When I took a typing class in highschool, my fellow students and I used typewriters with look-alike blank keys: it was incumbent on us to learn — without looking — the identity, purpose, and position of each key.

Likewise, when learning to play musical instruments, whose keys, strings, and valves are indistinguishable from each other, students must learn — without looking — their identities, purposes, and positions.
 

 
Alas, many vendors treat customers like music students, appearing as unmarked piano keys and expecting us to decipher their identities, purposes, and positions. Patently absurd, the antithesis of branding, but it happens every day.

Remember, people would rather blend than brand. Cloud computing proves it.
 
No Imagination

On December 3, 2011, SAP announced that it had purchased online employee-performance company, SuccessFactors Inc., for $3.4B. Businessweek reporter Ragnhild Kjetland wrote an article about it. Here’s his first paragraph:

SAP AG, the largest maker of business-management software, agreed to buy SuccessFactors Inc. for $3.4 billion in cash, stepping up competition with archrival Oracle Corp. in the cloud-computing market.

First, there’s no “cloud-computing market”: a market is people, not products. Second, we know nothing about the value SuccessFactors provides its customers, do we? No. Why is that? In tech circles, vernacular always trumps — and clouds — value.

Some believe that sticking a lower-case “i” in front of generic vernacular makes it unique. How so? We already have a plethora of i-names, a few of which (not including iPhone and iCloud) are listed below:

• iVillage
• iHeartRadio
• iPage
• iPower
• iGoogle
• iShares

Redolent of Mark Wahlberg (Charlie Croker) admonishing Edward Norton (Steve Frazelli) in The Italian Job: “You’ve got no imagination.” That’s right. No imagination. Why do the heavy lifting? Let the customers figure it out; they’re music students.

Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Branding requires imagination — and being unique. My tagline is Be Unique or Be Ignored^TM for a reason! Copying everyone else, with generic vernacular and symbols, keeps you in the white noise and increases your costs of sales, capital, and media.

Yet, imitation and blending prevail.

So, you must attract attention, customers, and capital while identified as iBoring. Good luck.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

Are you a communicator? How do you know? If so, you are rare.

As a branding consultant, I read homepages and exec summaries, listen to investment pitches, and watch TV commercials — most of which are totally unfathomable. They’re supposed to be crystal-clear and grab my gut in 15 seconds. They don’t.

Why is bad communication such a huge, pervasive problem?

Like the corpulent wearer of an inappropriately fitting Spandex outfit, the creator of bad communication is always oblivious to it.

Don’t be surprised by the deluge of corporate white noise. Good communication begins at home, where it rarely exists. Executives bring their home skills to work, do they not? Not a good scene, as depicted by the unhappy couple below. If communication is the oxygen of a great marriage or relationship, the lack of it is the chief reason most are suffocating.
 

Corporate Communicators at Home

 
Antisocial Media

This situation is worsening. Because of text messaging and “antisocial” media, people — especially college graduates — can’t even talk to each other in plain, grammatically correct English. When’s the last time you, like, tried to, like, talk to a teenager, the CEO and parent of the, like, future? You’re lucky to get a, like, grunt in response to any question.

Ironically, small children do know how to communicate. Eavesdrop on them sometime; it’s beautiful to watch. Sadly, once these kids reach the age when they can use cellphones and computers, they lose their interpersonal skills.

These days, some folks can’t even express themselves, in any way, other than by clicking a “like” button. How does one communicate to them? A society of passive automatons we have built.

Yo, phone, e-mail, and conversational etiquette are relics of the past, Dude.

So, where will corporations find professionals with stellar branding skills? Where? From a dearth of great communicators. But, who will understand them?

Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Branding is communication. Communication — knowing what to say, when, how, and why — begins at home, and you know THAT is not working out.

The strength of your brand is a reflection of the people you’ve charged with creating and disseminating it, the ones who embed their communications skills — or lack thereof — in it. Don’t dismiss this truth!

You can’t wave a magic wand to convert your noncommunicators and poor communicators into great communicators. You just can’t do it; so, stop trying to do it. Stop pretending you can get blood from a stone. Stop settling for murkiness and mediocrity. Stop winging it.

