Building a culture of trust is mostly one-to-one in nature.
Over time, simple interactions accumulate and help create rapport and friendship, which are critical ingredients for a high-performing workplace.
Try to be present in the small moments; this will lay the foundation for a more significant purpose—to create a culture built on trusting your colleagues.
Are you paying attention to those small moments where you can affirm your interest in those you work with?
You have to live life to the limit, not according to each day but according to its depth. One does not have to do what comes next if one feels a greater affinity with that which happens later, at a remove, even in a remote distance. One may dream while others are saviors if these dreams are more real to oneself than reality and more necessary than bread. In a word: one ought to turn the most extreme possibility inside oneself into the measure for one’s life, for our life is vast and can accommodate as much future as we are able to carry.
Ranier Maria Rilke, Letters on Life
January 1: It’s time to set those goals and resolutions again.
The goals we set for ourselves and our businesses at the beginning of the year usually don’t look any further than the end of the year. These types of goals are good, but they’re not great: they don’t provide us any long-term guidance. They don’t necessarily help us achieve our life’s goals.
This year, when thinking about your goals and resolutions, dare to dream. Dream what you want your life and your business to look like in the future. Ultimately, think about what will make you, your customers, and your employees happy.
Once you know what you want the future to look like, build your yearly goals and resolutions around it.
What do you want the future to look like? What concrete goals can you achieve this year that will push towards your ultimate goals and vision?
As the end of the year quickly approaches, we want to say thank you for being our reader. You represent the best in your industry and we look forward to bringing you insights on building brands that both employees and customers love in the coming year.
Below we curated the most popular, shared, and discussed articles from the Cult Branding blog in 2017. Please enjoy these three fantastic blog posts as a way to reflect as we enter 2018.
We wish you and your family a happy, healthy, and fantastic New Year.
Happy Holidays!
The Cult Branding Team
Why do images have so much power?
Our logos and marks are symbols. Symbols are triggers of archetypal images—energy patterns that rest in the unconscious. These primordial images are not personal to each but are aspects of the “collective” of all of us. Read more about bringing your brand image to life.
In today’s rapidly changing business environment, you need passionate people because such people can drive extreme and sustained performance improvement.
What does a passionate person look like? Find out more about creating a passion-driven workplace.
Anyone that’s done any retail research in the last decade will have noticed the growing importance consumers place on convenience. The rising importance of convenience isn’t a new trend—marketing scholar Eugene J. Kelley wrote about it in 1958. But, what is new—and what will continue to be new—is the ways retailers can satisfy it. Learn more about the importance of convenience and how to compete in the future.
Many businesses suffer from catering to deadly customers.
Deadly customers aren’t customers that hate you. They like you and probably account for a large portion of both your current base and target market. Chances are that, collectively, they purchase a lot from you. Playing to deadly customers may seem lucrative: there’s a lot of them out there and they likely contribute a significant portion of your bottom line. And, they’re easy to make happy.
The problem is: they don’t push your business forward.
The deadly customer is happy with the status quo—they don’t ask for anything new; in fact, they may not want anything new. They may make you think you’re doing better than you actually are. Serving the deadly customer encourages stagnation instead of innovation. By focusing on the deadly customer, you hand an unfair advantage to your competition in the future.
Are you catering to deadly customers?
Cult Branding was founded on Abraham Maslow’s Hierarchy of Human Needs.
Maslow’s hierarchy offers a simple framework for understanding consumer behavior: Humans have inherent needs (physiological, safety, love and belonging, esteem, and self-actualization) that they try to fulfill. And, consumer behavior is motivated by the fulfillment of some combination of these needs.
Although Maslow’s hierarchy offers significant explanatory power, it does not provide a complete explanation of brand loyalty.
A more comprehensive understanding of branding involves placing Maslow’s work in the context of the works of biologist Antonio Damasio, psychiatrist Carl Jung, and psychologist Ivan Pavlov.
Don’t worry, it’s not as complicated as it reads. We created a presentation so you can absorb the info quickly. Check out our Archetypal Branding presentation.
What is your companies primary archetype?
You know it, it takes a lot of time and effort to develop and maintain marketing that resonates with your audience. As a strategic thinker, however, the development of cult brand takes even more consideration.
After all, we’re always searching for ways to gain the oh-so-important competitive edge. If you find yourself in that situation, then you may want to check out these fifty-two marketing strategies that will ignite your strategic thinking, and with over 1 million views for our SlideShare, we know that these marketing tactics will spark your creative energy.
Onwards!
