Creating A Foundation for Your Brand – Stephen Melanson

Stephen Melanson, from Melanson Consulting, gave a great presentation on Verbal Branding and the Networking for NonProfits Fun Night Out on May 6, 2010. This is part 5 of his presentation. As you work on creating your Verbal Brand, you are actually creating a strong foundation for your brand.  Stephen gives a couple examples how this works in this video.

A transcript follows the video:

Alright, very quickly. Verbal branding is also a redefined foundation for the development of brand itself. You must add a spoken criteria to your branding effort, and I’ll show exactly what I mean. Geico, everybody knows the Geico commercials, right? Fifteen minutes can save you fifteen percent. Now if somebody said to somebody at Geico, “Hey why should I why should I care about you”? And that’s the question when you’re asked what he’d do at an event like this or any where you go, “Hey what do you do?”. Do you know people are actually asking you? They want to know if they should care about you. That’s the question. Hey, who cares about Geico? Well you should care about us for that reason, because fifteen minutes will save you fifteen percent. That’s the reason. That’s an idea that has spoken criteria. Fidelity, are you familiar with the “Turn” kind of brought out their new marketing campaign? Turn here. Hey who cares about Fidelity? Turn here, that doesn’t make sense. See there’s no logic there, there’s no conversation a logic, right? So Geico can advertize that way, and they can say it. Spoken criteria to their branding effort. Fidelity, I guarantee you I know, that their field people to not answer the question why should we work with you, they do not say “turn here”. Anybody disagree? Hey who cares about Fidelity? Turn here. It doesn’t work. So they are losing capability in the productivity of their brand. Believe it or not, as famous as they are, they probably spent a zillion dollars on that.

Alright, very quick I’ll show you this, traditional branding or traditional marketing campaigns is a vision that the company will have or the organization. Let’s pretend that the circle there is the campaign and it’s meant to go out into the marketplace. Right, sounds fair enough, and as a vision that it hits the market in a very dense complete uniform way. Well strangely, there’s really are these really odd things that happen every single day. Direct spoken interactions. So this campaign hits these bumps in the road, presentations, selling, networking, partner, referral… All these things are spoken interactions. Right? Well the bad news is that they have not been accounted for and there is total chaos in organizations having to do with the spoken interactions part of their business or their nonprofit. Total chaos, and this blows a huge massive holes in the productivity of their brand and by the time the brand hits the marketplace there’s all these holes in it and it’s like Swiss cheese. And guess what, all that effort blown right out of the water. That’s not good, that’s not a good result.

Add a spoken criteria, and this is how to do it, so the positioning can be said naturally. If you ask me what I do, I say I teach Verbal Branding. If you look on my business card, it says I teach Verbal Branding. If you look at my web site it says I teach Verbal Branding. That’s all I ever talk about. Even if you ask me details for two hours, it doesn’t matter, still talking about verbal branding. It’s all a spoken logic. So, instead of this, you create density internally. I want to make sure I mention this, I don’t care if there’s one person, or two, or ten, or ten thousand, create a natural spoken criteria for the understanding of the brand internally first. Non-negotiable, and then push it out into the marketplace and all the sudden these get filled in and the next thing you know you do in fact have a dense brand out in the market. What do you think of when you think of Volvo? Safety, that’s it. You can say it, it’s logical right? Walmart is cheap. That’s how they operate, that’s how they advertize, that’s what people can say, it all makes sense. It’s all the same. That’s what your brand should look like. I call it density branding literally. It unifies sales and marketing and culture internally because everybody understands why you’re different and better than the competition. Imagine that, they can say it, they can write it. By the way the interaction between a person outside with you whether spoken or if they read your Web site or marketing slick for instance the dynamics are essentially the same. They have to become curious right away there ought to be the brand in context I talk about, mostly the same.