What you should do, therefore, is recognize the criticality of branding — communication — and hire great communicators, wherever you can find them, and pay them well.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

The other day, I was discussing one of my pet peeves with a senior officer of a top global corporation: jargon-laced branding. I mentioned a few examples from techdom: Web 2.0, 3G, 4G, cloud, and SaaS. At this point, he sheepishly asked me, “Exactly what is a cloud?”

Bingo. I told him he had made my point.

Yet, the perpetuators of jargon are completely unaware how many “victims” of jargon don’t comprehend it, like it, or deem it a purchasing stimulant. This epitomizes a branding blunder.


Most folks in tech companies suffer from a malady I coined in 1989, technologica erotica, which causes them to speak in insular, arcane jargon — in engineering meetings, on homepages, at conferences, in radio/TV spots, in magazine/Internet ads, and, worst of all, on sales calls.

Jargon junkies — like all addicts — are perpetually clueless that their gibberish doesn’t resonate outside the rooms in which their jargon-filled whiteboards hang.

To speak in customer language, which obviously DOES resonate with customers, a supplier must understand: 1) buyers’ needs, emotions, and conversations; 2) that buyers acquire value and solutions and lifestyle, not products or technologies.

Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Are you a jargon junkie? Maybe you don’t realize it. You’ll know if your prospects, potential investors, and people in the media keep asking: “What the hell are you talking about?”

Using jargon causes your business focus and operation to become insular and stuck in time. Dale Carnegie taught us that, to win friends and influence people, one must engage them in conversations about themselves. This is impossible when talking about yourself.

You have a simple choice: Either kick your jargon habit, or accept unnecessarily high costs of sales, media, and capital — not to mention refilling that prescription.
 
POSTSCRIPT: Ellison vs. Benioff: What Is the Cloud?
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

You’re an energetic sales rep, armed with product training and imbued with HQ’s brand du jour, sitting before your prospect. When asked to explain your company’s value proposition (brand), you reflexively blurt out the slogan affixed to your company’s homepage: We take you to the cloud. Bewildered, your prospect, neither meteorologist nor balloonist, flashes a blank stare. Bad news: Your pitch just bounced back.

This revenue-killing ordeal is akin to sending an ambiguously worded e-mail: The recipient either ignores it or bounces it back by initiating an exasperating, multiple-volley clarification exercise — ultimately ending in a heated phone call.

Lesson: Failure to hit and stick to your target on the first attempt — in an e-mail, during a sales call, or via a homepage — is an unacceptable, preventable error that carries with it high resource and opportunity costs.

A top salesman succeeds because he knows which words work. He speaks customer-centric language, not vendor-centric jargon. He’ll try the “official” corporate message once; if it fails, he’ll invent his own version. Every other sales rep will do likewise (one brand per sales rep), needlessly boosting the cost of sales, relegating the HQ-articulated brand to the trash.

Jargon, like a tennis ball, is fuzzy and hollow, and bounces off its target. Why? It’s vendor-centric argot; customers reject it. They care only about their agendas, their lingo, and their pressures — not those of suppliers. Despite this, most suppliers are jargon junkies.
 

 
Steve W. Martin, who teaches sales strategy at the USC Marshall School of Business, knows that perceiving and leveraging customers’ emotions — garnering GutShare™ — is essential to successful selling. Cerebral selling, consequently, doesn’t work; that’s why mindshare — an absolute waste of shareholder capital — is meaningless and begets bad brands.

Martin penned an article in Harvard Business Review called “Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople.” In trait #3, Martin explained the art of selling (emphasis mine):

Top sales performers seek to understand the politics of customer decisionmaking. They strategize about the people they are selling to and how the products they’re selling fit into the organization instead of focusing on the functionality of the products themselves.

 
Branding Is Macroselling

Selling to one is like branding to many but on a smaller scale, although the skillsets of the people involved are vastly different — unfortunately. Each endeavor requires constructing a detailed map of needs, emotions, politics, and behaviors — and then adeptly incorporating these “coordinates” into customer communications.

