I’m pretty much sick and tired of rhetoric from gurus telling companies they need to be WOWing their customers. The fact is most struggle just to satisfy them and until you can do that, WOWing them may as well be Mars. To my mind, there aren’t many more dangerous concepts floating...
I am often asked, “What’s the one thing I can do?” My return question is most usually, “To do what?” Because it depends. Sometimes there is one thing. More usually there are a series of one things. But we seem to be hard-wired in organisations to look for a silver bullet....
An article on 24/7 Wall Street this past week outlined the “Nine Most Damaged Brands in America“. It’s nice to see the media starting to acknowledge that an organisation will be impacted when they don’t keep their promises. “The brands on this damaged brand list often rose based on lofty claims, and...
I’ve sworn off using the term “brand” for a month. Actually I tweeted my intention last week so in reality I’ve been doing it for nearly a week now. When the word is attached to everything that moves it’s easy to lose sight of what we are actually trying to say...
There is a common misconception that my name is my brand, but in reality while your name is the face of your brand, one of the points of connection with it, your brand is something else. As I talked about last week – choosing a name that is representative of who...
Too often people try and frame “brand values” as if they are somehow different from the other values of the organisation. They aren’t. Your values are your values. Their truth shows up in your actions and decisions more clearly than in any written statement. This week I came across a great...
Very little consumes and perplexes organisations more than the question of customer service. This is the organisational issue, brand issue and people issue that no company can afford to ignore. In today’s environment of sliver-thin margins of differentiation, customer service has quite possibly never been more important – so why...
By way of full disclosure: I work with people to help them understand and uncover things that make up their personal brands. But where I draw a rather firm line is telling people what their jobs should be. Despite my meagre hold out, my addition to that sphere will not be...
There is a common misconception that my name is my brand, but in reality while your name is the face of your brand, one of the points of connection with it, your brand is something else. As I talked about last week – choosing a name that is representative of who...
It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood,...