Lin Manuel Miranda, Neil Patrick Harris and Tommy Kail at the Tonys

I just finished watching the Tony Awards show where host Neil Patrick Harris ended the night, during the credits roll, by performing an outstanding recap in rap of the entire show — with images behind him on the screen racing to keep up.

His performance was amazing for a number of reasons: it hit all the highlights, it was funny, it was fast and no one could believe he was recapping everything so quickly in verse.

Turns out that he had equally amazing help. The rap was written by Lin Manuel Miranda, who wrote and starred in the Broadway musical In the Heights for which he won the Tony Award as composer and lyricist, and by Broadway director Thomas Kail.

But the rap did one thing more — it told a bigger story. Miranda and Harris used the rap to say that live performances eight times a week deserved our awe and praise. They’re right of course. And they used an awesome performance to drive home the message!

How about you? When you share your brand story or your presentation can you tell a bigger story in your recap?

Lots of companies have great brand stories they tell. The problem is, they don’t always match. For example, have you ever noticed that a press release may contain one way of discussing what a company does, while the website says something different? Or an old tagline still accompanies a new logo? These are all examples of poorly aligned brand stories.

If this sounds like your brand don’t fret — there are things you can do. Here are four quick steps you can take to realign your brand story like a brand chiropractor!

Step 1: Gather your messages — Find all that stuff floating around. Your press releases, collateral, website copy, presentations (don’t forget the speaker’s notes), advertisements, mailers, email copy — everything you can get your hands on.

Step 2: Categorize and grade — Put all the like messages together and begin to give each a simple letter grade — A, B, C, D and F — just like in high school. Give higher grades to those messages and communications that are the closest to what your brand story should be. Make notes about what needs to be tweaked for the B and C grades.

Step 3: Assess and template – Look at the messages that received the highest grades, and your notes about changes. Assemble the best of the best and turn these into templates for communications of each type. For example, good email copy and direct mail copy can be saved and used for future campaigns.

Step 4: Purge and protect – Dump all the messages that simply don;t reflect your brand story any longer. I mean it! I give you permission to get rid of the ridiculous boilerplate at the bottom of your press release that names every single division and product you make. Whoosh! Gone. Now, in order to stop a repeat performance, it’s time to remove old messages and replace them with the new messages. get everyone in your organizations — especially those guys in sales — to dump old collateral, email templates and presentations. Then replace them with your new versions.

This is not an easy endeavor. We charge big bucks to help a client walk through a similar process. But I promise, when you are done, you will feel the weight of old, stale messages lifted from your brand stories.

And you will be able to make lemonade from your lemons.

Related articles

• What’s restricting your brand story? (brandtelling.com)

A quick departure here. We recently developed a new 30 second spot with our video partner, Digital Waterworx. David Goldberg shot me (terrible, I know) against a white background and added copy and logos in post production. Let me know what you think!

When I meet with potential customers, they often ask who I see as my competition. Every one of us has some type of competition; it’s a little disingenuous to say, “Oh, we have no competition.” Often for branding services or public relations services and certainly for marketing collateral services, we have both local and national competition. I’m sure you do as well.

My biggest and most fearsome competitors are:

• Fiefdoms
• Silos
• Inertia

Let me explain why these types of internal competition are my greatest challenges for providing outsourced marketing services. Perhaps they’re your greatest challenge as well. I’ll also recommend a few things that you can do about them.

Fiefdoms
Frequently, and especially when dealing with smaller organizations where the president/CEO/founder is involved in all business decisions, from the largest to the smallest, I have found myself faced with a Fiefdom mentality. You may have heard this argument when pitching your services:

“We’ve got Jane and Peter on staff. They can provide the same thing you’re offering in-house for less money.”

This, of course, assumes that Jane and Peter have the same experience as you and your team, that they can provide the same level of advice and counsel from an outside perspective, and that they are able to tap additional resources whenever necessary based on the extensive partner networks they’ve built. Which, of course, they don’t, can’t, are unable to and don’t have, respectively.

It’s tough to overcome a fiefdom, particularly because the person you’re dealing with already has a mindset that says “In-house is best.” The best story to provide them is the experience of similar customers who have benefited from outsourcing to you.

Silos
Silos actually occur frequently in large and growing organizations. You often run into them when you pitch a service that doesn’t exactly fit a specific model or bridges a few different practice areas or departments. Training services and some types of IT applications are common offenders. You may have heard this argument when pitching your services to a silo mentality:

“Wow! That really sounds great, and I think we could use it. The problem is that I don’t have the money for that in my budget. I’d need to talk to another department and see if they would also be interested.”

Silos are often staffed with mid-level managers, each of whom jealously guards his or her budget. If you’re trying to pitch something that bridges a couple of silos, you’re probably not talking to the decision maker.

One way to overcome a silo is to offer to trim your service to best meet the available budget authority for the person you’re pitching. You could also offer to meet with all the peers with budget authority you are seeking to earn some budget from. But the best way to work with a silo is to avoid it entirely by pitching up a level, where the silos all properly appear to be straws in the same cup.

Inertia
Inertia can occur at any place, at any time, without any warning. You’re pitching a product or service, you seem to have established a rapport and you’re getting great feedback, when suddenly, BLAM! Your prospect says:

“Thank you very much for your time. We have decided not to proceed at this time. We will keep your information on record.”

Inertia is tough. It can come from the top just as easily as from below. Inertia mentality is actually FEAR. Your prospect fears that making a decision will result in a bad outcome, so he or she avoids making a decision. When inertia takes the form of choosing to remain with an incumbent vendor, the fear is that your product or service may not meet or beat the incumbent – or at the very least, may cause a hiccup in “the way that we always do things around here.”

The best way to overcome inertia is to meet it head on. Ask your prospect flat out what fear they have and how you can help alleviate that fear. Can you provide a test, a pilot project? Can you perhaps work with the incumbent vendor and slowly add your product or service into their mix? When your prospect is stuck in the mud, pushing them until they break isn’t the answer. You may need to dig around them or add a little water and loosen them up.

What’s your competitive story?

Image by bowbrick via Flickr

In a Harvard Business Review article a few months ago (that resurfaced this week), uber-marketing consultant Geoff Moore, Philip Lay and Todd Hewlin from TCG Advisors make the point that marketers should be “provoking” their customers, not simply consulting and reacting to their requests.

In “In a Downturn, Provoke Your Customers,” the group is clear about the need to be respectful, but they posit that we sometimes need to do the difficult homework before visiting the prospect. They compare their approach to more typical solution selling and make a very compelling argument.

I was especially interested in their advice for success during what they rightly call “The All-Important meeting” with the prospect:

Discuss war stories. Describe the experiences of similar companies that either have faced or are facing the problem. Such stories reinforce its importance and demonstrate that you are knowledgeable about it and are bringing a new solution to the table. They also make the executive feel safe in acknowledging that the problem exists in his or her organization.

Did you catch the part I underlined? That’s where Brandtelling comes in. But it’s also where the ability to present a well-thought-out and compelling argument plays an important role.

So get out there, think hard and provoke some customers!