Branding and Emotions
As reviewed online by Ivan Misner,”…when you know how to use design as a complete strategy, starting with the ideal
Book cover
customer experience and then building an internal supply chain to deliver in a way that exceeds expectations, you’ll create products, services and experiences that truly matter to your customers’ lives–and your business will thrive. However, the reality is that few companies know how to create great design, and even fewer know how to implement a design strategy that will secure enduring success.”
Prompts
- Help your clients explore how their product, service or brand forges an emotional connection with their customers.
- Give a case study of a client that executed a brand turnaround strategy with your help.
- Propose to cover topics from this book in your next client check-in.
Employee Free Choice Act: Pro & Con
Services Businesses
In a report released by the Economic Policy Institute the much debated Employee Free Choice Act, which adversaries say will kill jobs by forcing more employers out of business, found neither historical data or existing credible research, to back the claim.
In Still Open for Business, John DiNardo compares data on business failures among unionized and similar nonunion firms and concludes that unionized businesses are no more likely than nonunion ones to fail.
Writing Prompts
- After reading the report, you might share the findings with your employees in a newsletter.
- Has your firm’s trade association taken a stand on the Employee Free Choice Act? Explain your stand and how it differs or agrees with this report or the trade association.
- If passed, how will this legislation affect the way you do business? Will it change pricing or terms? Employee benefits? Recruiting and retention efforts?
Cap-and-Trade Rules
As reported in The Atlantic Monthly 3/27/09
EPA could draft a rule on carbon dioxide that contains language allowing it to be superseded by Congress when it
Keeping it Green
passes a cap-and-trade system or an outright tax on carbon emissions.
EPA would therefore be able to regulate CO2 without delay; if Congress failed to act, the EPA rule would stay in effect. The regulations could be written in a way that they tighten over time, thereby giving Congress (and industry) a political and economic incentive to supercede them. If Congress doesn’t act on climate change by, say, December of 2009, the Obama administration will face significant international pressure at Copenhagen to show its work. And at that point, the administration may well threaten to ask EPA to draft a rule, which could spur Congress into acting in 2010.
Writing Prompts
- How will this story outcome affect your customers?
- What advice do you have for clients who’ll be affected?
- Are you engaged in the political process? To what end? Do you want specific input from clients?
- What experience do you have with changing regulations that will inform how you’ll react to changes in this story?
- Prove you’ve got the expertise to handle anything that comes down the political/regulatory pipeline by citing case studies of your work.
G20 and the Greenback
EU leaders confer
This week’s meeting of the G20 will certainly address economic reform. But will it address the idea of replacing the dollar as the reserve currency?
If Nobel-prize winning economist Joseph Stiglitz had his way a global reserve system would be created.
Writing Prompts
- How does the current world currency situation affect your company and your clientele?
- What changes do you recommend to your clients’ holdings in light of today’s political-economic churn?
- If you were involved with currency trading or international business at the time that the EU adopted the Euro, you might reflect on that time and bring forward lessons applicable today.
- Do you or your company do business in China or Russia? These countries are advancing the idea of switching from the greenback.
- How will decisions made by the G20 affect mortgages in the US?
Trend This!
Get to know your farmer
Ah, a dose of good news about the food chain. Today’s NYT reports on a mass food producer offering up a big dose of customer intimacy and grower accountability.
Josh Dorf, who owns the Stone-Buhr flour brand, runs FindtheFarmer, which enables buyers to enter a code from their bag of flour and find the organic family farmers who produced it.
While the thrust of the NYT story was how even mass producers can behave as locals, it resonated with me as a former 4-H member whose grandparents farmed. Spending most weekends on the farm taught me the interconnectedness of all things. I didn’t have to learn about environmental cause and effect from a book; I saw it in the ebb and flow of daily life.
While I did my share of stupid things as a kid, spending so much time in nature kept me out of a lot of the trouble that my school peers fell into for lack of something better to do. I can think of no better way to grow up.
As I’ve written here before, there must be ways for us to blend the best of old and new capitalism. Great start, Mr. Dorf.
How about your business operation? How can you differentiate yourself from the competition using intimacy and accountability? Please post your best practices here.
Smelling your Content
According to Dr. John Medina, “Smell is unusually effective at evoking memory. If you’re tested on the details of a movie while the smell of popcorn is wafted into the air, you’ll remember 10-50% more.”
