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Just Talk Like People Talk
Purpose is easy to over complicate. Organizations spend thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours creating purpose statements full of expensive, opaque, altruistic, exaggerated jumbles of corporate buzzwords that, in the end, mean nothing and inspire nobody. When the reality is, purpose is best stated when it’s simple, specific and meaningful to the people who matter most. That’s enough. We make our clients look like heroes. We bring fun…
What Your Company Outsourced Its Policies?
Most company policies coincidentally favor the company. Instead of respecting customers, they’re more about making excuses, creating insurance, inhibiting creativity, controlling costs, avoiding accountability, building deniability, protecting executive egos, appeasing shareholders and covering corporate asses. But what if, once a year, companies held an open forum for customers to submit ideas for new company policies? What if, instead of operating solely inside their own heads, organizations let the people…
Client Service? Try a Little Amnesia
If you can help the client forget she’s a client, everybody wins. Try a few of these. Instead of applying your rigid methodology, just sit down, look people in the eye ask them what they want to do, and what would make them happy. Instead of bludgeoning people with facts and theories, just talk like people talk, listen as loudly as you can, and remember that they’re human just…
What Do You Make People Believe In Again?
The problem is, they did not come away believers. When your customers finally finish the transaction, sign off, shut down, wrap up, peace out, pay the check, walk out the door and go back to their busy lives, here’s powerful question worth asking: What did the experience you offer make people believe in again? What did your company restore people’s faith in? What idea, that customers were convinced was…
Work Without Clarity, Isn’t
John Jantsch is a marketing consultant, speaker, author, dad, yogi, guitarist and good friend of mine. The ideas in this post are drawn from his most recent book, The Commitment Engine. * * * * Strategy, purpose, and passion are integral to success, but none of them really matter without clarity. Clarity is the strong and unwavering sense that our daily choices are grounded in an authentic sense…
What Does Your Brand Take Out of the Equation for Customers?
Smart companies take something out of the equation for people. Not immeasurable elements like friction, time, energy, work, risk, taboo, fear, embarrassment, inconvenience, complexity, stress, guesswork, legwork, hassle, frustration, pain and mystery. They actually delete something measurable, visible and tangible. Something annoying and big enough that customers wouldn’t just notice if it were gone, but would be delighted to find out it’s gone, excited to tell people it’s gone,…
Create Social Meaning Above and Beyond Your Product
Interaction is the agent of human decision. If someone decides to pay attention to, press the like button for, buy something from, become a follower of, or tell others about your brand, it’s likely because of an interaction they had with another human being. Namely, not you. Real marketing isn’t about what you do to people, it’s about what you enable people to do each other. It’s about creating…
Make Your Product a Stage for Customers to Stand On
It’s not a product, it’s a platform. When your brand builds something that makes people famous, recognized and part of something cool that matters to them, they will love you forever. Threadless is the perfect example. They reward their designers with significant financial prizes, public kudos and coveted community awards. And as a result, their users are the most engaged in the world, their shirts are the most amazing…
Skyrocket the Number of People Aching to Stay
The freemium model is finally working. Give the product away to your tribe for free, let them use it until they’re blue in the face, then, once they realize the value of the product – and the increasingly important role it plays in their lives – you make money via micro transactions along the way like upgrades, paid subscriptions, cheat codes, level walkthoughs, feature unlocks, removing ad content, premium…
The Art of Perspective, Part 3
Information used to have a supply and demand issue. But now that it’s free, ubiquitous and accessible, its value has plummeted. If you’re a generalist, your competitors are Google and Wikipedia. If you want move people’s eyebrows and catapult their thinking into profitable new directions, your job is to deliver perspective. Here are my latest examples. Don’t forget to read part two! Las Vegas wasn’t built on winners. Are…
