How to Create a Vision and Build a Roadmap for Success

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—“ said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“—so long as I get somewhere,’”Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”
Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

Organizations that last know where they’re going. They know how they want people to perceive their business and they know what they want to achieve.

In short, they have a strong vision.

Creating a strong vision is a key to long-term success: it gives you clarity on what you should and shouldn’t do for the continuing health and prosperity of the company.

The vision, however, is only one of the keys to success, you must also have a purpose that drives the vision; and, you must have missions, strategies, and tactics to achieve your vision.

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September 22, 2018 by

Embrace Discomfort, Create Change

If something is comfortable, it won’t lead to progress.

Growth was seen as an endless series of daily choices and decisions in each of which one can choose to go back toward safety or forward toward growth. Growth must be chosen again and again; fear must be overcome again and again.Abraham H. Maslow1

If you’re comfortable, you’re not growing. It’s the uncomfortable things that make us grow.

The same is true of business: companies that embrace discomfort as a regular part of business life are more likely to achieve their goals and move closer and closer to fulfilling their company vision than those that don’t.

Companies that stay comfortable—which feels great in the moment—end up losing in the long run, which doesn’t feel so great.

Discomfort is a prerequisite for change.

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August 31, 2018 by

Love The Customers You Have

You’re a better designer if you love the people you’re designing for.
Fred Dust, IDEO Partner, quoted in Bernadette Jiwa’s Meaningful

I’m surprised how many companies don’t love their customers.

They talk about being customer-centric or even customer-obsessed, but they don’t love the customer they have. Instead, they fall in love with the customer they want.

Their customers aren’t cool enough. They aren’t young enough. They’re too weird.

I’ve heard these comments in the back of interview rooms. I’ve seen the look of disappointment in people’s faces when we’ve delivered presentations, looks that clearly said: “That shouldn’t be my customer; my customer should be….”

These companies are all driven by a faulty line of thinking: focusing on what the people are like instead of what the people need—what tensions in their lives need to be solved.

Great brands solve needs; that’s how they attract customers.

A brand that doesn’t solve a need—a tension in customers’ lives—is a weak brand.

Instead of trying to understand their customers and figure out their tensions, these companies focus on trying to attract the types of customers they want. They attempt to create surface-level appeal instead of the type of appeal that drives customer decision-making: appealing to higher human needs.

I think this is one of the reasons you see companies constantly changing their advertising or trying to reinvent themselves: desperate attempts to attract the types of people they want to love them.

No one falls in love with a desperate person. No customer will love a desperate company.

Love the customer you have, not the one you want. Make it about them. Solve their tensions. That’s the only way they’ll love you back.

August 24, 2018 by

Build A Campfire: How To Succeed On Social Media

Today the campfire is called a computer or a television … Drama goes back to the beginning of civilization around the campfire, where the tribe comes together, and they say, “My God, did you see what blah blah did with that mountain lion today?” And the other guy says, “I’ll tell you one better than that.” … [W}e tell stories that unite the tribe. We reinforce our tribal unity. We say, this is how we do things here.
David Mamet, MasterClass.com

If the computer is the new campfire, social media is the biggest campfire ever built.

Most companies invest a lot of money in social media because they know they have to. But, few know what to do with it.
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August 17, 2018 by

The Novelty Paradox: Why Your Attractive New Ad May Make Your Brand Less Meaningful

Most commercial messages contain too many elements, all competing with one another for our understanding, and the elements themselves may be uninteresting, unclear, or off-message.
Marty Neumeier, Zag

Companies try to make their brands stand out and be different: they try to constantly be new to gain a competitive advantage. In short, they use newness as a path to relevance. But, this quest to be relevant has affected their ability to be meaningful.
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August 10, 2018 by

Delivering Magic

Magic has long held a special place in the nation’s history. American magicians perform in arenas, theaters, and even backyards. No matter how big or small, a magic show will always inspire wonder.

Today as a member of the Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee, I am honored that the United States Postal Service delivered these Forever stamps.

This reminds me, let’s learn some magic for your brand…

Brands are a unique combination of a set of ideas and inanimate objects that serve as an ideal platform for relationships. When people feel bound to a group or community of shared beliefs around a brand where at least part of their identity is tied to the group, it’s a phenomenon known as participation mystique.

These brands spark magical participation with their customers; they embrace a particular way of being, aligned to a specific set of beliefs.

When brands attract customers to come together something magical happens, now let’s make that happen for you and your team.

Creating Magic: A mini workshop

To help you think more magical thoughts try these juxtapositions:

If my company was Zappos how would we WOW our customers?

