Marketing Profs

There's nothing like a snappy acronym to help you remember something useful, like SWOT, RAF, NASA, LASER, and so on.

But MAMBA? How can a venomous snake help you write better marketing communications?

It all started when my good friend and Master NLP Practitioner Sue Lickorish advised me to create a snappy acronym to help put over the key points of Powerwriting, a book of mine published in 2002, which is at this point metamorphosing into a live.

“People remember acronyms,” she opined as I cynically tried to turn the initials of these “hidden skills you need to transform your business writing” into a new, obscene-sounding four-letter word.

However the only acronym that made any sense—by a very unhappy coincidence—turned out to be a species of reptile. And the mere thought of snakes fills me with terror. Do I hear you say “poetic justice”? Ah, well. MAMBA it is, and here's why….

1. The First ‘M'—Message

You need to get the message right. You start that process by creating a brief for yourself based on sorting out your objective—what you want to achieve. It's no good thinking about what you want to say, because that often isn't what you need to achieve.

If you start by thinking of what you want to achieve, you'll keep yourself focused on outcomes, not subjective desires. That's usually a lot more productive.

2. The First ‘A'—Audience

If your message is going to work you don't just need to know who your audience is, but also how they feel, what they need, how they think. You need to know what makes them tick so that your message will be on their wavelength—and will appeal to them as soon as possible and for as long as possible.