The Art of Branding

Too often business presentations are a sea of statistics.  (Bullet, bullet, bullet; Number, number, number; Pie chart, pie chart, pie chart.)  Unless you’re speaking to numbers people, don’t cite a lot of numbers.  Focus on the important ones if you want them to be remembered.  You can also bring numbers to life through several techniques:

• • Show and tell.  Read a customer letter or relate an anecdote that brings the statistic to life.

• • Give an analogy.  Compare the number to something tangible from everyday life that people can relate to.  (The cost of funding this project is less than supplying the coffee machine on the 6^th floor for a year.)
• • Put the number in a historical context.  (Due to savings from technology, the production cost is one-tenth of what it was just two years ago.

Take the stage and enter the room with energy and confidence.  Make direct contact with your audience.  If you aren’t looking at the audience when you start to talk, you won’t get their attention. The development of a relationship begins with eye contact and full frontal engagement.

JFK was said to look at people first in one eye, then the other, a technique called “planting.”   In a large group, you can isolate a few people to make eye contact with. You want each person to feel like you are talking directly to him or her.

Don’t let paper come between you and the audience, either. Know the message well enough so that you don’t need to read it. (You can always put notes on 3 x 5 cards in your pocket, or use your slides as triggers.)

Use gestures or any animation that’s natural to you.  You want to make the audience feel your passion.

Pay attention to the room size. You want to build a relationship between you and the audience, no matter how big or how small. Always ask for a room that is just the size of the group.  You don’t want a lot of empty seats since they will sap energy from the room.

Speak the speech.

William Shakespeare

Hamlet (III, 2)

An advantage of cutting back on the PowerPoint habit, is that you’ll no longer be hiding from your audience.

You’ll be able to harness the visual cues of gesture, posture, appearance which account for as much as 75 percent of an audience’s opinion of a speaker.  After all, you must engage the audience if you want to build your self brand.  You can’t do that if they don’t experience you because they are trying to follow wall-to-wall slides.

Here are my pointers for doing an effective slide presentation:

• Make you and your message the stars, not the slides. You must fight the monotony of PowerPoint by limiting your slides to only those that dramatize your message.
• Follow the 10/20/30 Rule. In his book, The Art of the Start, Guy Kawasaki advises people to limit themselves to ten slides, twenty minutes and thirty-point-font in a pitch since “the fewer slides you need, the more compelling your idea.”
• Use pictures, diagrams and illustrations. Use pictures and graphics to make your points, not just words.
• Develop a brand look for your slides. You can put your logo on the master slide, add a signature background color, or even have a graphic artist design a branded template to set your presentation apart.

Too many presentations are trial by PowerPoint: too many slides, too many words, too many points.

One of the problems with PowerPoint is that it homogenizes your message.

Everything looks the same:  headline and bullet points.  Even if you are saying something memorable, it will be hard for the audience to find and remember it in a sea of similar-looking slides.

Record yourself talking and play it back. Listen to it.  Answer the following:

What do you hear?

What does you voice say about you?

Record yourself again.  This time try to put more resonance in your voice by contracting your abdominal muscles and speaking from the diaphragm.
Work on your inflection by practicing speaking in a lower pitch.  Then think of ways you could improve your voice and vocal delivery.

Write it down in cursive.

Our voice is like our DNA; it is unique and recognizable. If voice branding wasn’t powerful -. if you didn’t recognize and respond to the voices of Tom Hanks or Ellen DeGeneres or Eddie Murphy – there would be no point to paying them millions of dollars for voice-overs in animated films.

Consider how your voice sounds. Many people cultivate their wardrobe or their image, but don’t cultivate the voice they wear every day.

The voice is a potent branding device. You use it all the time in the wall-to-wall cell phone and voice mail world of our business lives. What does the way your voice sounds communicate about you?  Is it consistent with your self brand strategy?  How can you make your voice a powerful branding tool?

People will brand you by the way you speak, sound and present your ideas, and judge you and your ideas accordingly.

If you are not happy with the sound, pitch or cadence of your voice, work with it. You’ll find that people respond to a lower pitch voice when you are talking than a higher pitch voice. Try to develop a rhythm that works best for you. The next brainstormer will get you going.

Leave “air” around your words by slowing down your speech and pausing.

Just these two things – talking more slowly and pausing – will make a dramatic difference in your presentations (or any type of communication).

I stand in pause where I shall first begin.

William Shakespeare

Hamlet (III, 3)

Pause at important points (beginning, key ideas, a story). When you slow things down, you give your listeners the opportunity to hear your ideas and to comprehend them and become emotionally involved. It will also make you seem more confident if you don’t appear to be rushing through your message.

Pausing gives you a chance to breathe and take deep, relaxing breaths.

Try to carry over these speaking habits into all areas of verbal communication. Most people talk too fast at meetings, on the phone or when leaving a voicemail message. And they undercut their effectiveness as a communicator.

The beginning is the most important part of a presentation. You win or lose them in the first twenty seconds.

Make your entrance with stage presence:  Stand tall with your chest held high and your weight evenly distributed.  Even if you are nervous, making a good entrance can fool them.

Plan your opening gambit. Open a talk with something that’s unpredictable, something that will immediately grab the attention of the other people in the room.

Use contemporary news, stories, anecdotes or examples to make your points. Pick words that paint a picture. Pick words that are unusual to impress your ideas in the minds of the audience. Great speakers use language artfully to brand their ideas with the audience.

You need to hook your audience with a surprising statistic or news or anecdote.  Whatever it is, it has to bring about an Ah-ha from the audience. Have something to say that is different from the usual view (or why bother). Too many talks are rehashes of what’s been said before.

You also want to end on a high note. After the beginning, the end of your talk will be remembered most. It’s the same in brand advertising. In television commercials, the beginning and end of the commercial are carefully planned to capture attention and impart the brand message.

Leave a surprise element or special story for the end, so that you leave your audience wanting more. A great presentation is one in which people are provoked to think differently about something, whether they come to agree with what you said or question it.

The trick to formal business communication (whether it’s oral or written) is making it sound informal. Between a brand and a target audience a relationship needs to be built. You do that by being natural and engaging rather than formal and “business-like.”

It helps if you think of your business communication as a conversation with a colleague (and carry on a conversation in your head as you compose your thoughts). Think in terms of friendly engagement. Break the habit of relying on business jargon and technical terms.

You can tap into various speaking influences in developing your own speaking style. Pay attention to people around you who speak well and might help inspire your style:  your minister or rabbi, executives in your company, speakers at networking or industry meetings.

Watch media personalities on television. Listen to their technique and see if there is something there for you to adapt for yourself. Listen to the rhythm and cadence of their words.