David Armano has created this great graphic to illustrate brand building.

I went to see Pete Murray and band last night. Great concert. It made me think, what makes a great band?

Is the music, lyrics, vocals, musicians, stage presence, story telling, lighting, marketing, personality…?

Yes, all those aspects play a part and many more. We could probably argue for hours about which aspects are most important etc, but one thing is clear - just being a good singer isn’t enough to be a big star.

So what makes a great accountant, solicitor, optometrist, bank, builder etc?

Similarly, there are many aspects but, again, one thing is clear - there is much more to being great in your business than just simply being good at your core service.

“Whatever you do in life, surround yourself with smart people who’ll argue with you.” — John Wooden

Small Business Marketing Lessons By Harvey Cramb (Aged 3 ½)

Me: Come on, Harvs, jump in the car. It’s time to go to Kmart [meaning Kmart Plaza not the specific store].
Harvey: But the good time hasn’t started.
Me: What did you say?.
Harvey: That’s what it says on TV, “Kmart - where the good times start”.
Marketing Lesson: Make your marketing message “sticky”.

In their recent book, Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die, Chip and Dan Heath explore how to make your message stick. Their research has identified 6 principles. Here’s their tips for getting your message to stick.

PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY
How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize. Saying something short is not the mission— sound bites are not the ideal. Proverbs are the ideal. We must create ideas that are both simple and profound. The Golden Rule is the ultimate model of simplicity: a one-sentence statement so profound that an individual could spend a lifetime learning to follow it.

PRINCIPLE 2: UNEXPECTEDNESS
How do we get our audience to pay attention to our ideas, and how do we maintain their interest when we need time to get the ideas across? We need to violate people’s expectations. We need to be counterintuitive. A bag of popcorn is as unhealthy as a whole day’s worth of fatty foods! We can use surprise—an emotion whose function is to increase alertness and cause focus—to grab people’s attention. But surprise doesn’t last. For our idea to endure, we must generate interest and curiosity. How do you keep students engaged during the fortyeighth history class of the year? We can engage people’s curiosity over a long period of time by systematically “opening gaps” in their knowledge— and then filling those gaps.

PRINCIPLE 3: CONCRETENESS
How do we make our ideas clear? We must explain our ideas in terms of human actions, in terms of sensory information. This is where so much business communication goes awry. Mission statements, synergies, strategies, visions—they are often ambiguous to the point of being meaningless. Naturally sticky ideas are full of concrete images—ice-filled bathtubs, apples with razors—because our brains are wired to remember concrete data. In proverbs, abstract truths are often encoded in concrete language: “A bird in hand is worth two in the bush.” Speaking concretely is the only way to ensure that our idea will mean the same thing to everyone in our audience.

PRINCIPLE 4: CREDIBILITY
How do we make people believe our ideas? When the former surgeon general C. Everett Koop talks about a public-health issue, most people accept his ideas without skepticism. But in most day-to-day situations we don’t enjoy this authority. Sticky ideas have to carry their own credentials. We need ways to help people test our ideas for themselves—a “try before you buy” philosophy for the world of ideas. When we’re trying to build a case for something, most of us instinctively grasp for hard numbers. But in many cases this is exactly the wrong approach. In the sole U.S. presidential debate in 1980 between Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter, Reagan could have cited innumerable statistics demonstrating the sluggishness of the economy. Instead, he asked a simple question that allowed voters to test for themselves: “Before you vote, ask yourself if you are better off today than you were four years ago.”

PRINCIPLE 5: EMOTIONS
How do we get people to care about our ideas? We make them feel something. In the case of movie popcorn, we make them feel disgusted by its unhealthiness. The statistic “37 grams” doesn’t elicit any emotions. Research shows that people are more likely to make a charitable gift to a single needy individual than to an entire impoverished region. We are wired to feel things for people, not for abstractions. Sometimes the hard part is finding the right emotion to harness. For instance, it’s difficult to get teenagers to quit smoking by instilling in them a fear of the consequences, but it’s easier to get them to quit by tapping into their resentment of the duplicity of Big Tobacco.

PRINCIPLE 6: STORIES
How do we get people to act on our ideas? We tell stories. Firefighters naturally swap stories after every fire, and by doing so they multiply their experience; after years of hearing stories, they have a richer, more complete mental catalog of critical situations they might confront during a fire and the appropriate responses to those situations. Research shows that mentally rehearsing a situation helps us perform better when we encounter that situation in the physical environment. Similarly, hearing stories acts as a kind of mental flight simulator, preparing us to respond more quickly and effectively.

On Friday, I was lucky enough to play in a Pro-Am golf tournament (Playing alongside professional golfers as well as us mere amateurs). The pro that played with my group had a caddy.

A caddy’s job is to carrying the pro’s clubs but they also play an important role in helping the pro remained focussed and at the top of their game. Unfortunately for the pro that I was playing with, his caddy had no troubles carrying the clubs but didn’t seem to be able to help with the mental side of things and, although he still played awesome golf, he didn’t perform as well as he had expected.

It got me thinking - who’s my caddy? How good are the people around me at keeping me focussed and at the top of my game? Have I given them permission to play this role or just to carry my clubs?

In business we are lucky enough to be allowed more than one caddy, so who are your caddies that help to keep you at the top of your game?

John points out that in the media guide for London’s section in the Olympic Games Closing Ceremony it declared the intention to show that London is “the coolest place on the planet”.

If you need to state that you’re the coolest that probably indicates that you’re not. This is this case for other adjectives: best, quality, leading, modern etc.

“Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise.” - Ted Turner

Another Ted Turner quote:
“If I had any humility I would be perfect.”

Aussie diver, Matthew Mitcham, lived out every diver’s dream at the Beijing Games when he scored perfect 10’s on his final dive to leap frog into the gold medal position. You could have easily believed the script was written for a Hollywood movie as Mitcham stopped the Chinese divers from claiming a clean sweep of diving gold medals (except the Hollywood writer probably would have had an American diver winning).

Sensational finishes like this happen, but the majority of Olympic events weren’t so dramatic.

Many business owners are hoping to achieve the “Hollywood” style results with their marketing campaigns. Stuff dreams are made of. A low cost campaign that burst the doors down with new customers. Does it happen? Sometimes but the majority of successful marketing isn’t so dramatic.

Successful athletes train extremely hard to try and achieve their goals without needing the miraculous to happen. Any miracles are then a welcome bonus. Smart business owners build their marketing with the same mindset.

The United States are coming second to China in the Olympics medal tally. That’s a huge failure in their eyes. Australia is only coming 5th, but that’s a huge success.

Sally McLellan comes second in the hurdles and it’s seen as an amazing achievement. Grant Hackett and Eamon Sullivan win silver and we’re disappointed.

Australia’s cyclists, hockey teams and rowers have all finished in the top few in the world but they didn’t win gold (or any medal in some cases) and so they aren’t seen as successful.

Our perception of success is relative to our expectations.

It’s no different in business. Forget comparing yourself to your competition and defining your success based on whether you do things better than them. The true assessment is against your clients’ expectations. Live up to and exceed their expectations - that’s how to determine success.

Today’s medal tally still has little Australia in 5th place, but at the top it is clear that host nation China is thrashing the USA, the traditional powerhouse. Or are they?

Yahoo.com show the medal tally based on total medals rather than a priority on Gold medals. Is anyone fooled by this? Why do they bother?

Is that marketing or misrepresentation? Your marketing message must be believable or it’s a waste of time. Forget the spin. Do you really believe the banks are doing everything they can to make your experience better??