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Recent Posts
When the Founder Is the Rainmaker: How to Scale Without Losing the Spark
In many founder-led businesses, the founder isn’t just the leader—they’re also the best (and often only) rainmaker. They land the big deals. They have the trusted relationships. They know the pitch inside and out because they are the pitch.
It works—until it doesn’t.
As the business grows, this model creates a bottleneck. Every new opportunity depends on one and only person. And it’s the same person every time. But there’s a downside. When that person is also responsible for running the business, mentoring the team, and shaping the vision, something eventually gives.
Position Your Brand: Three Questions to Power Growth & Profit
Wed, May 11, 2016 — In Step 1, we began paving our road to a winning brand strategy with the basics. We determined that in order to win in a competitive consumer marketplace, we must first establish an emotional connection with our target audience. We also decided that remaining focused on emotional motivators is the key to the development of that critical connection. It’s time, now, to make sure we are winning with our “head,” as well as our “heart.” For the second step in our quest, we’ll don our lab coats and, utilizing the data from our emotional motivators and target audience surveys, we’ll now engage our sales and marketing teams to develop our company’s positioning statement and brand promise. If we can nail this critical “statement of purpose,” we’ll effectively stand out from our rivals and drive our company forward in the process.
The Marketing Power of Three
Tue, May 10, 2016 — Variety may be the spice of life, but having too many choices turns people away. Our brains have evolved so that we perceive three main things about options presented to us, and the rest gets chucked aside. Give us only two choices, we feel torn. Give us four, we’re confused. Give us three, we pick one easily. Curious, isn't it? When we write about things, talk about things, look at things, we instinctively seek out three options. It's pleasant, this power of three. We don't feel forced to choose between two things and it doesn't feel overwhelming. It feels just right.
Positioning Your Brand to Make an Emotional Connection
Fri, Apr 29, 2016 — According to an old adage, it is implored that we of the human species should “help yourself before you help others.” While this strategy is particularly important in oxygen-depleted aircraft cabin emergencies and personal matters (but was not great for people like Bernie Madoff), it also represents the foundation of modern marketing strategy.
Branding Like A Boss: How to Leave Your Mark
Wed, Apr 13, 2016 — Pity the CEO who has the misfortune of trying to build a corporate brand in the modern era. You see, way back in ancient times, when slow connection speeds had more to do with your supply ship being robbed by pirates; and broadcast advertisements were limited by the decibel levels of the hawker’s voice, branding was quite simple. A couple of strokes with a paintbrush or the sizzle of a hot iron was all that was needed to denote the origin of the goods.
New Challenger Brand Tees Off with Hilarious Video
Thu, Apr 7, 2016 — As they say, “Dumb as a fox.” Attitudinally provocative “Challenger” brands have long been around for decades using contrarian positioning (The UNCOLA!) to separate them from the more normative incumbent brands in a given category. But in recent years with disruption strategy almost becoming the expected method of launching every new product, we seem to see more brands becoming the champions for disaffected consumer segments by promising a substantially better product or deal and by attacking the category leader with advertising featuring a loud, irreverent or downright outrageous brand persona. More or less censorship free online media have also opened the door to the use of profanity and lowbrow bathroom humor by some Challenger brands to create even greater juxtaposition between the new upstarts and the brands they mean to steal share from.
Creating a Logo 101
Tue, Apr 5, 2016 — Branding began with cattle during the Industrial Revolution. The more goods people produced, the more they needed a simple way to identify ownership. If you knew that John Smith had the best cows in the village, how could you find his cuts at the city butcher? How to know which cow was which, who it belonged to, how it was raised? People started branding cows with paint or pine tar or, yikes, hot iron. Perhaps not a cheery picture, but the most memorable logos of today could be easily converted to a traditional cow brand. Nike. Target. NBC. McDonalds. Playboy. What do all of them have in common? They are very simple and they use primary colors.
What Nemo Knows About Organizational Success: Six Steps to Mastering the Power of Team Alignment
Mon, Apr 4, 2016 — I keep thinking about the pivotal scene in Finding Nemo when the school of fish is caught in a big, menacing net. Nemo takes the helm, shouts “Swim down!” and the combined downward force of the school detaches the net from the ship. Because of Nemo’s quick thinking, and the school’s trust in his plan, they’re able to escape out of the net to fish freedom. If just a few of his schoolmates had traveled upward or sideways – they’d be fish sticks.
Product > Market Alignment: The True Sign of a Startup Unicorn?
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 — For those of us knee-deep in the startup world, we’re inundated by Unicorn noise – first their rise and more recently their fall (or, at least their right-sizing). Any number of factors have played into this trajectory: from FOMO venture capital activity that drove unsustainable valuations, to startup growth hacking techniques that indicate initial hyper-scaling, but often run out of steam - exposing the startup’s gap between product and promise.
Your Brand Promise RX: The Keys to Delivering an Amazing Customer Experience
Mon, Mar 21, 2016 — In late December, a young mother with a cranky infant in tow boarded a Southwest Airlines flight headed for Islip, New York. It was her son’s first-ever trip, and the plane ride home was the only time he’d been awake on an airplane. As soon as they boarded, a confident, caring flight attendant scooped up the anxious mother and baby, carried their bags, helped them find an aisle with an empty seat, and even cooed the little boy in her arms during the flight.