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?

(But they’ve been mostly dead all day)

In today’s fragmented world and new global economy many employees and business owners say that Missions Statements don’t work or they are a thing of the past. They point to nameless companies who had their mission statement posted all over the place, but no one knew it and worse yet no one lived it, especially the management. If this was your only experience with Mission Statements then you’d be smart to turn the other way and leave the idea in the dust. BUT… if you are willing to take a few moments and consider the roots and true power of a Mission Statement you could be adding a powerful tool to your companies arsenal, not to mention giving your company a competitive advantage in the market place.

“Beware, this may mess with your sense of what is effective marketing and advertising!”

Good isn’t always the same as what works or as a friend of mine said to me recently, “Is it Good or do you just like it?" In my business, the business of marketing, we talk about this concept a lot.  Is a commercial “Good” or do we just like it?  Most people assume that if an advertisement is entertaining or has a  certain level of “Quality” then it must be effective; it must work.  It’s soooo NOT true!

Researchers, Magazines, a plethora of new books on the market, and many of our friends and colleagues tell us that  Social Media isthe panacea of all things marketing... and social and whatever else someone thinks up…. but is it all good?  The new marketing mantra is that traditional advertising is dead.  I hear all the time that no one is reading newspapers anymore or watching TV or listening to the radio..  If I listen to what everyone is saying, no one is doing anything but spending time online.  The truth is that TV shows, like American Idol are still setting record highs for viewership and they are not alone.

As we work with leadership across a myriad of industries invariably we get the same question, “What is SEO?” My goal is to provide you with a brief overview of what SEO is, and how it can help your business.

Given the events of the last few years it’s easy to say we are living in a new economy. If I have heard it once from the “experts” I have heard it a thousand times. They might as well be saying even more obvious statements, “Hey I think that internet thing is here to stay.”  Thanks for the tip.

However, when you ask, “what does it mean we are living in the new economy?” You will in variable receive a million different responses. Go to

the department of Labor Statistics and you can find the following data on American spending habits:

These are almost identical to the previous year. It’s not that Americans are changing where they are spending, but that they are just spending less over all.

Let’s start with the obvious American’s are spending less.