Book by BY LYALL WATSON
Makes you rethink the food and beverages you offer at presentations, doesn’t it?
And how about doing reconnaissance on the meeting room itself? Giving a presentation in a stinky room might associate you with “stinky” content.
That said, kicking the sales team in the pants while they whiff the cafeteria’s burnt offerings might subliminally reinforce your point to get going or get burned.
But before you break out the room freshener, do some research. Men and women prefer different smells and certain smells perk us up while others have a sedating effect.
The Ten-Minute Window
DR. JOHN J. MEDINA is a developmental molecular biologist focused on the genes involved in human brain development and the genetics of psychiatric disorders.
Stay with me.
He also runs a site and authored a book entitled “Brain Rules” in which he expounds upon “12 rules for surviving and thriving at work, home and school.”
Medina’s Rule #4 says “We don’t pay attention to boring things.”
Today’s blog focus, presentations.
Thousands of cartoons
Since presentations (and their presenters) are too often boring, we don’t pay attention to them — sometimes to our detriment. Medina shows that every ten minutes or so our attention flags and we need a little shot of something to continue paying attention. He says this little shot should be ” emotionally relevant.”
Consider the occasional New Yorker cartoon. For $20 each, you can insert a witty and apropos cartoon into your deck and keep your group’s attention. Plus that, you’ll look urbane and well-read.
Merging Postal and Email Addresses
Stop or go on email appending?
OK, you have a file of your customers’ physical addresses and you want to enjoy the efficiencies and effectiveness of email marketing to them. How?
You could engage a database company to match postal records to the email records in their database. When a “match” is found the database company will add that record (with the new email address) to what’s called an “append” file.
They usually send a “welcome” email to the entire append file complete with an opt-out only link and then send the file back to you.
Sounds great, eh? A dream come true.
Maybe not. The file has NOT been properly opted-into and could cause serious delivery problems for you.
If you decide to go that route, Ryan Deutsch of StrongMail Systems offers this advice:
1. Only append active customer files. Do not append inactive or “stale” customer files. These result in poor match rates and are riskier than active customer files. Furthermore, it is critical that these customers pass the PBR (Prior Business Relationship) test. As a general rule, be sure that the customer has purchased and/or interacted with your organization in the last 12 months. If you append bad data you will…destroy your deliverability.
2. Build an append-specific communication strategy. You should not treat your appended email recipients the same way you treat subscribers that have been on your file for months and years. First, make sure you isolate your append mailings from your core programs. While I believe opt-out appends can deliver value to a marketer, we must accept that this file IS riskier than the house file. As a result, keeping it separate limits any negative impact the program will have on your existing email campaigns. Second, develop a series of communications that repurpose email content for the appended addresses, and be sure to place opt-out front and center and continually remind recipients how they ended up on the email list. Be transparent; your customers will appreciate it.
3. Build rules to migrate append addresses to your house file over time. As time goes by, proactively migrate appended addresses into your house file. Migration should be based on specific recipient activity (clicks, purchases, etc.) Companies can build these rules to apply to their unique business models.
Discussion on Ryan’s blog post includes thumbs up and down. Whatever your choice, deliver quality content to recipients and they’re less likely to unsubscribe or hit the “spam” button.
Tag Cloud and Editorial Calendar
Illustration courtesy of Wikopedia
This morning I decided to manage my tag cloud. The tag cloud is a whole-brained way to look at the things you’re blogging about. It reflects your priorities.
Satisfying the left brain are the words themselves; feeding the right brain are the relative sizes and intensities of each word to the others, letting you know at a glance which topics get more attention by the blogger.
To the left is a good example of a web cloud with the dominant theme of Web 2.0. Surrounding it are first order tags for Convergence, Design, Participation, Usability, Economy, Remixability and Standardization, with a variety of other topics in second and third order.
Were my posts properly and fully tagged? No. Did the topics reflect my priorities? No. I revised my editorial calendar.
Look out for more on using case studies and whole brained communications.
Technorati the Wordsmith
Doing some site maintenance this morning including a Technorati update. Needed to upload a picture. Cracked up
Thumbs up, Technorati copy writers
when I read this:
Tip: Please do us a favor and upload a photo that does not show your very special but also very private parts. When you do that, we have to take time away from making our website faster and better to go find your profile and hide it, and that’s bad for you and us. Thanks for helping!
Not to sound elderly, but would this admonition have been necessary a short ten years ago?