Sounds simple, right? Evidently not.

There’s such a disconnect between how top sales reps and homepages (from marketing departments, PR firms, ad agencies, and Web developers) articulate value, resulting from:

• Lack of communications competence (bad now and growing worse): Today’s college graduates — the OMG/LOL/BRB crowd — have no clue how to speak or write;
• Using impotent, consensus-driven committees, which excel at converting arrowheads into tennis balls;
• Aversion to being unique: Most people prefer to blend and imitate;
• Ignorance of human emotions and behaviors;
• CEOs assigning low priority to unique, jargon-free, GutShare-garnering branding.

 
This value-articulation disconnect explains perfectly why HQ-driven homepages invariably focus on product functionality, feature indecipherable jargon and forgettable slogans, and resemble complex cockpits — the key to bouncing sales.

A top sales rep, alternatively, operates on a completely different wavelength: He relieves the pains and buttresses the ambitions of the execs in the decisionmaking unit — a far cry from “selling products” — by immersing himself in each one’s politics and psyche. Speaking customer-centric language, rarely found on homepages, is paramount to his success.

I’ve asked many sales VPs what role their companies’ homepages play in closing business. Typical reply: It plays no role; my salesforce ignores it, and our customers don’t even look at it. A wasted strategic asset. Are you listening, shareholders?
 
Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

When your customers and salesforce bounce your homepage, you have a bad brand — one that’s synonymous with ambiguity, complexity, confusion, imitation, and insularity — keeping your company stuck in the white noise, indistinguishable from its competitors.

Does your brand stick or bounce? Quick test: If your top sales reps, who are great proxies for your customers, are pitching with their own arrowheads, it bounces. Getting the point?
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

We are constantly bombarded with billboards, commercials, and homepages that convey no or negative value and are, therefore, colossal branding failures.

Few branding efforts fare worse than those of GEICO. Atrocious. Really. But, here’s one in contention: MetroPCS’s inane, cringeworthy “Tech & Talk” spot, part of a series.
 

 
Here are the three causes — Three C’s — of branding failure:

1. Competence: wrong people involved
2. Camouflage: wrong strategy
3. Committee: too many people involved.

 
Branding, like gourmet cooking, requires specific expertise, singular talent, and unique flair. Assigning this endeavor to generalists, geeks, investors, inept communicators, and those inexperienced with closing customer deals will result in failure.

The second cause of failure — easily verified with a 15-second glimpse at any homepage — is camouflage: the propensity to blend, to fit in, to copy competitors, to avoid standing out, to be invisible, to dwell in white noise. This confounds customers, investors, and the media — and hikes your cost of sales.

A speech or media appearance powerfully reflects a brand’s strength, or lack thereof. Bill O’Reilly recently criticized Tim Pawlenty for his unwillingness to confront Mitt Romney in the GOP debate on June 13, 2011. O’Reilly said about Pawlenty: “Häagen-Dazs could put his picture on vanilla. Do we get that? Are we all hearin’ that? The guy’s invisible.”

In the video below, Pawlenty tries to explain and joke about his branding failure to Chris Wallace of Fox News Sunday. Still vanilla to me. I can’t cite, or explain to anyone else, any compelling or unique benefit of Tim Pawlenty.
 

 
Finally, relegating branding to an unqualified, mixed-discipline committee merely amplifies and compounds causes #1 and #2 above. Committees, always political, produce bland, banal, baffling messaging — squandering time, money, and competitive advantages. Too many chefs spoil the broth.
 
Converting Clarity Into Ambiguity

In addition to Mark Wahlberg and Charlize Theron, the Mini Cooper was a star of The Italian Job. British Motor Corporation launched the first Mini in 1957, based on simple specifications that Sir Alec Issigonis and his team of eight used in their iconic design. Issigonis epitomized “less is more” and gave us this gem: A camel is a horse designed by committee. Indeed.

Anyone who’s been on any committee knows how mindnumbingly unproductive, uncreative, and political it can be. Typically, a “leader” who will not or cannot lead creates committees and councils to avoid making decisions, to kick the can down the road.

