So how do you tap into people’s emotional needs? First, it helps to understand exactly what those needs are. Behaviorists have identified the ten innate emotional needs, expressed as feeling:

1. A sense of status within a social grouping
2. Meaning and purpose
3. Part of a wider community
4. Friendship and intimacy
5. Privacy
6. Attention (to give and receive it)
7. Security
8. A sense of competence and achievement
9. Emotional connection to others
10. A sense of autonomy and control

Obviously some of these emotional needs are more intrinsic to some brands than others. For example, the car one drives may help define that individual’s sense of status within a social group — and may help define his or her sense of competence and achievement. Life insurance and other financial services products involve concerns about security and sense of autonomy and control. But every product or service you can name relates to one or more of these basic human needs.

Tapping into them can make your communications more powerful.

If you’re communicating to internal audiences, i.e. your employees, take some advice from Daniel Pink, the well-known author who writes about the changing workplace. In a recent talk to the RSA (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6XAPnuFjJc), Pink points out that in tasks involving cognition, what motivates people is not compensation but emotional needs like autonomy (the ability to be in control), mastery (competence and achievement) and purpose (the ability to make a contribution). In other words, people want to “feel” the reward.

So what does this all mean for your communication? You might have to dig deeper to consider your audiences and the emotional needs that motivate them — then address those needs in your marketing messages. It’s a good start for better and more motivational communications.

From our experience, companies do a relatively good job talking about the “what” of their business  (defining what they do) and the “how”  (the processes they use to achieve the what). But they often ignore the “why” (the purpose). This is the reason they got into the business in the first place — and why they get up and go to work every morning.

The “why” is becoming more important than ever. Employees and customers want to know all about it because the “why” makes them feel good about being associated with your company. The “why” is your context — the cornerstone and the common thread of your business. So don’t ignore it in your marketing communications. Your “why” can really help differentiate you from your competition.

This is especially important when people have a difficult time understanding exactly what you’re trying to sell them, like a complex financial or technical service, for example. Here’s where a mini-story — a metaphor or analogy — can come in particularly handy.

To generate your mini-story, ask yourself, “What’s your service like?”  Then come up with a list of metaphors that describe your service or the problem it solves.

People need to find a standard of identity or association, like being able to associate Prudential with a rock or Travelers with an umbrella.

Case in point: ADP, a company that provides outsourced HR administration services, ran an ad showing a frustrated executive trying to fashion a paper clip from a piece of wire.  The copy read: “Make your own paper clips?  No?  So why would you do HR administration in-house?” Or, if you boiled it down: “Trying to get by without our services is like trying to make your own paper clips.”

Giving tangible examples not only make your product more real — they give it a distinct personality and emotional resonance. That’s what effective selling is all about.

The complete research study cited in article 1 can be found at http://www.gallup-robinson.com/reprints/mehtapurvisreconsideringrecall.pdf

Brand is intrinsic.  It comes from who you are—not who you aspire to be. You may wish you were a truly innovative company, but competitors regularly beat you to market. What you are, though, is steadfastly reliable. Instead of pretending to be something you’re not, celebrate that steadfast reliability. Embrace it. Live it. It’s where your meaningful differentiation can be found.

Don’t let competitors define who are you by trying to emulate them. Look inward and determine your distinguishing qualities—your brand essence—and make it your selling point and your rallying cry.

Your brand essence goes hand-in-hand with your values—they are intrinsic to you, which is why they will provide a more genuine connection to your customers. To quote Will Shakespeare,  “To thy own self be true.” Be yourself, and stay true to the attributes that define you.

There used to be a time when people believed the marketing messages in ads—and believed in political propaganda—but not any more. Thanks to developments in technology and communications, most notably the Internet, more people than ever can see it all for what it really is.

Banks have collapsed, economies are faltering or failing, auto manufacturers took multi-billion dollar bailout packages, and many consumers have lost their last hopes that the pie-in-the-sky claims made in ads are even remotely true.

That’s why transparency, honesty and trust are so important for brands today.

In a time when there are so many reasons not to trust institutions, people are looking for greater meaning and sincerity from companies they choose to do business with—fueled by a desire to connect with things that feel safe, certain and unambiguous. (Think of fast-growing brands like Google, Apple and IKEA, that all have authenticity at their core.)

On the other hand, when a brand’s rhetoric becomes out of sync with customers’ actual experiences, its integrity and future efforts at persuasion suffer. When that happens, you run the risk of magnifying the issue geometrically—audiences have the power to seize control of your brand, spread the word and damage your reputation.

Case in point: When McDonald’s launched its “We love to see you smile” campaign several years ago, pundits like Advertising Age‘s Bob Garfield, were vehemently negative—arguing that filthy restrooms and grumpy counter help made the ads run “preposterously false.” To make matters worse, after the campaign ran for a year, published reports revealed that rude employees were costing Mickey D’s millions of dollars in lost sales.

