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How seemingly senseless acts make life worth living
The value of rituals in life… and in commerce. Carrie walked into her mother’s home to find her sitting on the floor, surrounded by relatives and friends. She was wailing after having just buried her son. Nobody seemed to be able to offer any consolation—in fact, any attempt had her cry harder. “Why don’t you…
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Has Your Business Language Lost its Commercial Roots?
When I came across “in my neck of the woods” in Richard Brautigan's The Revenge of the Lawn, I was intrigued. Do woods have necks? I filed the expression right next to “being on top of things.” This evoked images of a person sitting on the very top of a pile of stuff. At…
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Getting Closer to the End Product: Return on Quality
“'The content farms' model is going away in favor of quality,” says Paulina Karpis. “Future media will be more distribution of a well-made piece of content.” Karpis is co-founder of BrunchWork, a co-learning model of education. She was speaking on a panel at a Reuters event on marketing and customer experience. My tweet elicited a…
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What can a Company do to Deliver Experiences and Satisfaction?
The best companies are defined by priorities, not bound by capabilities. Horace Dediu uses Apple as a lens to analyze business strategy#: Apple, since its inception, has always been oriented around its customers, not its products. The questions asked by management are “what can the company do to deliver experiences and satisfaction” rather than “what…
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Authenticity, it’s Your Call.
We may not know what's real today, but we surely know how to spot a fake – the result of a mediated, manipulated, and focus-group-tested effort. Take for example customer conversations. So much work goes into cramming all sorts of meaning into scripts, that at the time of delivery they sounds hollow and insincere,…
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Customer Lifetime Value
There's a reason why you've been on hold with customer service for an hour says the Wall Street Journal, that company may have decided you're not profitable. It's one of the stories I shared in the most recent Learning Habit issue. Algorithms determine Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by keeping a tally of how much…
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The Best Story with the Most Impact
Brand is an interesting concept for many organizations, especially in the digital era. It's helpful to define what you do and to understand how clients and customers experience your product and service. In some cases, it can help a company reconnect with purpose, or define a new one. Having a brand strategy helps move…
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Today in Branding: ConvertKit Reconverts and Airbnb Logo Stays
On July 1, 2018 ConvertKit announced a new company name and logo to its users. The announcement of the rebrand to Seva wad made at their annual conference. It took only a few days for conversations about the cultural and religious implications of the word to reach scale. it was only then that founder…
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You say Tomato, I say Tomato… When Language is the Enemy
Things have come to a pretty passOur romance is growing flat,For you like this and the otherWhile I go for this and that… Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong taught us a thing or two about the subtle disconnects that can kill relationships. All's fair in love and war goes the saying. Lovers that want…
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What Brands can Learn from How Entrepreneurs Use Social Media
The handicap many established brands have is that they have a product or line of products they need to market ― that's often enough to be wired in thinking about social media as channels, rather than tools. Entrepreneurs don't have those constraints. Because they're often thinking only about a problem. Serial entrepreneurs know…