Category Archives: Branding Thoughts

"Don't be humble, you're not good enough."

No, I’m not picking on you, I’m quoting an old mentor of mine, Archie Rand. Archie is an artist and teacher and walking encyclopedia of art history (and music history for that matter). I don’t know if the line is his originally, but it is a gem I’ve hung on to for over 17 years, since I was a long-haired MFA candidate with more paint on my clothes than on my canvases. And no, Archie wasn’t picking on me either – he was giving me a gift, and in a way paying me a compliment. His point was that none of us is so good that we should just rest on our laurels or risk being passed over for the sake of mere modesty. Think about the most talented, successful people on the planet – what do they have in common? A publicist.

“Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” That’s a risky strategy when Inferior-Mousetraps-R-Us has a weekly newsletter, a larger sales force, better distribution, and a keynote at the next cheddar cheese conference. No matter how talented you are, no matter how top-notch your team, or how world-beating your business process is, a little self-promotion, a gentle reminder, even a bit of selective bragging can do you a world of good. Think first: think about who you are, how you want to be perceived, how you bring value and can genuinely benefit the customers you serve, but don’t think you’re doing anything wrong by telling people about your skills, experience and successes.

And if you find yourself the target of praise (lavish or otherwise) don’t be the one “who dost protest too much.” Instead, take the advice of another sage, my late grandmother: “Say thank you, and sit down.”

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You are the ambassador of your brand.

This one goes out to all the good folks who are up early in the morning, going to their local chamber of commerce, hitting that networking breakfast, and doing their part to keep the economy going through good old fashioned hustle.  You are the ambassador of your brand. 

When you swap cards at the chamber you are engaged in economic diplomacy and the stakes are high for you and your business.  When you stand up and give your 60, or 45, or 30 second speech at that networking lunch you are in the process of setting policy and expectations for inter-business relations.  Now here’s the rub: you are you AND you are the impression-setter for your company.  You are the window by which your friends, partners, customers, and prospects become acquainted with your brand.  If you are not projecting an image that is consistent with your brand you are creating a disconnect in the minds of the people you meet, yet you must also be authentic to yourself. Of course it is easier when you own the company and you are the one setting the tone for vision, mission and value for both yourself and your enterprise.  but even if you are working for someone else, you are shouldering the responsibility for framing the brand story for the people you interact with – if you are phony, it reflects on the brand, if you are impatient, it reflects on the brand, if you are overly what’s-in-it-for-me, that reflects on the brand.  A brand can be a lot of things, and a person is a whole lot more complex, but you have to find a harmony that fits, that gives people access to you, and through you, to all the great value your company can bring.

What’s your brand’s diplomatic policy?  Try writing down the 3 to 5 most important aspects you want your business contacts to recognize in your brand.  Then write down the 3 to 5 perceptions you want people to have of you. How well do they align?  Ask a trusted friend if this the image you are projecting.  Go over your elevator pitch, your handshake line, your stadium pitch, and see if it serves both you and your brand to meet the criteria you’ve written down.  Keep tweaking and tuning – you’ll know when you’ve found the right balance, because it will both feel good, and will get you the folks you want to connect with: the ones aligned with the value you offer and the working vibe that suits you best.  That’s the best kind of business diplomacy.

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Disambiguate or Die

I first ran into the term “disambiguation” while hanging out with a few speech scientists at a speech technology industry conference. For them, it was serious business. When your product is speech recognition, the subtle phonetic differences between “Austin” and “Boston” can have a huge impact. Usually the fix is easy in theory, but can get dicey in practice. Asking a customer if they mean Texas or Massachusetts seems like the obvious thing to do, unless your customer is from Boston Township, Ohio, or Austin, Colorado. Not to mention that the average caller of a voice system is only going to tolerate a couple of “Did you mean _____?”s before they hang up or mash down so hard on the asterisk that they break a nail.

So the speech techies take disambiguation very seriously, but why should they have all the fun? I’ve never seen ambiguity listed as a desirable attribute for a brand, but clarity on the other hand is desirable. I like the term disambiguation because it implies a process for taking you from ambguity to meaning. It might take a few iterations, however, and you may only get a few tries before your customer hangs up.

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Diet Freskyta is the real thing?

How many products does The Coca-Cola Company offer? Well there’s Coca-Cola, of course, and it doesn’t take long to come up with Diet Coke, and Coke Zero. And if you really think hard, you might think about Caffeine Free Diet Coke, and oh yeah Vanilla Coke, so what maybe 10 or 12 brands?

Would you believe the number is somewhere in the vicinity of 500?

Don’t believe me? Check it out for yourself. So what’s my point? Could you imagine if they tried to cram all those brands onto one billboard? Or on the back of a business card? Despite their vast array of offerings, Coke chooses the radical idea of hanging its hat on only one hook at time, but why follow their example? After all, what do they know about building a brand?

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On the Air

Well it was a great holiday weekend, and I can definitely say that the highlight for me was sitting in as a guest on Connect Grow Profit Radio. CGP Radio is an Internet radio show and podcast syndicated by BlogTalkRadio.com and hosted by Kathy Smart, CEO of SmarterIdeas, Inc. and co-founder of International Businesss Academies.

Kathy and I had a great time talking about branding and the importance of differentiating your business. Whether your business is a scrappy startup or a Fortune 500 company we touch on some of the basics that can help drive your message home. You don’t need a big budget to tap into the power of clarity and reinforcement. We also squeezed in a plug for Glossitope, which makes me happy. Check out the show if you’re interested: Connect Grow Profit Radio: guest David Cohen.

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What is the opposite of "Graceful Degradation?"

Today, you can buy a fairly swanky 22 inch LCD monitor for about $250. You’ll probably be able to get a 30 inch one of superior quality for the same price in less than two years. Goodness only knows how fast your processor will be then, or how much memory you’ll have, but the question is what are we going to do with all those pixels and all that horsepower?

In web and interactive design the term “graceful degradation” gets thrown around when you want to make something, perhaps a little over-the-top for viewers who have the latest and greatest software and equipment, but also want to have something that works reasonably well for those unwashed masses that might be lagging a little behind in their technology consumption. As anyone who has slung a little html can tell you, there are all sorts of hacks and scripts to sniff out browsers versions and to selectively hide and show features. It can be a lot to keep up with, but we are begininning to face a new challenge, and I think the implementation of Safari on the iPhone is the tipping point: our user experience capabilities are starting to get quite good in a wide range of devices – phones, cameras, laptops, desktops, kiosks, etc. and they are all about to get a whole lot better. So we need a new bit of terminology, a new word or phrase coined to capture the practice of designing for a landscape that is tilting toward greater capability, without wallowing in fluff or pointless feature-creep (think “Skip Intro” or “Clippy”). So what’s it going to be? Graceful Upgradation? Elegant Elevation? Intelligent Feature Expansion? Yeah, none of those work for me either, but I’d love to hear what you come up with. )

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    Caitlín Mowbray"I adore your doodles... I swear looking at those bunnies lowers my blood pressure, calms my mind and makes me smarter. Who needs meditation when there are bunnies?"
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