Author: remap_content_admin

The systematic arrangement of words, messages, slogans, and concepts that support a sales team

Also see B2B Sales

A type of human, conversational sales where multiple buyers collaborate to make purchase decisions based on their desire to acquire value

In marketing and communications, impact refers to the purportedly meaningful results of a public good campaign or program. 

It’s meant to distinguish the value of such activities from “income” and other purely monetary measures, ie., revenue, profit, etc.

Thus, a philanthropic org commissions “impact studies”.

In advertising, impact is…

“That quality in an advertisement which strikes suddenly against the reader’s indifference and enlivens his mind to receive a sales message”
– Raymond Rubicam 

You have a lexicon. You might be using now, it to parse this email. And to the extent that you use it in business, you have a business lexicon.

But can your customers see it? Probably not, because most of us divulge our lexicon only in conversation or written work communication, like email or Slack.

If your business lexicon is an asset, how much is it worth? How much value does it add to your business?

*    *    *  

The words in your business lexicon are mental definitions. To the extent these definitions have any value at all, they have two essential qualities:

First, they are instantly accessible to you, as if from muscle memory. Otherwise, they’re not very useful to you as business assets. To own them, I recommend actually memorizing them and practicing reciting them. Protip: if you wear a mask as you do this, people won’t think you are talking to yourself (:

Second, they define a word or term differently, in ways others won’t expect. A business strategy that lacks surprise does not inspire action. Messaging that lacks surprise makes your marketing boring, vague, or unoriginal.

These two qualifiers narrow it down; your business lexicon might consist of just a dozen definitions. Or who knows, 2 or 3.

And this changes. Your lexicon today is similar, if not identical, to the one you had a month ago. And not at all similar to the one you had 10 years ago.

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When you write your business lexicon down into definitions, now people can see it. This increases its value to you, so I want to quickly put down a “how to”.

First, you don’t need any of the academic stuff, like:

• a formal education in lexicography, which is a fancy way to say, “the practice of making dictionaries”. 
• training in “lexicographic praxis”, like how to conduct lexicographic research.
• an understanding of metalexicography or lexicographic criticism.
• transnational or multilingual perspectives on lexicography.

I mean, a lexicography degree can’t hurt. But you don’t need it. It might even get in your way, because you’re making a different kind of dictionary.

So what do you need? Here’s what is helpful:

• to know who your definitions are for
• to know how they’ll help them understand your business
• to ignore almost all senses of a word except for one (maybe two with edge cases..)
• depth – it’s cute to write a short, pithy definition but not always very useful
• putting your definitions adjacent to one another, in some way

On that last note, your definitions could be presented as a series of blog posts or podcasts. It could be a tag of some kind on your tweets or LinkedIn posts. It doesn’t have to be presented as a dictionary; it just has to be navigable as a collection of definitions.

And these definitions could be implied and subtle rather than explicit. I’m learning from my current research,a the de facto dictionaries innate to business publications, that definitions don’t always get presented to you as such.

You could use metaphors, visual diagrams, or the easiest and most useful hack of all, anti-definitions: defining what it isn’t. 

Let me know the most important word in your business lexicon and how you’d define it.

And have a terrific weekend
Rowan

Everything you know in your head about your business but may not have put into writing, either as explicit definitions or as de facto definitions that amount to explorations of the meaning of a word or term

But the most common cause of a value gap is that people buy when they aren’t ready. (Chief culprit: direct marketing).

The gap between the potential value of a solution and the actual value it creates.

Also, see Usability Gap

The gap between the potential usefulness of a feature and people’s ability to use it.

Having a feature but people can’t use it
– Jakob Nielsen

Also see Value Gap

I know that I jump around a lot on this newsletter. In my psychedelic mind, of course, it all interconnects seamlessly and makes perfect sense. But I can see how it seems like I’m all over the place to readers.

But there’s a central theme: be different or be forgotten

Now that isn’t a new idea, a unique idea, or even useful advice, at least not by itself. It’s too much at the surface, even if I qualify it as: be meaningfully different. You could say it’s reductionist, too.

But I don’t really care about any of that. 

I care about uniting everything under a theme, to provide context and focus. And I care that pretty much anybody can understand it, even a young child or someone who knows nothing at all about my business.

*    *    *

The problem is how to be meaningfully different or be forgotten? How to not drown in the ocean of the infinite alternatives to you?

This is an especially keen problem for my core client base – tech entrepreneurs who leverage some kind of emerging technology or innovation to create products and services.  Not only is their solution complex but they’re often flirting with some new category of business that they find difficult to explain.

The common result is a brand identity that is either too complex, too vague, too unoriginal, or too boring. Or more often some blend of those traits. Most indie consultants and agencies similarly lack clarity.

In response to problems like that, I write about specific ways to “be different or be forgotten”:

• Positioning your business as distinct from alternatives in the minds of people who matter to it
• Finding Messaging that makes it crystal clear what your value is and isn’t
• Thinking about what you offer as a brand and polishing and repolishing brand identity
• Productizing and pricing your solutions so they become a structured system for creating value and profit
• Publishing your perspective to gain visibility and trust… and better perspective
• Selling through thoughtful, researched, and curiosity-driven conversation, be it real-time or asynchronous
• Uniting your business insights and solutions with your personal life experience  and philosophical/spiritual beliefs
• Redefining the concepts that matter to your business and creating a unique business vocabulary

Lots of stuff, I know! But each of these “professional competencies”  helps remember you to your audience, your prospects, your partners, future employees, and people who connect you to others. So we explore them here.

*    *    *

But this isn’t just a “how it works” article for the newsletter. There’s also a really important messaging question I now want to ask you: what’s your central theme?

Remember, it doesn’t have to be an original idea or useful advice. It just has to connect all that you do and talk about. And make sense to any stranger, even a child.

If you answer this question will, you may get some effective messaging out of it.

Have a great week ahead (:
Rowan

A message map is an analytical process that creates a tactical tool, perhaps captured in a document, that investigates and documents elements such as:

• Brand identity
• Sub brands
• Product lines/extensions
• Positioning
• GTM strategy
• Target audiences
• Audience problems/fears
• Pricing

By taking stock of all of these elements in one place, and understanding their relationships, a messaging map becomes an approach to creating effective messaging.

Secondarily, it can create messaging uniformity across large teams and disparate sales and marketing campaigns, materials, etc. As such, it can be useful to capture the messaging map as a single document, such as a slide deck.