Unlock the Magic in Your Story Now
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Get the Free 20 questions to Ask Before Launching Your Idea workbook when you sign up for occasional updates.
Great Marketing Is Baked In Not Sprinkled On
The most common misconception in business is that you should work on your idea now, and add marketing later…. when you’re done.
Marketing is not just the icing on the cake, or the sprinkles on the top.
Marketing is the whole cake.
The quality of flour you use. The lightness of touch of the baker. The texture as it’s cut.
The tastiest icing, or most colourful sprinkles in the world won’t save a badly baked cake.
Bake your marketing into your business, products and services.
Don’t just sprinkle it on at the end.
Image by Cat Edens.
Share this article
Adapting Or Shaping
filed in Entrepreneurship, Marketing, Strategy
Are you adapting to the current environment, or shaping what’s to come?Stand Out By Telling A Better Brand Story
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
The summer of 1980 was a terrible time to own a hair salon on Sydney’s Queen Street. The mile long suburban street had over twenty salons to choose from, and haircuts that were once $20, had been steadily knocked down a dollar at a time by each salon in turn.
The first salon to discount started doing cuts for $19, and very quickly every salon on the street was advertising $12 haircuts just to compete and stay open.
The situation was desperate, and many businesses were going to the wall for want of a better solution. Apart from one smart salon owner who created a big sign to put in his window which simply read:
We Fix $12 haircuts.
You don’t have to tell the same story as everyone else. You actually get to choose.
Image by Michael McCullough.
Share this article
What Would You Do?
filed in Worldview
My little brother Johnny and I were born just 18 months apart.
When he was little he was dubbed ‘a typical boy’ by his teachers. I think that was teacher-code for “school is not for this one”. And in truth it wasn’t from day one. On his first day he cried so hard, and made such a fuss, that my mortified mother took him home for a whole year before bringing him back again!
He left school early without any ‘pieces of paper’ and got a job in a supermarket. He lit up the lives of elderly ladies who came shopping for one item a day because they were lonely. He didn’t need a piece of paper to know how to make people matter.
It was his birthday yesterday, but he wasn’t here to celebrate it. He died when he was just 31 years old, with so many dreams left inside him.
I look at my twenty year old son today and wonder what Johnny would have done at that age if he’d known that he had just ten years left.
Just ten years… it could so easily have been ten days, or ten minutes.
What would you do?
What will you do today?
Don’t waste a second.
Image by Andrew Lewin.
Share this article
Business Would Be Great If It Weren’t For The Customers
There was no doubt that I could have chosen a better time to go shopping for special flowers, than first thing on Saturday morning in early Spring. The lone florist reluctantly came out from the back room to ask how she could help, then let out a sigh when she realised it wasn’t going to be quick. I hoped that the tiny white roses would be the first thing my dear friend Pen would see when she came back from having heart surgery. This was important.
The florist tutted at my indecision and hesitated to show me the vases she might use. Of course I understood that she was “busy getting orders ready for later that day”. She wanted me to care about her emergency, while she neglected mine.
To succeed in delighting your customers you actually have to step out of your shoes and into theirs. You must see the world through their eyes from the opposite side of the counter.
It’s not always easy, but the businesses that optimise for empathy are magnetic. Less push and more pull.
Whose shoes are you standing in?
Image by Luca Pedrotti.
Share this article
What The Waitress Remembered
My name.
To look me in the eye.
How I like my coffee.
That her smile could brighten someone’s day.
To make a difference.
That giving a damn is seriously underrated.
To hope to see me tomorrow.
Not to hide behind the rules.
To love her job.
That what she does every day matters.
Image by Cobalt123
Share this article
Give Them A Reason
Half of the products in your pantry now have a ‘like us on Facebook’ icon on the label. Why should you like a brand of mass produced honey on Facebook? Why does the brand manager think you should care?
Marketing is about doing great work that gets noticed. It’s about giving people a reason to care. It takes time, thought and a deep understanding of who you want to serve and how you want to make a difference. Yet we look for shortcuts. We use tactics to make people notice before creating real value. We forget to help customers to understand and experience, before selfishly telling them what to do.