Branding — articulating a unique, compelling, memorable, repeatable value proposition — requires decisive leadership, the guts to stand apart from the competition. This is not a job for a committee. A committee excels at converting clarity into ambiguity.

In my consulting experiences, I’ve observed, especially in today’s feel-good culture, many companies exulting in squishy, politically correct, all-opinions-count branding by committee. It doesn’t work. Committees are about nebulous consensus, not boldness and creativity. Committees create white noise and ruin branding.

Barack Obama loves committees. Remember his deficit-reduction panel, with Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles? The deficit has increased. Then there’s his President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness. Its chairman is Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, whose stock has declined by half during his decade-long tenure. Now, Obama faces a 17.3% unemployment rate. You see, committees ruin economies, too.

Politburo-style central planning always fails, but the president won’t admit it. If Obama really wants to “create jobs,” he’d boldly cut taxes and government spending in half — and watch American businesses grow overnight. Instead, we get useless committees. The US government is one big committee!

Watch Obama joke that “shovel-ready was not as shovel-ready as we expected.” Mr. President, your committee is the joke.
 

 
Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Committees ruin branding because they lack the incentive, structure, and expertise to win. They’re clouds, not arrowheads. They impede, not propel.

Before initiating your branding effort — which you must do before building a product — make a fundamental decision: horse or camel, memorable epicurean event or potluck supper.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

On June 6, 2011, Steve Jobs, emerging briefly from his medical leave, made a rare branding blunder in a product announcement: incorporating “cloud” in its name.

Jobs heralded Apple’s free iCloud service, which allows users to store remotely their music, documents, photos, and apps from their iPhones, iPads, and Macintosh computers.

As I’ve opined previously about cloud computing, using generic vernacular in branding is a major blunder: 1) generic is the antithesis of unique; 2) nobody can define cloud; 3) every vendor under the sun also uses cloud. To wit: Amazon’s Cloud Drive and Elastic Compute Cloud, IBM’s SmartCloud, Dell’s Cloud Computing, Microsoft’s Azure Cloud, and VMWare’s vCloud.

Confused? You should be. Confusion=CO$T. When I hear cloud computing, in addition to its nebulous idiocy, I think of one word: Wikileaks. Putting all your assets online, because it’s the thing to do, is an impetuous, foggy, risky decision — the epitome of groupthink. Does the Sony hacking incident come to mind?
 
Nonsense & Water Vapor

As I awoke this morning to my alarm clock, I heard two local radio hosts discussing the iCloud announcement. Inevitably, they asked each other the obvious question: What’s a cloud? Bingo.

Never use words that don’t resonate immediately, and have visceral impact, with the target audience. If you need lots of seminars, interviews, and Powerpoint slides to define and/or explain your offering, something is very wrong.

The Wall Street Journal reported the news with an article entitled “Apple Opens Locker for Songs.” Why locker? Locker is a word everybody understands. Duh.

Watch Larry Ellison, CEO of Oracle, struggling to define cloud computing to an audience at the OpenWorld 2010 Conference — presumably pressured by his board to look “cool” and “with it” on Wall Street — one year after telling Ed Zander, former exec of Sun Microsystems and Motorola, that cloud computing is nonsense and water vapor:
 

 
Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Succumbing to peer and media pressure to copy your competitors by incorporating generic buzzwords and vernacular into your brand is a colossal mistake — one that tech firms seem destined and delighted to make. Yet, even the mightiest brander of all, Apple, just made it. That will be a cloud hanging over Cupertino for a long time.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

There’s a remarkable correlation between the power of government that people tolerate and the kinds of technology they embrace. It is no coincidence that Americans are now overwhelmed with invasive laws and gadgets that diminish their individual freedoms. Welcome to the end of self.

Hillel, the great Jewish sage and originator of the Golden Rule, famously asked: “If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But, if I am only for myself, who am I?”

Fast-forward to the attitude of today’s entitlement culture, in which 50% of Americans pay no income tax and 14.1% of them are on food stamps: “If I am not for myself, my government will be for me. And, because I am only for myself, people will follow me on Twitter.”

