Sometimes it is so hard to write a blog. You get writers block. You don’t know what to write or if any of your thoughts are any good. One moment you have an idea that you think is amazing and the next you think to yourself, no one will care about this. And then there’s the word count. How many words do you write? Oh that’s right, between 350 and 500 or was it 500 to 750? Today I like 350 to 500. Now what should I write about? Well my focus is on marketing, advertising and consulting. So let’s talk about Advertising. In fact lets talk about measuring advertising.

Perspective can make all the difference in the world between a small business surviving and not surviving. Perspective is huge. It even has a significant impact on how well we solve the smaller challenges of day to day life. So what is perspective? How do we better understand it? How can we change it and how do we use it to make our small businesses more successful? Well, consider something that happens thousands of times an hour all over the world - landing a plane.

I’m going to start subscribing to the San Francisco Chronicle’s Sunday paper and I don’t ever read the newspaper, any newspaper!

When I’ve subscribed to the newspaper before, any newspaper, it eventually ends up going from the driveway to the recycle pile in our house within a week or two. It drives my wife crazy! Like I said, I don’t read the newspaper. I’m more like a subscriber than a reader. It’s not even that I have anything against newspapers in general, except they are super duper expensive to advertise in for what you usually get. The worst paper in the Country to advertise in is “The” paper in Indianapolis. They are the most expensive I have ever seen, but I digress.

Bob Sprague has a new blog on Leadership called Personal Clarity, and it’s going to be worth the read. (http://www.personalclarity.me) Bob is one of those guys I know that teaches about Leadership and truly lives it out. I value his insight. When I was 19 years old he influenced how I thought about Leadership and helped me pursue my journey towards being a better leader. For the last 25 years Bob has served me as a mentor, good friend, comrade in arms, and fellow parent (which is an amazing breeding ground of leadership lessons). Bob knows leadership well. It’s kind of like his pet project only it’s been during his entire adult life so far and maybe longer. Now that I think about it, Bob might have been born with a Leadership book at his side. I wonder if that version had pictures, hmmmmm?

Do you want to be found in Google?  Do you want to reap the benefits of consistently being found in Google and not losing your ranking? Then think about this.

I wanted to pass this video along. I got a big laugh out of it because my family watches NCIS LA on TV. This type of media is also good for having fun and getting people to like your Company. Remember, if you really want to rock your marketing then you need to do stuff that will make people like you. People buy from people and companies they like.

A Brand is incremental. That’s right, incremental. It is made up of lots of little pieces that impact the whole.  If you want to better understand what a brand is or how to influence it you need to understand how to see it at both a small and large level.  You may not agree or understand what I’m, “on about,” but let’s start with how I define “Brand.”

Reputation

A brand is described many ways but as Marty Neumier put it so well in his book, “The Brand Gap,” it all boils down to your reputation. Your reputation is what people think of you at a conscious level and an unconscious level. Your reputation is what makes people like you or not like you. It influences whether people trust you or not, and it impacts what they say and do in regards to you or your company. Basically, reputation is an abstract word that we use to group all of the little things in life that give us some hint about who a person or company is. Do you have a reputation for being nice or mean a good dresser or a poor one?  Do you have a reputation for being conscientious or sloppy, timely or late, honest or dishonest? Whatever picture you have of a person is part of their reputation. There are many things that come together to give us an impression of a person or company and those things form a reputation. The conscious mind isn’t even able to keep up with all of these impressions, but your right brain or unconscious mind does and that influences our gut feelings and emotions on any subject. (The right brain is powerful and one of its big job descriptions is to take all the little pieces and then consider the whole picture).

Yes, brand and reputation are complicated beasts when you start to look under the hood, but when you just consider that everything you do impacts your reputation it becomes easier to impact how you influence it.  When I wrote that a brand is incremental, I was referring to all the little things and that is how we analyze it.  Imagine a line with “weak” on the left end and “strong” on the right end and lots of incremental hash marks along the line as if it were a scale from 0 to 100.

Every little thing that improves your reputation in a society, whether you consciously notice them or not, are positive attributes and move you further up the line towards 100.  Everything that takes  away from your reputation, no matter how small, are negative attributes that move you towards 0.  Now take all the little things about a person or a company, and I mean all of them, add all the positives and subtract the negatives and you get a relative score on how strong or weak your Brand or reputation is.

Many of these things are so small, like polished shoes or misspelled words, that on their own people say they are not significant, but when added up they shift our thoughts and behaviors.

A Brand is incremental and when you understand what to look for and how to influence it you reap the rewards of having a strong brand or reputation. In the next blog I will talk more about the little things and  how to know if something is worth your time.

Thanks for reading and let me know if this was helpful.

This week I was flabbergasted to see mind numbing, non descript marketing at a trade show in Vegas.  I was there to meet with a great client and also to further investigate his market space.  Some of his competitors were there, and many of others selling in that same industry.  The attached word cloud demonstrates a really good reason how mind numbing it was.

I promise you that if you do these 12 steps you will radically increase your chances of success over everyone else around you.

By the way, they’re only secret because they’re so obvious that very few people notice them, let alone follow them.

AUTHENTICITY… What is it?  Does it matter?  Does it matter in business? Yeah, I think so, but why does it matter and what exactly is it? And if marketing were to be more authentic what would THAT look like? We know we want it and sometimes we are fooled into believing that people are being authentic when they are not.  So what’s the big deal?