The net, net: Tell it like it is.  Be honest, truthful, and real. Create expectations for your brand in consumers’ minds—and then do your best to deliver on those expectations every time and in every customer interaction.

Take one of our longstanding clients, PeopleNet Communications. With PeopleNet, trucking companies can achieve higher performance than they can with competitive alternatives. Of course, there are facts and figures that provide significant substantiation for that claim. But the voice is what brings it all to life. It’s a challenging and collaborative voice, pushing the audience and the industry to a higher level. Take a headline from a recent ad, for example: “When it comes to safety and compliance, who wants to be average?” Language like this can serve as a real rallying cry—the “stuff” it takes to build a community of fans.

There are other examples of companies that do “voice” right. Remember, Tom Bodett for Motel 6—or Apple Computer’s challenge to “Think different”? How you say what you say can make all the difference in the world.

After a while, the tag lines on the print ads developed by Fidelity Bank, Edina, Minnesota, all started to read the same. They said something like “The Bank of Business” or “Creating Business Solutions.”

That’s when the financial institution, which specializes in serving business customers, decided to try something different. The bank introduced a campaign in which one of the headlines says, “The beans can’t touch the meatloaf.”

The campaign was so distinctive that it encouraged the bank to create a series of spin-offs, including employee “beans and meatloaf” lunches and a trophy to recognize special services consisting of an oversized can of baked beans with a Fidelity logo on its label.

The “beans and meatloaf” ad was designed to appeal to meticulous people, the kind who don’t like their beans to touch the meatloaf, according to Steve Stoup, the bank’s senior vice president of marketing and business development. Fidelity sees its customers as people who are particular about where they do their business banking.

The “beans and meatloaf” slogan is intended to be shorthand for the fact that the bank’s employees strive to have comprehensive knowledge of the bank’s customers and their financial needs. When distributing data about new customers to employees, the bank includes such personalized information as the customer’s favorite beer or travel destinations.

The agency for the campaign was Introworks in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Read more about the “Beans Can’t Touch the Meatloaf” Campaign
How simple comfort food impacted a client’s culture.
What do beans and meatloaf have to do with Introworks?

Introworks, a leading branding and marketing communications firm, is seeking an important new member to its account services team. This account management candidate can develop and retain relationships, making customers grin and revenue grow. A persuasive problem-solver, he or she has deep knowledge of branding and can write a compelling plan, yet is not afraid to digest details and spearhead projects. This person enjoys a challenge and is eager to get results for companies that make a difference. In depth knowledge of digital media is a must and experience in building brands and driving sales for MedTech companies is preferred.

Responsibilities:

• Mange client relationships and expectations
• Determines brand and marketing communications strategy and plans
• Manages client external and internal account activity including billing
• Prepares and presents statements of work for projects
• Responsible for ensuring client projects are on time, on budget, on strategy

Submit your resumé to jobs@introworks.net.

Here’s where you may find yourself—you’re wanting to communicate with other businesses in a way that’s more lively than your website and less sociable that Twitter and Facebook, yet you feel a fair amount of pressure via the media or management to use social media as a communication medium. It’s not that you are unaware of the tools and what they do, or even how they work, it’s more a problem of qualifying the appropriate outlet for your message. You rely on innovation, service, support and trust—not buzz. You prefer dialog and storytelling to sound bites and you’re definitely more interested in making sales than “friends.” Have you considered a blog?

Take a look at the following diagram to see why I think a blog is a good place to begin. This example is not a catchall for every situation, but it does offer basic insight on using each tool. Basically your blog is a good way to explain things related to your core competency that you would like to get a reaction or feedback from. A successful blog in turn provides a starting point for building a network with other tools, and then those tools can eventually have content and a life of their own that loops back to accomplishing other business goals.

Here’s why I think a blog may be appropriate for a small to mid-sized b2b communications strategy:

• Blogs are still where conversations are happening. There are corporate, sales, news, support, video and photo blogs so you’re not limited in the way or media you use to get your point across.
• A blog is a great platform to start with. By first focusing on what you really want to communicate and the benefits of it, you’ll have something worth building a network of friends and followers around later.
• In a small- to mid-sized business your time and resources may not be best used managing friends or followers in an opt-in or subscription-based network. This doesn’t have to be time consuming. But if you’re just getting started, it can take your focus away from what you should be doing—communicating about your business.
• You want what you put online to be available to anyone who may find it (including search engines), not just your network. (Some social tools are open to search, but many aren’t).