A week ago, a new technology company, Color Labs, announced that it had raised $41M in first-round equity funding to build a service that broadcasts photos taken by each subscriber to the smartphone of every nearby subscriber, using proximity algorithms. Why does anyone want to receive strangers’ photos? We hate to receive them from our relatives! People are choosing to wave privacy and individuality to join a group.

The “open borders” lifestyle underscores the end of self, identity, and individuality. Accordingly, Sequoia Capital, which invested $25M in this startup, claims Color Labs is the hottest phenomenon since Google. Sequoia recognizes, accurately, that our culture has replaced the individual with the group. What happened to “I need my space”?

Color Labs is, in a way, akin to Foursquare, purveyor of “check-in” software. With their smartphones, subscribers can track the whereabouts of all their “friends,” no matter where they go. Ironically, survivors of the former Soviet Union risked their lives to escape the constant scrutiny to which these folks are voluntarily submitting themselves.
 
None of His Damn Business

I recall watching Johnny Carson relate an awkward encounter at a party he had hosted. A guest approached to ask the price he had paid for his beautiful home. Appalled, Johnny explained that he was raised in the Midwest, where people didn’t ask such questions. When the man reminded Carson that he could go to city hall to find the deed, which is public information, Johnny angrily invited him to do so while admonishing him that it was none of his damn business. Johnny’s attitude about self is so yesterday.

If he were alive today, Johnny Carson would find Foursquare and its ilk shocking and nonsensical. People have a natural yearning for freedom and privacy, but they also must work and fight to maintain both — because Big Government, the lifestyle dictator, has a natural yearning, and objective, to erode and steal our freedom and privacy. That’s why our Founding Fathers fought to build this country.

“End of self” conditioning has periodically raised its ugly head, starting with Woodrow Wilson. Never, though, has it been more entrenched than today. It’s no accident, then, that people are increasingly choosing group-centric technologies and governments. Using “chicken/egg” analysis, Big Government — such as FDR’s New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society — fashionably preceded Facebook and iPhones.
 
Socialism’s Barometer

Technology, interestingly, has become a barometer of government power. As wimpiness, political correctness, and anti-capitalism insidiously pervade each successive generation, mostly through our federally controlled schools, all sense of self fades. Big Government then increases its fascistic power, and technology’s invasiveness adapts accordingly. The whole cycle is so evolutionary -– progressive — that few notice until it’s too late.

Reliably, technology — socialism’s barometer — symbolizes the populace’s willingness to be monitored and controlled. What Big Government leader doesn’t salivate over a more-pliable electorate and those who soon will join its ranks: students.

Ask any high-caliber schoolteacher about the contemporary classroom, and you’ll likely hear two sad trends: 1) the typical public school revolves around the worst student, not the best — shrinking the smart kids to equal the slowest kid, thereby making the “group” uniformly mediocre; 2) kids, who know more about recycling than the Revolutionary War, are being indoctrinated with socialism and taught to accept, expect, and extol Big Government.

It’s not surprising, then, that anyone who attends one of our identity-shredding schools will happily and readily support overtaxing the rich and greening the planet while also sharing her schedule, location, and nude photos with friends — and strangers. What a nice blend of socialism and socializing!

When a student gets his sheepskin and enters the real world, he’ll discover the end-of-self theme perpetuated as an extension of his school. If, for example, he wants to buy a 100-watt lightbulb for his apartment, Big Government will tell him that, to save the planet, he can’t. When he has to pay taxes while other members of “the group” don’t, he’ll hear that he must spread his wealth around.

If he’s not head-down, constantly texting his friends, our graduate may learn that, except for the dictator leader, there’s no individual in socialism — only the group. Given man’s natural quest for freedom, which he experienced in his rebellious teenage years, it might dawn on him that socialism (aka Marxism, fascism, communism, collectivism, Nazism) never succeeds and cannot exist without force or fiat: Obamacare is mandatory.

Finally, if our graduate discovers that fascism, which derives from the Italian word for bundle, is an oppressive, left-wing, invasive, wealth-redistributing system of government, he may even take another look at his Facebook page and resent his loss of self. Maybe.
 
