One of my 11 major rules for powerful marketing is that your language needs to be shameless. Your communication must be bold. The way you speak about your products or services needs to be confident, aggressive and strong.

The opposite of this is typical marketing: careful, technical, toned down (probably by your legal department), and somewhat defensive.

When you speak about your products or services, you are training your market and all of your partners and observers — think staff. distributors, retailers, media, etc.– how to speak about you. Watch this 3 minute video of Steve Jobs introducing the first iPad to see how he did this. The next day, every newspaper in the country used these same words (and watch how all the people who came on stage after him used the same words!).

Marketing is no place for modesty. If you are not supremely confident in how you communicate your value, how will you convince customers to believe in you? If you don’t communicate shamelessly about your work, who will?

The Evangelist Marketing Institute is a private strategy and marketing consulting and coaching practice with clients that include Logitech, TiVo, and Sprint, as well as a wide range of startups and mid-market firms.  Details about my work are here.

Bonus Reading: My new book, Evangelist Marketing, is 288 pages detailing this very process. It reached #1 in its category on Amazon.com recently. Here is a book review that just ran in Forbes.

The Evangelist Marketing Minute is a weekly thinking launch point that is always short enough to read in about 60 seconds. It covers marketing, branding, positioning, language, and public relations. Your email address is never shared, with anybody, for any reason.