Growing up I avoided AM radio for its lack of a Top 40 countdown and hair-band guitar solos—the more loud songs in an hour the better. Today I prefer both for different reasons (sans the hair-bands now) and the same applies to how I delineate social media tools. Consider the differences between AM talk radio and FM Top 40—one is designed to be taken in over a longer period of time and the other happens in 3 to 4 minute blocks. It takes more than 140 characters to explain your business niche just as it takes longer than a wall post to highlight an insider’s perspective on a product feature. Communicate well. Begin with a platform that makes sense. Change your business broadcast.

Additional Resources
If you’ve made it this far and still question your tech savviness or ability to execute something in the blogosphere, give your IT or development partner an invite to help integrate a blog into your website or other online offering. If that’s not an option, give one of the following tools a try—both have extensive instructions, can be set up in minutes, and have the option to be branded or themed. They’re also free and hosted externally, leaving you the sole responsibility of typing.
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• WordPress – http://www.wordpress.com
• Blogger – https://www.blogger.com/start

Illustration by Nik Kouzes.

The prevalence and widespread misuse of PowerPoint presentations is a major culprit. (When was the last time you sat through a really good one?) While Powerpoint is designed to communicate and clarify, many times it ends up doing just the opposite. Case in point: In a recent New York Times article, “We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint”, feature writer Elisabeth Bumiller describes how General Stanley McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was recently shown a PowerPoint slide that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy. The slide, which “looked like a bowl of spaghetti,” was so complicated and so convoluted that McChrystal remarked, ‘When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war.”

But there are ways to breathe life into PowerPoint presentations. Here, borrowing from a pamphlet written by famed marketing blogger Seth Godin, are some tips on how to use the medium more effectively.

Make slides that reinforce your words, not repeat them.
Unfortunately, more often than not, PowerPoint is used as a teleprompter — the presenter actually reads the slides. Think about it: Why has your audience come all the way to a meeting just to listen to you read the slides? Why not just send them over the presentation and let them read it at their convenience?

The remedy: Instead of cramming the slides with facts and figures, have a few key words as talking points.

Make your audience use both sides of their brains.
Communication is not just the presentation of facts and figures, it’s the transfer of emotion. When you show up to give a presentation, people use both parts of their brain: the left side to process the facts and hard data, and the right side to judge the way you talk, how you dress and the body language you use. Lots of times, the right side ends up being more powerful — and people come to a conclusion about your presentation by the time you’re on the second slide. After that, it’s probably too late for your bullet points to do you much good.

Instead of loading up lots of words on every slide, why not inject some powerful visuals every so often — then use the screen to talk emotionally to the audience and grab their attention. If you’re talking about air pollution, for example, images of dead birds, smog — even a diseased lung — are way more compelling than several bullet points of EPA data.

Create a written document as a leave-behind.
Put all the facts and figures and footnotes you were tempted to put into the PowerPoint into this document. But don’t hand it out until the end of the presentation. If you do, people will read the whole thing while you’re talking and ignore you. You want them to sit back, trust you and take in the emotional and intellectual points of your presentation. That way, PowerPoint can be the high point — not the death knell — of your next meeting.

We don’t think it‘s a stretch to say we’re reaching a tipping point—which can be a good thing because all these new tools are facilitating more personal, face-to-face communications. But it all comes with a caveat: Effective videoconferencing requires staging. Here are some tips on how to “choreograph”:
…

• It’s best to set up the equipment before the scheduled time so you’ll have time to test the system and resolve any issues before the meeting. (And you’ll want to have a back-up plan, just in case the equipment doesn’t work.)
• If there are windows in the room, close any drapes or blinds. (Daylight is a variable light source and conflict with interior room lighting.)
• When you adjust the camera, try to fill the screen as much as possible with people rather than with the table, chairs walls, lights, or the floor. (You certainly don’t want to have construction workers in the background.)
• Wear the right clothes. Neural or muted colors, such as medium blues or light pastels, help the camera focus more easily. Avoid clothing with very intense colors — reds tend to bleed on the screen, whites may glare, and black absorbs the light. Also stay away from bold, complex or busy patterns like small checks or narrow strips — they can affect the camera’s ability to focus and lower picture clarity.
• Reduce background noise. Turn off fans, close windows and doors, mute cell phones and beepers, and lower the volume on office telephones. Microphones can intensify these normal sounds.
• To get the best possible audio, speak in your normal voice — don’t shout. Ask the people at the other site if they can hear you, and have them introduce themselves so you can be sure you can hear them. Mute the microphone before moving it during the meeting. And remember, the audio has a very slight delay, so you may want to pause briefly for others to answer you or to make comments.

As with every presentation, don’t forget to liven it up with humor, anecdotes, etc. — and make that essential “emotional” connection. After all, you’re on camera, and people are watching.