Rx from the WhiteNoise Doctor™

Sequoia Capital, with its $25M investment in Color Labs, is bullish on the herd. Most technology companies — with Facebook in the lead — are following suit. The herd, the group, the bundle all signal societal submissiveness and voluntary exposure.

It’s not a stretch, either, to extrapolate that those who remove borders between people also believe in doing the same between countries. For example, Thomas Friedman, left-leaning author, promoted technology, in The World Is Flat, as a means to do just that.

Technology, like government, always has been, and always will be, a means to an end. The question is, what end? It’s disconcerting, at best, to see so many people actively and deliberately choosing the means to the end of self. Investors and socialists applaud.

This article is also published at WorldNetDaily and GOPUSA and American Thinker.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

By now, I’m sure you’ve seen Microsoft’s series of “to the cloud” commercials. These spots, as demonstrated in the clip below, make two fundamental branding errors: 1) selling “the cloud,” yet another generic, nebulous form of technobabble; 2) sending viewers three murky messages instead of a single crisp one.

 
The three messages in the clip above are: cloud, Windows Live, and Windows 7 — in that order. If we stop the clip after the actors send us to “to the cloud,” we have NO clue about the advertiser. We’re already confused and distracted, instead of confident and focused.

To the cloud. What does that mean? Which cloud? Where can we buy the cloud? Is there a cloud store? We have no idea. The cloud is just a puffy mass of white noise to us.
 

 
Branding Error #1

Yet, Microsoft’s initial salvo is the generic cloud message, and we don’t know Microsoft is behind it. Branding error #1. Worse, almost every other tech vendor also speaks “cloud” lingo — except Apple (read Cloud Computing: Branding Fog).

Without a unique, gut-grabbing, memorable, repeatable brand (value proposition), a vendor has no hook and gets no traction. Spouting generic technobabble is tantamount to wasting the shareholders’ money — and the customers’ time.

Is Microsoft showing us a problem scenario in this spot to which we, as business professionals, can relate? Sure. We want to connect with geographically dispersed colleagues. No argument there.

Microsoft’s solution? We don’t know. There’s this “cloud,” whatever that is. Then, there’s Windows Live, followed by Windows 7. So, what’s your message, Microsoft? And, how do your three messages interrelate? Hint, Microsoft: it’s not our job to decipher your brand.

 
Branding Error #2

We neither have a gut reaction to nor remember Microsoft’s three messages, as humans can’t process three messages. Consequently, we cannot repeat the messages to our colleagues, because we have no idea what to repeat! Branding error #2.

Have you ever seen an archer use a trident? Of course not. Such an act would be both aerodynamically and ballistically futile. Only sharp, single-tipped arrows will fly, hit their targets, and stick to their targets. This is axiomatic in branding, too.

Yet, in communicating their brands — via homepages, speeches, ads, media appearances, and sales pitches — most companies use tridents instead of sharp, single-tipped arrows, believing that fatter ordnance yields better impact. They’re wrong.
 

 
Rx from The WhiteNoise Doctor™

Had Microsoft simply stated its legitimate case — barriers to collegial connectivity raise the cost of sales — and then offered Windows 7 as the solution, we would view Microsoft as the unique standout for simply articulating our problem and offering us a clear, easy solution.

Instead, Microsoft sent us to the murky, generic cloud — the same ambiguous buzzword its competitors use. Why, then, should we buy from Microsoft? We want a unique-standout vendor, not one stuck in the white noise with its me-too competitors.

Microsoft’s singular goal is to get us to want and buy Windows 7, period. Alas, Microsoft blew it by clouding its brand in the cloud.

We don’t care, or want to know, how Microsoft connects us to our colleagues, because the technology will change again in six months. We care only that Microsoft can do it and explain it, simply — like hitting a bullseye in one shot.
 

POSTSCRIPT

Microsoft Gets It Right: December 2011

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2011 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.

Bud Fox (Sheen), a trader in a brokerage house, had tried but failed for 59 consecutive days to make a face-to-face appointment with Gordon Gekko (Douglas), the master investment banker. But, on Gekko’s birthday, Fox prevailed, Cuban cigars in tow.

