“I went to school on Tom’s ideas!”
Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com
A Clear Eye.
On customers, brands and marketplace success
by Tom Asacker
“I went to school on Tom’s ideas!”
Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com
1. Malcolm Gladwell on why Chris Anderson is wrong about "Free" and Anderson's response.
Gladwell in The New Yorker. Anderson on his blog. And a few words from Seth Godin.
2. You Can't Beat Habit
The economy has even the most habitual customers rethinking what they buy -- forcing you to win their loyalty all over again, according to Neale Martin, author of "Habit." Entrepreneur
3. Leadership in a (Permanent) Crisis
When the economy recovers, things won’t return to normal -- and a different mode of leadership will be required. Harvard Business Review
4. Scientist: Influencer Theory Is Bogus
Yahoo's Duncan Watts says the influencer idea isn't even a theory, it's a 'rhetorical device.' Brandweek
5. Why Your Gut Is More Ethical Than Your Brain
It's believed that to live ethically, we must engage our reason, which reins in the whims and follies of emotion. But what if unethical behavior is actually spurred, rather than prevented, by reason? Fast Company
Note to my U.S. friends and family: Have a safe and happy 4th of July celebration! Here's a little video to inspire you: Great Quotes from Great Leaders
When great companies like P&G, UPS, Time Warner, Meredith, and others need an entertaining and inspiring speaker to shake up their people, fill them with ideas and charge them with inspiration, who do they call? See for yourself! www.AsackerOnVideo.com
I hear it all the time: "How do I get my people to embrace these brand concepts? To live these brand principles?"
Here's the simple answer: The same way you get customers to respond to your brand. First, by appealing to what matters most to them, which is them -- their lives, their families, their futures. Start by covering the table stakes in your competitive environment: things like fair wages and benefits, an emotionally healthy work environment, fairness and transparency in your dealings with them, control over their own work, and recognition for achievement. Then provide opportunities for learning and growth.
But here's the Catch-22. You can't provide all of that unless you start to grow. That’s why growth through innovation is the imperative. It’s a virtuous cycle. Growth leads to more opportunities, higher morale, and enhanced communication, which in turn gets everyone passionate about the brand.
You can’t simply ask people to change -- to work better together -- and to expect it to happen. They have to want to, as well as know why and how. So put the brand -- the growth strategy -- in your people's hands, and it will become impossible for them not to become engaged and to take responsibility. And then that Catch-22 -- fueled mainly by fear, flawed reasoning and bureaucratic nonsense, will cease to exist.
We like the reassurance of a familiar face, don't we? Of course we do. But we also want to be surprised and to laugh. Yes, we want order, but we also want some randomness -- an adventure. Yes, we love excitement, but we also crave quiet time. Everything that touches our senses -- especially those things we love the most, like music -- is an alternation of stimuli: on, off, on, off, on, off.
The experience with your audience should be similar. Tickle their minds and their hearts. Don’t smother them to death. As the philosopher Alan Watts once said, “If you put your hand on the knee of a beautiful woman and leave it there, she’ll cease to notice it. But if you gently pat her on the knee, she’ll know you’re still there. Because you come and you go. Now you see me, now you don’t.”
There’s an old Zen maxim, “You can’t control the waves, but you can learn to surf!” We’re living in a new world now -- one that revolves around the rapidly changing expectations of the customer. There’s no stability. None. You must move with people, like a life preserver in a shifting sea. You must catch their wave.
So get out there and interact with your audience. Find new and compelling ways to become meaningful to them. Try something new and see if it takes hold. You can’t build a great brand by avoiding risks. Instead . . . dance!
Creating an enduring brand is a huge challenge in today’s rapidly evolving marketplace. It’s similar to raising a child: it requires focused attention, intuition, and a lot of patience. It also requires a desire to change and adapt. Our natural instinct, however, is to shelter our brands, like our children, from the knocks and bumps that come in life. We want to keep our arms around them, keep them safe and under our control.
But for children and brands to thrive in today’s world, they must grow. We must encourage them to try new things, trip and fall, learn the hard lessons, find out what works and what doesn’t, and be exposed to a variety of outside perspectives and truths.
The culture of the world is different today than it was years ago, just like raising a child today is different than it was years ago. And although we are exposed to a dizzying amount of opinions and techniques, the best way to address the complex job of brand-rearing is to recognize that, like raising a child, raising a brand takes a village.
And that village is the complex web of relationships among your people, your customers, your partners, and other stakeholders. So teach your brand to be compassionate, authentic, appreciative, respectful, and, by all means, vibrant and alive. Allow it to stretch and try new things. Because in a confusing environment, and as Milton Erickson made clear, "change will lead to insight far more often than insight will lead to change."
