Blog
Humanizing Technology: It Isn’t All About Apple
Humanizing technology is essential, but it doesn’t mean copying everything about Apple. It seems everyone holds up Apple as the perfect brand. Human centric design. Humanized communications. A human touch at every moment. Great products. Great marketing. Great branding. Great success. All good reasons to respect, and even envy, the Apple brand. However, does that mean Apple has a monopoly on the idea of humanizing technology… and the success that comes from doing that? Hardly. But a technology brand doesn’t have to copy everything Apple does (and look like a copycat in the...
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Turn Your Brand Around Through Emotionally Meaningful Behavior
Turn target audience members into hot prospects Turn hot prospects into customers Turn customers into regular users Turn regular users into loyal customers Turn loyal customers into brand advisors Turn brand advisors into brand recruiters Purpose: Do it by embracing a purposeful intent for your brand – a high order idea about how your brand makes life better for individuals, society and/or the planet. Empathy: Do it by taking on an empathetic attitude to all the people vital to your brand’s success – see the world through their eyes, walk a mile in their shoes, come to understand what...
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What Is Your Brand’s Future State?
Why talk about the future state of your brand? Look ahead and dream about what would make your brand a kick-ass success. Now start planning for it. What if you could turn the clock back 5 years? Thinking about the state of your brand and business today, what would you have done to make your brand either stronger today, or more fit for the future it faces? If we had this magical power, we would be able to go back and pull the strings, turn the dials, and change the gears of our complex brand workings. With the power of hindsight, we’d be able to avert many of the business problems that plague...
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Numbers Don’t Lie
Ask any writer or reporter who deals with the real world, and they will tell you that language is not the thing that quickens their hearts. It’s numbers. In a world that’s awash in words, subjectivity, and spin, hard data is the ladder back to dry land. A few revealing numbers can instantly provide a clear context for everything around them, enabling us to understand things better, faster, and more usefully. For example, a lot of people thought it was crazy for Angelina Jolie to get a double mastectomy to prevent cancer. (You can find her announcement here.) But once you get a few relevant...
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Should I Stay Or Should I Go?
We often reach a “stay or go” point in key relationships. It can happen with our partners, our jobs, or even the brands we’ve been using. We go through the process of weighing up the pros and cons of the relationship. We assess what has changed, or not changed as we hoped. We factor in new opportunities, new dreams and new fears. We analyze the gap between what we first imagined this relationship would turn out to be, and how it has actually turned out. We consider the cost to us to “make things right again”. We struggle to balance rationality and sentimentality. We focus on what really...
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The Tales That Bind
It may be hard to find fans of the U.S. military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, but we have learned a few things. One is that tourniquets save lives. For a long time they were exiled from emergency medicine, in both military and civilian life, but now we know that they save lives under the right circumstances. Another surprising life-saving technique is telling stories. When people in military units share a backstory, they trust each other more and do more to keep each other safe and successful. The military tested this in its schools and training camps after learning from researchers...
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Why Every CEO Should Pursue a “Purpose Beyond Profit”
It’s textbook management practice to formalize a company’s “mission, vision, and values.” And while these are important steps in helping form a direction and way of being for a company, many CEOs are nonetheless challenged with a litany of business issues: Unengaged employees An inability to attract the new talent needed Customer defection Lack of marketplace differentiation Dissatisfied shareholders This list goes on and on, doesn’t it? Behind each of these business challenges is a big question: How can my business matter more to people? When your business...
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Why Recruits Say, “No Thanks”
I came across an interesting article on recruiter.com the other day entitled, “7 reasons I’ll turn down a job after interviewing with you”. Two caught my eye: 1. You’re too negative – If you’re bad-mouthing the company, other employees, your workload, or even yourself, then chances are slim that I’ll come on board as your newest employee. Why? Because negativity is toxic. It tells me that morale is low and that you don’t enjoy your job. I recognize it’s possible that you’re just having a bad day, but it’s just too big of a risk to take. 5. You don’t tell me...
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Five Sustainability Report Formats
The pros and cons of five sustainability report formats What format will your corporate sustainability report (CSR) take? Determining how to present the final product is one of the key decisions to make as you develop the strategy and project plan for a CSR. The format not only has budget and timeline implications, but it also impacts the way your report is organized and written. For example, writing for the web requires a very different approach than a long-form printed copy. It wasn’t too long ago that most companies simply prepared printed documents and/or a downloadable PDF of the same...
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The Power of Being Stubborn Around a Single “Beacon” Idea
George Tannenbaum is a noted advertising copywriter and prolific blogger. In his wry, and often acerbic way, George chronicles the tension of being a creative thinker in the world of business. In a post, he recounted the experience of being at a client’s annual shoot for a celebrity TV spot. Anxiety is the king of such events, and George talks about the problem of working with inexperienced and politically-driven executives who do nothing but worry and create chaos. He offers this advice to people who want to remain cool, collected, and purposeful in such an environment: “Never...
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Startups, Change the Conversation With Your Engineering Team
It’s an all too familiar startup sight. Your technical co-founder and dev team have their eyes glued to screens of scrolling code as their fingers fly across keyboards and music blasts through their earbuds. They are driving hard toward the launch date, losing themselves in their work and consuming Red Bull like there’s no tomorrow. Time for a breath of fresh air. Writing on Quora, Nikos Moraitakis, Founder & CEO of WorkableHR.com, sets the following as one of ten helpful tasks non-technical co-founders should undertake: “Nurture good spirit, keep everyone...
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Emotional is Not Necessarily Emotive
If you haven’t already heard the buzz about the new Johnson & Johnson ad campaign, you will. And after May 10, it will find its way to a page or screen near you. Thirty million bucks buys a lot of exposure. What caught our attention is the emotive premise of the campaign, which is called “For All You Love.” With a name like that, you can guess it’s going straight for your heartstrings. The teaser image on the J&J home page suggests we’ll see lots of loving parents applying Band-Aids® and baby soap. This is not just because the company wants to play off how much we love our kids. It’s...
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How Leading Companies are Winning Through Meaningful Brand Strategies: The Employee’s Perspective
According to Gallup’s 2013 State of the American Workplace study, “in 2010, 28% of American workers were engaged.
By the end of 2012, as the U.S. inched toward a modest recovery, that number increased slightly to 30%, matching the
all-time high since Gallup began tracking the employee engagement levels of the U.S. working population in 2000.” “These latest findings indicate that 70% of American workers are ‘not engaged’ or ‘actively disengaged’ and are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be productive. Currently, 52% of workers are not engaged, and worse,...
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Your People Will Make Your Brand Meaningful (If They Believe in You)
There are many “tangible” brand moments that are under direct control of a brand (the lobby people enter, the ad campaign they see, the packaging on the product they open, etc.). However, there are also many “intangible” moments that play an important part in defining the success of a brand. These are moments when people of the brand interact with other employees, customers, partners, suppliers, distributor, investors, community leaders, and so on. Behind every great brand there are great people talking with important people. When a brand seeks to move toward greater...
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Social Business Driven by Meaning
Stowe Boyd is a researcher, speaker and writer working principally on social tools and their impact on media, business and society. Back in 2012 he told delegates at the Meaning 2012 Conference in the UK that we are entering the age of “Post-normal Business”. For Boyd, “Postnormal Business” results from a series of fundamental shifts for business: “’Leadership’ has changed when a decentralized group of people can take down a government. ‘The Value Chain’ has changed when the customer is no longer just the ‘buyer’ but also a...
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