by Stephen Melanson

   This article was originally published in The Productivity Institute (PI) Newsletter

The most frequent complaints in the marketplace are something like: “We have no idea how to differentiate ourselves with so much competition” and “Everyone I talk to gets lost in all the details”.  Many people attribute this to sales and marketing problems. They are not but instead, a problem with brand positioning.  How a brand is developed and implemented both internally within a company and externally to its customers requires a spoken criteria for initial contact and a true verbal application for everyday use.  Rather than be standalone entities, sales and marketing become an important part of this brand platform.

A Verbal Branding platform is the only solution.  It combines brand positioning – one or two concepts at most that convey how you are “different and better” than the competition – with a fully defined application for all spoken interactions such as sales, networking, and presentation.

5 Seconds

It only takes five seconds worth of brand-oriented information to immediately differentiate you from your competition.  This information acts as the leading edge of your brand, regardless of what type of interaction comes after it. It’s what people remember about your brand and what you offer.  Not only is it remarkably simple and concise but it also offers an inherent competitive advantage because of its revolutionary approach. Instead of your one minute long elevator pitch, your readily remembered differentiation pitch is now 5 seconds.

Verbal criteria involves the development of the key differentiators and is reflected in positioning development.  By employing it in spoken and conversational logic, branding results will have a different and significantly more usable orientation across entire organizations and be more effective.  Suddenly, everyone across the organization now knows what to think (in terms of differentiation) and what to say in complete simplicity; a rather unique occurrence in today’s highly connected business environment.

Consider: everything that goes on in business begins with thinking precisely about who you are and what you offer. If a brand isn’t developed with conversational logic, you won’t be able to propagate it through your organization because no one will understand the brand on a plain language basis. This leads to confusion and a of lack clarity in almost every aspect of doing business, adversely affecting performance and results.

Without a Verbal Branding platform, almost any branding initiative will largely under perform, resulting in a significant waste of time, money, and effort for often, minimal positive results.

With a Verbal Branding platform, there are at least four levels of simultaneous business improvements:
• Sales
• Internal culture
• Brand density (unifying sales and marketing, which is always a huge challenge)
• Management Modeling – management’s ability to set strategy and make decisions

With Verbal Branding you can marginalize and differentiate yourself from the competition where amazingly, the more competition you have the better it is for you.

(Part 2 of this article will provide real-world examples of Verbal Branding and how any company can use it.)

Stephen Melanson is the President of Melanson Consulting, a Verbal Branding development and education company. His second book is called, Verbal Branding INSTEAD!, due out in 2011. Please ask about speaking and project availability.

Online course: verbal branding
Email: stephen@melansonconsult.com
Web: www.melansonconsult.com