consulting) in such a way that it becomes not just different, but uniquely valuable? Or, can you reach into another type of service and find an influence (i.e. Apple turning a mobile phone into a consumer / business / fun / status symbol devise) to change the actual value and perception of a product or service?

If you do, you’ll have created a strategic need where there wasn’t one before, and positioned yourself as the sole provider of something necessary (or, perceived to be necessary, which is just as good).

In today’s hyper-competitive environment, doing this just might be the only way to truly grow as fast as you need.