I once read about a psychological study designed to see how people would react to flawed reasoning, even when it flew in the face of their own very sensible judgment. It was quite revealing. In the study two people, A and B, were seated on opposite sides of a dividing wall, looking at a screen. Each person was instructed to learn by trial and error how to recognize the difference between slides of healthy cells and sick cells. For each slide, they had to push one of two buttons in front of them, “Healthy” or “Sick,” at which point one of two lamps, labeled “Right” and “Wrong,” would light up.
Person A received true feedback, meaning that his “Right” lamp would light up when he was correct and his “Wrong” lamp would light up when he was incorrect. These people—the A’s—learned to tell the difference between healthy and sick cells with a high level of accuracy. Person B’s situation was quite different. His right or wrong lamps lit up based not on his own guesses but on Person A’s guesses. He didn’t know it, but he was searching for an order where none could possibly exist.
A and B were then asked to work together to establish the rules for determining healthy vs. sick cells. The A’s told the B’s what they had learned and what simple characteristics they had looked for to tell the difference. Bs’ explanations, by necessity, were subtle and quite complex—and completely bogus.
Here’s the amazing part. After their collaboration, all B’s and nearly all A’s came to believe that the delusional B had a much better understanding of healthy vs. sick cells. In fact, A’s were impressed with B’s sophisticated brilliance, and felt inferior because of the pedestrian simplicity of their assumptions. In a follow-up test, the B’s showed almost no improvement, but the A’s scores dropped because the A’s had incorporated some of B’s completely baseless ideas.
This study teaches us two important aspects with regards to branding or, for that matter, any business concept. First, once an explanation for something has taken hold of our minds, information that should refute that explanation may produce not an appropriate change of mind but rather an elaboration of the flawed explanation. It also teaches us to beware (be aware) of abstruse ideas, no matter how convincing the presentation or how brilliant the so-called expert.
The signal-to-noise ratio in the fields of branding and marketing is becoming dangerously low as the level of background noise becomes more and more obtrusive, enabled by platforms like blogging and Twitter and amplified by traditional publishers desperately searching for an audience for their rapidly shrinking businesses. If you're an A in this environment, you should be very, very careful. And try like hell to stay away from the B's.
1. Hyatt’s Random Acts of Generosity
Loyalty is one thing, but the Hyatt hotel chain wants to engender something even stronger in its guests: gratitude. This summer, the company will bestow free drinks, room service and so forth on random guests in hopes that grateful guests will come back for more. The NY Times Magazine
2. The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed the Power of Personal Metrics
When Nike decided to bring Web 2.0 technology to the sneaker, it reached out to Apple for help, writes Mark McClusky. Together the two companies developed Nike+, an advanced pedometer system aimed at tapping into the reasons why runners exercise and then elevating those impulses with the motivating power of statistics. Wired
3. Boosting Engagement While Cutting Costs
Yes, it’s possible. Here’s how one hospital turned the budget over to its employees and reaped a windfall. Gallop Management Journal
4. The Divine, Too, Is in the Details
Great metrics are every bit as important as great ideas and great execution, Prescription Solutions CEO Jacqueline Kosecoff says in this Q-and-A. It's important to set the measures of success in stone before a project begins, she notes, because otherwise success can be redefined to meet the project's eventual outcome. The New York Times
5. You can’t have a strong brand without a strong business
Millward Brown's Nigel Hollis on aligning brand and business strategy. If you get a chance, comment on his closing question. You know my opinion, but I'd really like to hear yours. Nigel Hollis
Twitter has felt strangely familiar to me for a while, but I simply could not put my finger on it. Well, it just hit me.
I was born in Louisiana and raised outside of Boston. Each summer my father would pack us into the family car and make the 1,700 mile trip back "home."
One summer in the late 70s, as I loaded the car with luggage, maps and snacks, I noticed a strange black box with a bunch of dials and knobs mounted near the floor between the driver and passenger seats.
I asked my dad about it and with a wink and a grin he simply replied, in a strange Southern drawl, "Breaker breaker, good buddy."
For the next three days I was subjected to more of the same (much more), like:
Citizens' Band (CB) radio, a free, two-way radio service with each channel shared by many users, was an exciting, yet short-lived fad with my dad (thank God), and with many others.
However, it does remain popular among long-haul truck drivers to communicate directions, traffic problems, speed traps and other time-sensitive information of value.
Twitter reminds me of CB radio, only with many more potential contextual applications. Now, if we can just reduce the growing number of alligator stations. :)
P.S. BTW, wasn't this Twitter?
"Tom is timely, thought provoking and all about the new brand vision packaged as a Seinfeld stand up. I went to school on his ideas."
- Jeff Taylor, Founder, Monster.com and CEO, Eons.
(Rest assured, we will never provide your email address to anyone. Period.)
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