No one cares what your name is. Well, perhaps your family and close friends might have a thought or two — but out in the world at large, nope. Some 25 years ago I decided to work for myself, and immediately became fixated on what the name of my business should be....
After I wrote about personal brand a few weeks ago, I received an email asking me to extend that thinking to include how to find your message. Finding a clear and straightforward way to talk about what you do and care about is hard. And today, a lot of people have more...
Do you think about your customers as consumers, users or purchasers? According to a recent article in Harvard Business Review, the underlying mindset marks you as either a “legacy” or a “newcomer” brand. With apologies for the quotation marks, let’s just say older or newer organisations. In the article is a sentence tying itself...
Describing what you care about without descending into hyperbole is hard because fear sits underneath the words people use. Fear that my thing is not good enough, sexy enough, bold enough, game-changing enough. And we’re good at using language to mask our fear. Hype is subtle at first. Just give the...
As more of our interactions become digital, the desire to translate them into a relationship is creating a faux familiarity that bugs me. Acknowledge me, yes, but too often it slips over the line into something less appropriate. Tone is a tricky thing, and the gap between formal and familiar can...
Nearly five years ago (time does indeed fly), I wrote an article headlined “Everyone is not your customer”. Since then I find myself making that same point at least once a month. So it appears some things do bear repeating. Everyone is not your customer. I run an SME too, so I...
The idea that you can change a brand by changing a name and logo returned to the headlines last week (did it ever really go away?), with the ‘Big Australian’, BHP, the latest company to peddle the myth, dropping the Billiton and updating its logo. The new veneer makes for a...
Just being different is all a bit ho-hum. Different isn’t even all that hard. Change a couple of things, and you’re different. Me being in this location, and you being in that location means you have something that makes you different. My prices are low, and your prices are high. Yep, different....
“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...
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...