It’s been quite the few weeks for businesses and unhappy customers. But today my blog isn’t for them or any other businesses. It’s for all the customers out there. In other words all of us, because we’re all customers of something. From lawsuits about mice in hems to burger joints getting into altercations over missing...
“It isn’t different enough?” To which my next question is “different from whom and why do you care?” Because a customer doesn’t care if you’re different. What they do care about is whether you can solve their problem – whatever that may be. I often refer to differentiation as a myth. In...
This week I’m handing over my blog to the wonderful Nancy Hellmrich (@getnance). A bit over 15 years ago when I was looking for a writer to work with, a colleague said, “oh, you have to meet Nance” and I’ve been forever grateful. We all need people around us who...
It takes courage to tell the other story – the one where things didn’t go as planned – and to share the hard lessons you’ve learned with others. A few months ago I received an email from Luke Taylor with just that kind of story about his company TPC. I...
Over the years I’ve seen organisation after organisation tie themselves up in knots over words. In absence of a genuine understanding of what they want to say, messages are subjected to endless wordsmithing, copy by consensus and all manner of other assaults on language and meaning. From purpose statements, to core...
Purpose and positioning serve two very different functions for your organisation. It’s important that you don’t mix them up. In the process of finding your purpose and getting to a mix of breadth, clarity and inspiration, it’s very easy to find yourself in positioning territory. Knowing how and why they are...
The old “what’s best practice” chestnut has been rearing its ugly head a lot lately. I get it, in the absence of any idea of how something could be done, looking at what others who are successful are doing can seem like a pretty good place to start. The key...
“Spinoza knew that all things long to persist in their being; the stone eternally wants to be a stone and the tiger a tiger.” Captured in this quote from Jorge Luis Borges is the part of a person’s brand that to often remains unexplored. Who am I and what do I truly care...
Sometimes the deep work and everyday actions and decisions needed to build a brand can feel like a modern day equivalent of the Gordian Knot. The origins of the term come from the time of Alexander the Great in 333 B.C. and one of the earliest uses in modern language was by...
When a word is as familiar as “promise” it’s easy to think we know all there is to know about what it is and how it works. The dictionary defines it as “a declaration that something will or will not be done”, and “an express assurance on which expectation is...