After exchanging a few awkward pleasantries about the young trader’s admirable persistence, Gekko gave Fox an immutable lesson in Branding 101 by asking, “Why am I listening to you?” Indeed.

Why should any prospect listen to a vendor? Inherent in Gekko’s question was a more-fundamental, unspoken question: What do you know about me?

Gekko didn’t ask about Fox’s company or products. As the prospect, he wanted to talk only about himself and his needs — in this case, illegal insider information. Once Fox realized and addressed that, he got Gekko’s attention — and cash. No kidding.

Will vendors ever grasp this simple branding truth? Customers want you to talk about them — not about cloud this and social-networking that. Really.

Alas, judging by their supplier-centric, buzzword-laced homepages, vendors still don’t get it — and this is precisely the point I made in “Use Mirrors to Attract Customers.”

 
Rx from The WhiteNoise Doctor™

Branding supersedes all other business activities; it is the first priority, predicated on a deep knowledge of the customer.

The brand is the stone in the pond — it begets all subordinate ripples: fundraising, marketing, building, and selling. The stone creates the ripples; the ripples don’t create the stone!
 

 
When talking to a prospect — face-to-face, over the phone, or via your homepage — note that he’ll be asking himself, from the outset, Why am I listening to you? If you think it’s because of your products, congratulations! You’re in the white noise. Hissss.

The barcode transformed supermarket checkout in the ’80s. Its primary benefit: increasing sales while decreasing the cost of sales. What a coincidence! That’s the same benefit — and objective — of a unique, compelling brand.

We know what it’s like to stand in a checkout line when someone is holding up the works — because the scanner is malfunctioning or a barcode is missing or incorrect. The cashier must manually enter each item’s SKU on the keyboard, exponentially expanding the wait-time of the entire queue. Collective frustration is palpable. The cost of sales immediately jumps.

We have the same experience when viewing a vendor’s nebulous homepage (yes, we do judge a book by its cover).

Typically, the vendor throws industry jargon on its homepage and then expects us to read “About Us,” watch a corporate video, or peruse a whitepaper to comprehend its reason for being. Newsflash to vendor: it is not incumbent on us to decipher your business; it’s your job to explain it — in our language, in 15 seconds, on your homepage.
 
A Logo Is Not a Brand

An effective brand, like a barcode, effects instant identification of a message in the “reader.” When we, as readers, recognize and accept a brand, we feel the familiar “beep” sound of a supermarket scanner in our guts, and we want to make a purchase.

Conversely, when we don’t “get it” — can’t instantly grasp the vendor’s brand — we dawdle or never buy, lowering the vendor’s sales and raising its cost of sales.

I constantly meet executives who think that creating a fancy logo is equivalent to branding their companies, that the job of branding ends with creating said logo. Wrong. A brand is not a logo; a logo is not a brand.

A brand is a value proposition that your customers recognize, grasp, feel, accept, and share with their friends and colleagues — whether you’re selling shoes or nuclear reactors. The logo reinforces a brand but never constitutes one.
 
Rx from The WhiteNoise Doctor™

People do judge a book by its cover. Your homepage is your cover, your #1 branding platform. If you can’t communicate there, where can you communicate?

Look at your homepage. Does it speak unique? Odds are, it doesn’t. Is it sharp and piercing like an arrow? Odds are, it isn’t. Do customers find it compelling? Odds are, they don’t.

Recall the last time you were stuck in a supermarket queue, when the scanner couldn’t read a barcode. Did you feel frustrated, that the store was wasting your time? Did you consider leaving the store?

Now, imagine your customers’ frustrations, and desires to exit, the next time you downplay and deprioritize the urgency of crystal-clear branding on your homepage.
 

About the Author

Marc Rudov, The WhiteNoise Doctor™, is a branding-strategy advisor,
creator of GutShare™, and internationally known media personality.

MarcRudov.com | GutShare.com

Copyright © 2010 by Marc H. Rudov. All Rights Reserved.