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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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Stereotypes
The soundtrack that flattens culture to amplify margins—the gain temporary, the collateral effects long-lasting. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It’s what you get when you try to compress a whole idea into a formula. An attempt to capture a category of things with a simple, generalized belief. You declare: ‘I expect you’re…
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How the Employer Brand Dies in Applicants Inboxes
Applicant experience is buyer experience in recruitment. Buyers are people who come to you once. Based on the experience, they may decide to walk away and never come back. Or, they could come back again and become customers. In some cases, they might tell everyone they know about you. Your choice whether that's positive…
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Brands that don’t Need to Steal Energy to Survive, Thrive
I was reading an article about a study by Minneapolis agency SuperHuman about marketing and women above 40. How brands get it wrong. It was 2017, I forgot where they published about it. But I remember I seemed to agree 300 percent with the gap they observed between what women want and look for…
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Why I don’t use the Word “Problem” Anymore
The idea that we need to identify what is in the way of our goals is good. But a focus on the word “problem” often becomes the obstacle. Because we get stuck into a “situation, matter, or person that is hard to deal with or understand,” as the main definition suggests. Some languages address the…
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A Personal Journey Relies on Mindset. A Brand’s Journey on Mindshare.
This post is part of a new series on conversations worthy of attention. Sara Blakely has had quite an interesting career and story#. She founded Spanx in her late 20s. The company made $4 million in sales in its first year (2000) and $10 million the following year (2001). In 2012, Forbes named Blakely the…
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Ignoring 2 Billion Internet Users is a Missed Opportunity
Of the 4.2 billion people online in the world#, only a little over 2 billion are on Facebook (mostly mobile use#.) This is not an overlooked opportunity. Access is not the same as reach ― especially the kind of reliable reach a business builds by creating value. Other means of communicating and interacting…
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Love Lessons in Customer Experience from Mr. Rogers
“Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.” This was part…
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Narrative Clarity: the Importance of Scope
Narrative clarity is the one thing that is easy to admire and extremely difficult to imitate. It sets an organization and brand apart from the rest. It's the product of hard and crucial work that is often invisible to define high standards. But just setting the bar high is a recipe for confusion. …
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How to Evaluate Value
“The value of a thing sometimes lies not in what one attains with it, but in what one pays for it — in what is costs us.” [Nietzsche] Steve Jobs founded Apple to initial success. Then he got pushed out. So he went to his desert — i.e. NeXT — to build the actual…