Episode #161: You Make The Brand Not The Other Way

My eyes are slowly closing. I am sitting in the front row but I am struggling to stay awake. There is something about this presentation that is not working. I thought, it must be me. I must be tired. Later however I realized the problem. I was being lulled into sleep by the monotone delivery of the presenter. Now there was no excuse for this, because the language was English. We know that Japanese is a monotone language, so you can sort of understand that this is going to lull you to sleep, unless the presenter is on their game.

The brand by the way is spectacularly gorgeous. This is seriously high profile, a name that everyone knows and respects. The name alone triggers images that are all first class. The slides and videos he presented were all high quality and professional. These people have money and they know everything about marketing very high end products. They have been doing it for a very long time too and they do it globally.

Our speaker had all of this powerful support going for him, yet the actual presentation was coma inducing. Why was that? The brand is a passion brand, but there was no speaker passion. The brand is a great story, but the storytelling was bad. The delivery was wooden. Measured, calm, considered but wooden. The person delivering it comes from a country, language and culture that is flamboyant, exuberant, intense, bombastic, enthusiastic, passionate. He showed none of these traits.

Fortunately for the firm, despite his lifeless delivery, the brand is so powerful it can survive his attempts to murder it. But what a wasted opportunity. It is not as if this brand doesn’t have sexy competitors. There are many and they are also appealing to high status, rich, exclusive, well healed clients. He needed to stand out amongst a very intensely contested field, infecting that audience that evening with his passion and belief in the brand. He is their guy in Japan, so that is his job, every time, everywhere.

It was a good audience too. These are people who appreciate a good brand, who are influencers, who can spread the message. No one will bother though because they were not receiving any energy from this talk. This is the danger when we have a strong brand supporting us that we can become complacent. We imagine we don’t have to do much because the brand sells itself. The marketing department’s glossy photos and slick videos are enough.

Not true. Brands are being recreated every single day. When the product is consumed that is a brand defining moment. If the brand promise is not delivered when the product or service is consumed, then the brand is that much lessened. If this continues, then the brand will disappear, vanquished by its better performing competitors. The brand doesn’t have to be consumed to define the brand though. We as representatives of the brand, are influencing the quality perception of the brand every time we present. If we give a really average performance then the audience will start to doubt the quality claims of the marketing department about this brand. Never forget, we judge the entire organisation on you and how you come across.

If our man in Japan had given a high energy presentation, extolling the virtues of the brand, that would have been consistent with the positioning of the brand. If you are representing a funeral home however, that would not be appropriate. So obviously we need to be congruent. This brand case though would be a great platform for enthusiastic storytelling and verbal passion for the brand. Where were the gripping stories of high drama and intrigue, as they duked it out with their competitors across the globe and over the decades? Where were the human dimension stories of the customers who were famous fans. This is a glamour business and yet there was so little glitter or glamour presented in his talk. The product styling is seriously beautiful, but we heard nothing about the design team. We got no insider account of some of the legendary tales from the past. It was flat.

There was little to no energy being transmitted to the audience. When we speak we have to radiate that energy to the listeners. We need to invigorate them. We do this through our voice and our body language. It is an inside out process, where the internal belief is so powerful, it explodes out to the audience. They see we are convinced, we are believers and they become believers too.

It is interesting that we have a client company we do training for and the external image of the brand is over the top. Yet the people who work there are very muted, very low key. The contrast is quite jarring because it goes against what we would expect. This means that if we are running a dynamic brand we had better be hiring dynamic people. Our speaker was not dynamic at all. He put me to sleep. No brand consistency on his part and that is just not allowed.

Let’s raise our energy levels up when promoting our company in a public presentation. Make sure our voice is using all the range of highs and lows to get full tonal variety. No monotone delivery please. We need to punch out hard certain key words and phrases, like the crescendos in classical music. We need our body language to be backing this up, our gestures in sync with what we are saying. We need to lift the energy of the audience through our personal power. None of this happened that evening. The brand will survive him, but the brand elevation opportunity over the competition was totally missed. If he keeps doing this dull dog stuff, over time, it will be to the brand’s detriment. Obviously the leaders of his organisation have no clue about any of this. How could that be?