A brand is like a joke ….. “What?!” you ask… “a marketer telling me that my brand is a joke!?”

NOW BEAR WITH ME.  

A brand is a serious thing for sure, and so is a joke. A joke might be funnier, but they both work the same way.

For a joke and for your brand, it’s all in the delivery.

You need to believe in the brand story you’re telling and deliver it with style, just like you do with a joke you’re telling. If you believe and show that commitment in yourself, then others will reflect that and believe and commit in you too.

Let me tell you a story that this topic reminds me of.  When I was little I loved watching reruns of old TV shows; I loved all of them: Lucy, Bewitched, Andy Griffith, etc. There is an old Dick Van Dyke Show episode that stuck with me through the years. The show starts as Rob, Buddy, and Sally are approached and hired by an intimidating mobster. He wants them to write jokes for his nephew aspiring to be a standup comedian. His nephew isn’t doing so well in his career so far, explains the mobster. That is why he has come to them, to get the help of the best comedy writers in Hollywood.  The trio of writers all stress about coming up with the absolute funniest material they can think of.  Otherwise, they worry they’ll be offed.

Rob, Buddy, and Sally bite their nails fearing that they will be under concrete somewhere if the jokes they wrote for the nephew aren’t funny. The writers come up with their best material and nervously hand it over to the nephew to deliver at a comdey show the next weekend.

Come show time at the comedy club, the nephew delivers all their jokes and fails miserably… he barely gets a laugh and it’s fingers across the necks for them!image1

The mobster uncle comes up to trembling Rob afterward and thanks Rob enthusiastically for his work. This, of course, confuses Rob; because the nephew bombed and it didn’t seem like the material was funny. When Rob asks about this to the mobster, the mobster asks Rob: “Is the material you wrote funny?” Rob says he definitely thinks it is. The mobster then asks Rob to present the same material the next night at the comedy club.

The next night Rob stands up on the same stage the nephew stood on the previous night and delivers the same material to the audience. This time, Rob has them in stitches. The crowd is laughing the whole time.  At the end of the show, the mobster comes up with his nephew, shakes Rob’s hand and says to his nephew, “See I told you so.”

Turns out that the mobster had hired Rob, Buddy, and Sally (the best comedy writers in the business) to write for his nephew to prove to him being a stand-up comedian isn’t his calling.  Once the nephew sees that Rob delivered the same material successfully, that he delivered unsuccessfully, he can’t argue with his uncle.

Back to my point– for most things, if not everything, it’s all in the delivery!  Pay attention to how you deliver your brand. How do you answer phone calls, talk to clients, and present proposals or completed projects? Pay attention to how you deliver your brand to the masses. If the delivery is sloppy then your brand is sloppy. The little things add up. Framing your value proposition and your calls-to-action in a compelling way and having consistent on-brand messaging & graphic design in all your iterations is an art that pays dividends if you pay attention.