Reading Time: 2 min Sometimes you will execute something perfectly, yet another person might think you’ve made a mistake. Depending on who that is, it might be worth owning up to your “mistake” rather than making a bigger one by trying to correct them. In his pursuit of excellence, Danny Meyer shares these thoughts in the book “Unreasonable Hospitality“, […]
Marketing
Make the complicated simple
Reading Time: < 1 min Making something simple can be a very tricky thing to do. Historically, Apple has been fantastic at this, with hugely complex products that have a very simple and intuitive UI. As I shared a few years ago, many things start out simple, gradually become more complex, and then need to put in some work to […]
Boast or fact?
Reading Time: < 1 min When marketing your company, there’s a fine line between boasting and sharing facts. Boasting can be fine is certain cases, but facts should always win. A recent post from Jonathan Stark laid this out perfectly, and he compared it to the movie “Elf” where Buddy tries the “World’s Best Cup Of Coffee”. If you’ve not […]
Give or take?
Reading Time: 2 min After my recent post “experts don’t cold call“, I had an interesting comment from a friend. He defended cold calling to a degree, and ended with “you have to start somewhere when you’re new“. I agree with that, but you have a choice when you’re new: you can choose to give of yourself, or you […]
Personas are specific, but not precise
Reading Time: 2 min When working on defining your target audience, building a persona can be a great exercise. It’s something I do with some of my writing, where I occasionally write for a specific vision of a person. Having a person in mind when writing content can be a huge benefit, and it can ensure that you’re using […]
Experts don’t cold call
Reading Time: 2 min Some of the funniest emails I get are from “SEO experts”, and I’m sure you get many of the same. My initial thought is “if they’re so good at SEO, why do they need to resort to spam?”. Of course, they’re not any good at it, which is why spam becomes their tactic. In a […]
Strategy or tactic?
Reading Time: < 1 min While recently reading “The 1-Page Marketing Plan“, author Allan Dib frequently came back to the same concept of explaining the difference between a strategy and a tactic. In his words: Understanding the difference between strategy and tactics is absolutely key to marketing success. Strategy without tactics leads to paralysis by analysis. Tactics without strategy leads […]
“Somebody” is somebody else
Reading Time: < 1 min In an emergency, the phenomenon of “diffusion of responsibility” can be a huge problem. The short definition is that when an accident occurs and many people are around, everyone assumes someone else will take care of it. When a person yells “somebody call 911”, everyone often assumes that “somebody” means “somebody else”. The same can […]
Keep it simple: Sonder to Empathy, or Experience to Work
Reading Time: 2 min I’ve written a few times on here about the goal of keeping things simple, but it doesn’t mean that I don’t fall prey to overly-exotic words sometimes. Two examples showcase that. Sonder First is the idea of sonder, which I wrote about a few years ago. While many people may not know the word, reading […]
Distinction is good. Clarity is better.
Reading Time: < 1 min When marketing your product, you always want to stand out and be memorable. In an effort to be memorable, though, you can run dangerously close to simply being unclear. I talked about this a few months ago with the death of Google Stadia. Their main commercial for the service was bonkers, and simply being clear […]