Working hard to make people say your work is great,
is not the same as doing great work.
We spend so much of our energy here. Crafting the tweetable headlines. Writing press releases to help us get noticed. Trying to get on the radar of influencers. Creating print advertising campaigns. Deep discounting and on and on, when what actually works is doing the thing that people want to talk about.
When you do something that makes a difference you won’t have to work so hard to persuade people to notice or to talk about it.
Don’t just ask your customers to care about you. Give them a reason.
Image by Badjonni.
Share this article
Make Your Idea Matter
filed in Entrepreneurship, Storytelling, Strategy
Make Your Idea Matter is finally available to buy on Amazon. Thanks to the people who bought the book yesterday it bagged a Top 3 spot on the Amazon Bestsellers list overnight!
It’s taken most of our Australian winter (or your summer), to simply get the book edited, formatted, designed and ready for publication. We’ve even completely redesigned the cover in the last three weeks. I love what Reese has done with it!
On Monday I published a post about the the subtle difference between thinking about how people feel, versus making people do. If I wanted to market this book with tactics I’d be offering you a carrot so that you’d go out and buy it. Since I’m not big on writing ‘squeeze pages’ with yellow highlighter, and I’m all about story I’ve been thinking a lot more about how you feel, than I have about making you do.
The path to success is littered with great ideas, poorly marketed, don’t let yours be one of them.
I hope that you’ll buy Make Your Idea Matter and begin using it today, to help you take your ideas out there into the world and make them fly. I hope you’ll use it to help your business stand out with a better story. I hope you’ll share it with ideas people, entrepreneurs and business owners that you care about who you know could use it too. I also hope you’ll tell us how it’s helped you in the reviews section on Amazon.com.
Lastly, without readers there would be no writers.
Thanks for making me care enough to show up every day.
Image by Sian Richardson.
Share this article
Thinking About How People Feel Vs Making People Do
filed in Marketing, Storytelling, Strategy
Every one of us is a marketer.
We spend our days persuading people to do what we want them to do.
“Buy now.” “Click here.” “Please retweet.” “Only 5 4 left.” “Don’t drink and drive.” “Eat your greens and you’ll grow big and strong.”
My friend Mark and his wife Cindy own and run a tiny bakery. If four whole wheat buns in a batch of two dozen don’t rise they look each other in the eye and ask, “How will we feel if someone takes these home?” And then they simply don’t sell those four buns. Mark and Cindy are in it for the long haul. Yes, they have to balance the books at the end of the month, but they don’t make that happen by putting all of their energy into persuading people to do something.
They spend their days wondering how what they do can make a difference, and how it will make their customers feel.
You could spend your time working out how to make people act in the moment. Or you could think about how you would like to make them feel in the long run.
Image by Quan.
Share this article
Hiding Behind The Truth
I walked into the empty store clutching my receipt and the faulty garment. After one wear and one delicate wash several holes had appeared out of nowhere in the fabric. My ten-day-since-purchase window had expired so I couldn’t get a refund but I was happy to take store credit.
The manager examined the holes. She told me this had never happened before and explained that she’d have to send my shirt to head office over east (a five hour flight away), to confirm that the fault was ‘genuine’. She spent time carefully putting tape over the holes (so that head office could immediately see the problem). She filled out forms. Took my phone number and gave me a receipt. If my complaint was ‘genuine’ I would get a call within a week to confirm my store credit and I could go back and redeem it.
Here in Australia sales in department stores tumbled by 10% last month, one of the contributing factors is the rise in online shopping. Big retailers are scratching their heads wondering how to get shoppers back through their doors and giving deeper discounts every day. And yet they create senseless rules and company policies to squeeze all of the joy out of the shopping experience for the few remaining customers they have left.
Yes you can protect your profits by giving your employees rules and manuals and policies, the truth that they can hide behind. But before you do, think about how that truth makes the customers you have left feel.
If bricks and mortar retailers can’t delight customers by empowering great staff to deliver outstanding service, what advantage do they have left?
Image by Jason Pier.