If our company was Disney how would we give our customers a magical day?

If our brand was Houdini what problems can I help my customers escape?

By thinking like other great magical brands, you will discover magic of your own.

August 3, 2018 by

Do You Feel Like You’re Maximizing Your Marketing Dollars?

Now what do you want out of me? Fine writing? Do you want masterpieces? Do you want glowing things that can be framed by copywriters? Or do you want to see the goddamned sales curve stop moving down and start moving up?

Rosser Reeves in Dennis Higgins’ The Art of Writing Advertising

Marketers are quick to blame agencies for their ineffectiveness. And it’s true: I’ve lost count of the times I’ve seen agencies produce off-brand advertising that didn’t resonate with their customers; but hell, it looks pretty and gets likes. I’ve even seen a major agency try to get a company to fund research for an ad slogan that was not only off-brand but was impossible to understand—on the bright side, it was the first time they actually tried to gather data to inform an ad.

But, the fault isn’t solely with the agencies, it’s also with the companies hiring them. Many companies don’t know what they want to get out of a marketing initiative, so they don’t articulate it to the agency, and then the agency produces whatever the agency wants instead of what the company needs.

Every initiative, whether it’s a television ad campaign or the way you handle your Facebook page, should have a goal. And, the goal doesn’t have to be monetary. What is has to be is something that ties into your vision—what you want your brand to become.

Using the vision as a guide, you can create strategies—the overarching plans to get you to your vision—that result in a series of tactics—the steps it’ll take to get you there.

Marketing initiatives fall under the tactics bubble and must be measured in that context. Think: What do I want this initiative to do in a way that fits a strategy that pushes the company towards its ultimate vision.?

Thinking in this way makes it easy to then develop a simple metric to test the effectiveness of the initiative and be able to hold an agency accountable for the results.

Acting this way will ensure your marketing initiatives are on brand; make agencies produce better, more meaningful work; and, it will stop you from being so frustrated with your lack of return on your marketing spend.

July 27, 2018 by

Everybody is a Marketer

“Accounting is a department. Marketing isn’t. Marketing is something everyone in your company is doing 24/7/365.”

Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson, Rework

A brand isn’t a name or a logo: it’s the perception people have of your organization. Everything your company and employees do contribute to this perception: how an associate greets a customer at checkout; how your television ads looks and feel and what they say; how you respond on social media; and even what the mailroom clerk tells their friends about what it’s like to work at your company.

Everyone in the company can influence perception, so they can influence the brand. In other words, everyone in the company plays some role in your company’s marketing.

To make everyone an effective marketer, everyone must be on the same page. This is why it’s so important to understand your Brand DNA (the human core of your brand and the problems you solve) and and then translate it into both a vision (what you want the company to become) and a set of core values (what the company stands for) that are understandable by every person in your organization.

With an easily-understood vision and a set of core values that are rooted in human needs, every person in your company can be motivated by your ultimate goal and understand what behaviors contribute toward and what behaviors work against what you are trying to achieve.

July 20, 2018 by

Cult Brands are Inclusive

In Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia, the Macedonian King upset his military compatriots and childhood friends by marrying Roxana.

Roxana was the daughter of a minor Persian baron. That is, she was not from Macedonia; she was not of Greek blood.

This outraged Alexander’s men who felt that he was disrespecting his homeland. But Alexander didn’t identify himself exclusively as Macedonian or Greek. This great military strategist had a grand vision to create an empire that united the world as one people.

Alexander understood one of the Seven Rules of Cult Brands: Be open and inclusive.

The ideals of Vans shoes, for example, probably aren’t going to speak to you if you’re not in the skateboard community. IKEA isn’t going to draw your attention if you aren’t in the market for affordable furniture that gives your home a sense of style.

The annual, week-long, Burning Man event now attracts over 65,000 attendees to the Black Rock Desert each August. Anyone can participate. As written in their ten guiding principles, “Anyone may be a part of Burning Man. We welcome and respect the stranger. No prerequisites exist for participation in our community.”

And the full range of attendees from artists to billionaires, to Silicon Valley CEOs, demonstrate that the not-for-profit is true to its word.

How To Be Inclusive

The more inclusive you are, the more customer groups you open your business to and the larger your market potential becomes.

To become a more inclusive brand requires diligence. Being inclusive means gaining insights into new customer groups and then collaborating with your teams to discover ways of relating these new customers to your business, and serving them with respect.

How inclusive is your business today?

How inclusive do you want your business to be tomorrow?

July 13, 2018 by