No room for Danish modesty

Modesty may be a Danish trait, but it can get in the way if you want to compete on the international stage. Here’s why you should exchange traditional Danish modesty for confident and clear communications.

Modesty sounds like a good idea. No one likes a person who boasts about how great they are. And as a company, if you are modest in your claims, you probably think you can beat your customers’ expectations. But on the international stage, you have to communicate the benefits of your product confidently – and there’s no room for modesty. Why not?

Inspire with confidence
One of the ways to delight a customer is to provide them with an experience they did not expect. This makes them feel special, because it gives the impression that they got more than they paid for. And one of the best ways to achieve this is to be modest about what you will deliver in your marketing and sales materials.

But this often defeats the purpose of marketing. If you don’t let potential customers know upfront that you offer an excellent product or service, you can create doubt in their minds making it too easy for them to go somewhere else.

Recently, someone admitted to us that they were scared to promise too much, because they might not be able to deliver. That’s not an attitude that inspires confidence. If anyone is going to live up to promises, it will be the Danes with their education, determination and skills in the areas of technology, engineering, innovation and design.

Tell the world why your product is best
Imagine you’ve developed a new breed of tennis balls that wear slower and retain their bounciness for longer. Instead of littering the packaging with details of air pressure and surface tension, explain clearly what advantages your tennis balls give tennis players and coaches.

You’ll have done the right product testing and you’ll understand exactly why your tennis balls fulfill a need in your market, so you’ll know exactly what messages will inspire confidence in your audience. Stick to the facts and you can even explain why your tennis balls are better than the competitions’.

Delight your customers
But what if you still want to impress the (white) socks off your customers? Then find other ways to over-deliver. For example, provide fantastic customer service by ensuring rapid delivery, making reordering a pleasure, offering information about prolonging the life of tennis balls, and a money-back guarantee. Why not form alliances with other suppliers of tennis equipment? The options are endless.

So whatever product or service you offer, don’t be scared to explain the precise benefits and relevant features – and choose your arguments based on what will resonate with your customers most. Be confident about those benefits and stand by them 100 percent.

What if you sell a parity product?
If your product doesn’t do it better, faster, simpler, cheaper or more efficiently than the competition, then remember these words from Joel Raphaelson:

“If you and your competitors all make excellent products, don’t try to imply that yours is better. Just say what’s good about your product - and do a clearer, more honest, more informative job of saying it.”

Find out more
At Global Business Day 2009, Eye for Image's David Hoskin offered advice on how businesses can plan their communications with an international mindset from the start.

Read the online magazine for a full report (in Danish) on the conference. (You can find a summary of David’s talk on page 18.)

Or contact Eye for Image if you’d like to know more about how to get your message out to international audiences.