Verbal Branding: A New Application for Selling and Unified Brand Performance By Stephen Melanson
Marketing to gain new customers is hard enough without competition on nearly every block. Unfortunately, this is typically the circumstance for bankers across Massachusetts. What’s needed in such a competitive environment is the correct branding strategy for differentiation and day-to-day application. No matter how similar banks might seem to the public, each institution has the opportunity to create their own brand that’s practical, powerful, and theirs alone. Verbal branding is redefining the foundation of brands for improved performance. Not only does verbal branding create better differentiation in the marketplace, but it can also immediately improve sales revenue, unify sales and marketing efforts, drive brand density through all communications, and improve internal cultural confidence. Without verbal branding, an organization’s branding strategy is often incomplete. Traditional branding strategies rarely account for spoken dynamics and therefore lose communications density and a front line, brand-oriented selling strategy.
What is Verbal Branding? Verbal branding – a spoken application for brand positioning – is built for natural understanding in the market and instantaneous differentiation for an organization, helping to avoid gaps in brand messaging, and ultimately performance. It is not an elevator pitch; in fact, it effectively replaces the entire mindset of an elevator pitch. Elevator pitches do not work for several reasons: they are far too long and boring, are not satisfactorily developed for differentiation, and most importantly, they do not offer a strategy for managing entire spoken interactions. A successful verbal branding initiative produces a five-second positioning statement which replaces the 30-second elevator pitch, so the brand will be understood more easily in the marketplace.
Verbal branding is not just a way to differentiate a company or organization in five seconds but a comprehensive platform that helps unify all brand messages for spoken interactions, cultural dynamics, and marketplace impact.
How Verbal Branding Fits Into Overall Strategy The elephant in the branding room is high expense, under-performing initiatives. These are usually due to development strategies that do not account for internal cultural needs or verbal, conversational criteria.
Verbal criteria should be part of any brand’s development – it is at least as important as the logo, tagline and other traditional elements of a branding campaign. If verbal criteria are not included at the start of a brand’s development, a verbal branding strategy cannot become an effective application at its completion. Omitting verbal criteria during development diminishes the brand when it hits the marketplace.
Recently a banking client not only found themselves without powerful ideas to separate from the competition but no practical understanding for how to apply a differentiation strategy in everyday business conversations. A verbal branding platform allowed them to convey competitive advantage in five seconds, manage each kind and length of interaction more easily, fully understand the brand positioning and its implications for customers, and reorient their prospecting to find “best fit” customers to work with.
The result was immediate improvement – starting literally the next day – of both message consistency across the organization and setting higher numbers of business relationship meetings.
How to Build a Verbal Branding Strategy Start by imagining an implosion, like in a nuclear reaction. The reason nuclear reactions are so powerful is that it involves inward dynamics that force a naturally-occurring chain-reaction of outward energy. Brands should be developed this way. Drive internal dynamics first, since the outward energy that results will expand with extraordinary density, uniformly taking the best brand positioning into the marketplace.
A verbal branding platform requires each person inside an organization to understand the differentiated positioning in total simplicity, and to be able to use it each day based entirely on moment to moment practicality, especially for spoken interactions.
When the staff understands an idea in a simple way, in this case why their organization is different and better than the competition (brand positioning), they are also able to speak about it compellingly. Simply put, staff must understand the organization’s differentiation before they can speak about the brand. And being able to effectively articulate a company’s brand results in cultural confidence – and ultimately sales.
Is It Time To Rethink Branding? The notion that brand development needs adjusting and is in desperate need of a verbal component might seem a bit overstated. Banks who deploy a verbal branding platform, however, will avoid the underperformance of marketing initiatives, and reap benefit from a new application and strategy while the competition struggles with outdated approaches.
It is time for the next set of ideas in the branding world. Verbal branding redefines priorities and drives the kind of comprehensive results banks should expect from such important strategic planning and execution.
Stephen Melanson is the President of Melanson Consulting, which was founded in 2004. He is a speaker, consultant, and verbal branding expert.
