The Eyelet.

If I hear the phrases “global solutions” or “a leading provider of” again, I’m going to take a stapler and affix the offending tagline or brand positioning statement to the perpetrator’s forehead.

I was very recently asked to participate in a survey to help an unidentified agency determine the best of four “positioning statements” for their B2B client by providing ratings on a dozen or so key messaging points that the statements were trying to convey. However, they weren’t really your typical positioning statements that outlined what the brand does, for whom and how it is differentiated from others that do so. They were more like taglines and each one employed a variation of the phrase “global solutions”. The lines also used verbiage that the target audience would never understand – that even most of their own associate base wouldn’t understand. They were trying to use such lingo to give a more grandiose and broader spin on what they actually do – small batch document production. I gave each and every key measure an effectiveness rating of a 1 or 2 on a 5 point scale. Whether these lines were for internal or external use, they failed miserably to explain and differentiate what their client’s brand did, for whom and why it’s important.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote a post about Christophe Morin’s work in leveraging recent findings from the field of Neuroscience in marketing communications. I reviewed the 6 most effective stimuli of the reptilian brain and the 4 basic steps to leverage in order to persuade and influence it. Now comes the more tactical piece. What are the buttons we can push to activate acknowledgment and action by the reptilian brain? Well, if you haven’t picked up on it by now, you will after this post – Mr. Morin likes to keep things summarized in easy to understand and remember chunks. Our next sets of chunks are about the tactics to utilize and leverage the previously mentioned reptilian brain triggers.

Christophe has outlined a set of messaging blocks and their corresponding boosters to those messaging blocks that enable us marketing communications folks to get our message acknowledged and responded to by the reptilian brain. There a six such blocks:

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What? Who’s Jack Palance. If you’re under 30, you might have no idea. If you’re over 50, you likely watched him in hundreds of westerns and crime dramas. If you’re somewhere in between, like me, you might know him only from the movie, City Slickers.

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That’s right, the post office. I spent this past week at the National Postal Forum accepting an award for innovation in direct marketing. The event was interesting, informative, and offered some useful insights on building a service brand. Let’s start with some facts about mail you probably didn’t know:

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A few Mlicki associates had the opportunity to attend a seminar held by Chrisophe Morin, founder of SalesBrain, a San Francisco “Neuromarketing Coaching Company”. Mr. Morin illustrates how we marketing folk can harness the neuroscience findings of the past decade to fashion more effective marketing communications. At times his premises may seem a little manipulative – maybe even akin to “big brother” type tactics. Read more