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Brands Have Lots to Say But Only One Mouth to Say It With

Brand messages. They’re an important part of branding your company. They could be messages to speak to all your stakeholders or to just one of them. Brand messages can speak directly to your customers. They define your positioning. Positioning that hopefully resonates with customers to the point they regard your brand first in the buying cycle. Many companies completely ignore their brand, falsely believing their brand is simply their logo and piffy slogan. While your logo and slogan are definitely a part of your brand, they are by no means the entirety of it. Your logo and slogan are just the face of your brand—the visual component. The larger part of your brand is its reputation and the positioning that anchors it to the minds of your customers.

Companies have a tendency to run paranoid. They do lots of things and as such go to market touting all they can be. They believe that it’s important to say a lot in their marketing. A large list is the essence of their promotional strategy. And the order of “the list” is the single biggest discussion in formulating that strategy. It would seem the services at the bottom of the list are less desirable than the upper stations. The larger “the list” gives the brand more to say. Apparently more is better no matter the reality.

The shame is, with only one mouth or voice your brand doesn’t have a lot of opportunities to resonate with the customer. “The list” creates the dilemma of having too much to say. Granted, it is exactly what most of the competition is doing as well. Some see blending in as a safe harbour. I see it as just the opposite. I don’t want to blend in. I want my brand to lead. I want my brand to lure business to my door with one strong message that compels the competition to follow, and customers to be drawn to. To make the best of my one mouth as it were. Leading with positioning certainly makes marketing more efficient and effective.

Narrowing (or niching) the field is not for the faint of heart which is why you witness so little of it. Most of the businesses you know are re-active as opposed to pro-active. Only the brave few play with a differentiation strategy which is exactly what I am recommending her and to my customers.

I espouse one theme: one message—one mouth and you have to OWN that message and control that mouth!

Published: November 10, 2014
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Ed Roach

For more than 25 years, Ed Roach has worked with hundreds of successful small businesses by helping them develop unique brand positioning strategies that differentiate them from their competition. Ed appreciates working with companies who see the value of going beyond mere slogans and have a desire to sell from compelling positions, and consults predominantly with businesses facilitating his proprietary process, "Brand Navigator." This branding process effectively focuses a company's brand, delivering a positioning strategy that can be taken to their marketplace. He is the author of "101 Branding Tips," a book of practical advice for your brand that you can use today.