Who’s telling your brand story?

With markets becoming more competitive, and marketing gurus telling us that acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one – there’s never been a more important time to protect and strengthen your brand.

Customer churn is an expensive business. Many affected companies turn to profit-sapping acquisition strategies, which end up being a price war with competitors. Salespeople find there’s nothing left in their toolkit and resort to chipping away at competitor brands. If you don’t have 100% market share, you can be sure your competitors are downplaying your brand, time and time again.

Your competitors are saying:

• Their products are better than yours because...
• Their response times are faster than yours because...
• Their prices are lower than yours because...
• Doing business with them is so much easier because...

So how can you prevent competitors telling their version of your brand story? The answer is to build a cast-iron, impenetrable brand that appeals to your target audience’s hearts and minds.

This is the point in the discussion where a brand manager’s heart sinks and top management’s hand shuts firmly over the marketing purse: “Brand-building exercises are costly and we simply can’t afford it.”

People: a valuable brand-building asset
But the fact that most brand-building spend is eaten away by marketing executives and their hungry ad agencies is nothing more than a myth. Where does your company invest most money in building its brand?

The answer: its salespeople. Your company’s brand is shaped by its customer-facing people. If these brand-builders are not properly trained in how to tell your brand story, all the money you spend on brand identity is nothing more than a cosmetic fix and your company is left wide open to attack from competitors.

Yes, your salespeople are most likely trained to talk about the features and benefits, the quality, the deals and the service levels, but are they fully up-to-speed with your brand language?

Salespeople are communications people too
This doesn’t mean force-feeding a script to your salespeople. On the contrary, helping salespeople tell your brand story involves giving them the freedom to move away from talking about features and encouraging them to explore the emotional side of your company’s brand.

Steering your salespeople away from solely focusing on features and price (and all the other things that can be duplicated by competitors), and getting them comfortable with a brand language that speaks to customers’ emotions, will prevent transactional buying and price objections. By selling the brand first, your salespeople are protecting your brand story from being told by competitors.

Become fluent in your brand language
Get savvy with your brand language and make sure others are too. This will help create brand harmony in your company and give you more control over who is telling your brand story.

To be able to speak brand language, a salesperson needs to know:

• What’s the brand character?
• What’s the brand position?
• What should the brand communicate?
• Who or what does it represent?
• What is the value proposition?
• What are the brand values?

Read more about our recent seminar that covered this topic in our blog. If you’d like to get a copy of the seminar notes, let us know and we’ll send them to you.

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WordNerds

According to Wikipedia, a brand is more than just a logo, slogan and design scheme. It’s the experience and associations that people have with a company, organization, product or service.