Episode #47: How To Incinerate Your Personal Brand

When we represent our organization in a public venue delivering a talk there are two brands on display. Our companies brand, because everyone will make a judgment about the entire organisation based on what they see us do. The second brand is our personal brand, how professional we are. If we are ever in a position to give a public presentation, we need to be very conscious we need to be doing a proper job, because we can damage both brands do easily. Intellectually, most people get this but the reality is that every day someone is burning their organization and personal brands through sheer unadulterated, incompetence.

Before we get into this week’s topic, here is what caught my attention lately.

To attract more twenties and thirties consumers, the one hundred and forty year old Shiseido is overhauling its entire makeup lineup and discontinuing one hundred products. These are being replaced with a new collection using bolder colours and matte cosmetics. The Shiseido President Masahiko Uotani says “what’s important is we recruit new users to the Shiseido brand. We can now get into this new segment of younger consumers who are going to become long-term users for us”. The idea is to use the newly launched cosmetics line as a way to hook younger consumers into using Shiseido branded items. Shiseido wants to grow its makeup revenues from the current ten percent share to thirty percent. These new products will be rolled out in eighty eight markets globally. President Uotani is a very Prominent Dale Carnegie graduate, so we wish him good luck with this bold redirection.

In other news, although Japanese car makers have established a dominant global position in terms of the number of cars sold, their foothold is being eroded by German automotive part producers such a Bosch and Continental. They are starting to overwhelm the Japanese auto industy in the field of autonomous driving technology. The Japanese makers are seeing their young engineers leave their companies. They are electronics engineers, specializing in semi conductors, sensors and designing electronic circuits. They are moving to the German companies, because they want to work on state of the art technology for self driving cars. Japanese makers have dramatically increased their purchases of components from the German suppliers of Advanced Driver Assisted Systems. To make it worse, Google and Apple are also spending one trillion yen each on R&D for autonomous driving. In some defensive moves, Toyota and its key autoparts suppliers are looking at jointly developing autonomous driving technology. Denso, Aisin Seiki, Jtekt Corp and Advics a subsidiary of Aisin say they are planning to set up a joint venture next March. In particular they are going to work on sensors, brakes and steering. This whole industry is going to be challenging in the future for Japan to maintain its dominance. Denso President Koji Arima said the race is “not about win or lose, but live or die”. Toyota has also invested five hundred million dollars in Uber to jointly work on developing self-driving cars. Finally ZMP Inc a Tokyo based developer of autonomous driving technology has joined up with Hinomaru Kotsu taxi company to launch the world’s first taxi services to fare paying passengers in tests between Otemachi and Roppongi. They are planning to launch a full service in twenty twenty for the Olympics.

This is episode number #47 and we are talking about How To Incinerate Your Brand.

Soredewa ikimasho, so let's get going. Seriously sad really. Our speaker had some excellent points to convey but due to silly basic errors, killed his organisation’s messages. I believe there is no excuse for this anymore. Today there is so much information available, so many role models, so much video instruction, so much access to insight, so much training, you really have to wonder how some organisations can do such a poor job.

The impressive thing was our speaker was delivering the talk in English, when that was not his native language. Actually, the level of English fluency was highly impressive. The speaking speed was good, the English pronunciation was fine, the speaking voice itself was clear. He came with a grand resume, part of the elite of the land, a seriously well educated, very senior guy. This was game, set and match to be a triumph of positive messaging and salesmanship. It was a fizzer.

I thought what a waste, so approached him after it was all over. Being the eternal Aussie optimist from the land of vast horizons, blue skies and wonderful sunshine, I thought our speaker would benefit from a bit of friendly, positive feedback on how he could help his organisation to do better. His body language screamed out that he wasn’t buying any of that and asked me for one example. Clearly he believed his talk went down a treat with the crowd, a group by the way, full of long term Japanophiles and enthusiastic boosters for things Japanese. He was in fact preaching to the choir, in audience terms, but his messaging went astray.

I asked him for the first slide to be brought back up. A confusing coat of many, many colours, seriously dense with data, totally impervious to easy understanding – a florid, turbulent, roiling mess in other words. The other slides were all like this. The heavy data volume on one slide was simply killing the key messages. When I suggested the slides were perhaps attempting to put too much on the screen at the one time, he said I was looking at the cleaned up version. He had taken the organisation’s standard slide deck and pared it back. “Pared it back?”, I thought incredulously. Well it was still simply ridiculous.

The other issue was the delivery. Our speaker chose to stand in front of the monitor and read to us what was on the screen, while having his back to us for most of the presentation. Fortunately, he was handsome, urbane, charming, international and articulate. He had all the natural advantages to carry the room to his way of thinking. Unfortunately, he failed completely.

What could our erstwhile hero have done? He made the slide deck the centerpiece of the presentation, instead of making his messages the key points. We should all take note and carefully cull our ideas and distill them down to only the most powerful and important. We should present only one idea per slide, restrict the colour palette to two colours for contrast and try to keep it zen-like simple. If our audience cannot grasp the key point of any slide in two seconds, then it needs more paring back.

Graphs are great visual prompts during presentations and the temptation is to use them as unassailable evidence. This usually means trying to pack the graph with as much information as possible, showing long periods of comparison and multiple data points for edification. Instead think of them like screen wallpaper. They form a visual background. We can then go to another slide showing the turning point in isolation, reducing all the noise on the slide, so our eyes can focus on the key data. Also, we can have a pop up cover the background data, with a special key number, emphasised in very large font. In this way, we can cut through all the clutter and draw out the critical proof we want our audience to buy. Trying to pack it all on one screen is a formula for persuasion suicide, because we lose our audience.

We need to learn some very basic logistics about presenting. Despite how the organisers have set up the space, move things around if possible to give yourself the best shot to present as a professional. Try to stand on the audience left of the screen. We read from left to right, so we want them to look at our face first and then read the screen.

We want to face our audience and if anyone drops the lights so your screen is easier to see, stop everything and ask for the lights to be brought back up. We need the lights on in order that we can see our audience’s faces. We can then gauge if they are with us or resisting our messages. They can see us and we can use our gestures, facial expressions and body language to back up the words we are saying.

Changing the layout of the slides and the delivery would have made the speaker’s messages clearer and more attractive. None of the things I have suggested to him are complex or difficult. Why then are we still assailed with unprofessional presentations from smart people? He remained resistant, so I saw him riding off into the sunset on his quixotic quest to convert others to his organisation’s point of view. Good luck with that one buddy!

Action Steps

1. Make yourself, not the slides, the centerpiece of your presentation
2. Don’t bombard your audience with a visual multi-coloured extravaganza – go for zen when designing your slide deck
3. Don’t put too many graphs on one slide – two at most is a good rule
4. Try to position yourself facing your audience to the audience left of the screen
5. Keep the light up, so you can see and be seen