Forget Your Competition
Forget that your company is one of many selling products and services in a noisy world.
Change the paradigm. You are standing on your own mountaintop. You can lead; you can speak from your summit anytime, anywhere, with all the tools at your disposal today. Being heard is the agenda.
The key to brand effectiveness is to consistently connect with your target audience, your constituencies — your employees, your customers, members, your stockholders, suppliers, vendors, the public. You extend your brand; you extend your influence. It is not the total answer to maximum marketing influence but if you present the best part of yourself, your company, your brand honestly in communications face-to-face or through print, speeches, or the Web, you will be happy with the outcomes.
1) As a brand leader within your company or organization, draft the most critical documents in your sphere – vision statement, speech to shareholders, customers, and urgent correspondence – on your own. If you need editors, hire them. Hire professional writers for speeches, articles, columns, your book.
2) Take control of the discourse within your sphere – email, phone calls, blogs, Tweets, etc. Make sure the brand comes through in the simplest of communications. Don’t let the technology manage you. Make it work for you and the messages you want to convey. As a senior executive in any organization corporate or otherwise, surprise folks by personally occasionally answering a few phone calls or emails. It’s worked for a few notable success stories like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates.
3) Be as transparent as possible from the CEO down. Everything you publish in the company should be accessible at least to your employees on your intranet and “Web ready” so there’s not a lot of work to be done to make it public on the Internet. Much information will become available anyway so make it easier for all concerned.
The results? Your ideas have impact. Employees listen intently. Your constituencies follow. People invest. Companies partner. Customers commit to your products, to your company.