When thinking about marketing it’s easy to skip steps by immediately focusing on sales. It’s important to avoid loosing sight of certain fundamental elements of marketing.
No. 1
What’s the impact you want to have, the type of change you are seeking to make? This is your WHY.
No. 2
WHO is your audience? Notice that audience is much broader than customers. A lot of people will be part of your audience but not be customers, at least not as fast as you might like them to be.
No. 3
What’s it for? WHAT is your brand promise?
Marketing always has to do with telling a story. Based on how good of a match you have, between the worldview of your audience, the type of stories they keep telling themselves over and over again, about themselves and the world around them, and the elements of your brand story, that’s what will ultimately help you move forward.
If you show up in a thoughtful and consistent way that helps your audience with what they care about, you have a chance, the chance to earn both attention and trust, currencies that are immensely valuable in today’s world of constant distractions.
RIP Kobe Bryant
The death of some people looms large because through their extraordinary deeds they’ve been able to touch an unusually high number of people. As a basketball fan I’ve been watching Kobe Bryant from afar, mesmorized by his talent and relentless work ethic.
It must have been just one week ago when I watched Matt Barnes’ and Stephen Jackson’s interview with him. After Kobe finished his active NBA career he seemd to have made such a smooth transition into new areas where he could channel is incredible determination to seek excellence, e.g. movie making.
Tomorrow is never promised.
Positive and negative experience
There exists an inverse relationship between what you want and its opposite. It’s important to pay attention to your desires and how they impact perception. The following excerpt frames it beautifuly.
“Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; acccepting negative experience is a positive experience. It’s what the philosopher Alan Watts used to refer to as “the backwards law” – the idea that the more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The more you desperately want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you feel, regardless of how much money you actually make. The more you desperately want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you come to see yourself, regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you. The more you want to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.”
Source: read it on the internet, can’t find where this originates from. If you know, I’d appreciate a message.
7 things that make you more resilient
“When the going gets tough, the tough get going”, is a popular saying that seems to stem from the 1950s, first mentioned in the context of American Football. How does one develop the capacity to face adversity in a positive way, to be more resilient? Here are seven aspects that can help you:
1. Pervasiveness
When faced with a challenge, let’s say an illness of the kidney, you an easily become overwhelmed by it, thinking or feeling like this is all that’s happening to you. Of course this is not the case. Whilst you might have an issue with your kidney, you can notice all the other organs that are in perfect health.
2. Permanence
Reminding yourself that whatever you’re feeling, it will probably change and not last forever.
3. Gratitude
Reminding yourself that there is a lot you can be grateful for and that not everything is bad. A daily practice of writing down three things you are grateful for can already make a huge difference.
4. Humor
Laughing is a tonic. Practice to find humor in even awkward situation.
5. Self-talk
Reflect upon your inner voice and notice what it is telling you. Are you your own worst enemy or your best friend?
6. Mindfulness
Notice how you feel and what is going on around you. Develop a mindful approach to life, an approach filled with kindness towards yourself and others. Between a trigger and your reaction there exists a space of awareness, use it.
7. Relationships
You are not alone, others can help you and you can take advantage of that. Invest in building quality relationships with family, friends, colleagues and neighbors.
Being a world citizen
It’s a different outlook on life when you see yourself as a part of the entire cosmos, rather than just an inhabitant of a village, city, country or even planet Earth. When you acknowledge that we’re all tiny parts of an enormously vast web of life. On top of this only during a short period in time, unless you believe in some form of after life.
When you look towards the sky and notice far away stars, there’s a chance for your problems to shrink.
The crux of customer service
Yesterday I’ve been reminded that there are selling-buying relationships that benefit, even require, to go beyond a mere transaction. What had happened?
A monthly parking card, at the Zagreb trade fair premises, got swallowed by the apparatus which is supposed to give the card back before one is leaving the parking lot. It has worked properly in numerouses instances before, not yesterday, though. Two days later, when I came back to park at the same place, I enquired as to what could be done. A friendly clerk gave me some valuable advice and directed me to an office named “Office for security”.
After a “This is Yugoslavia” public company office reality type of throwback moment, the two clerks in the office were smoking (it must be decades since I last experienced such a scene here in Zagreb), I got brushed off by saying “There’s nothing we can do. You should notice that on the apparatus that swallowed your ticket there is a button. You need to press that button and someone will help you.” The problem was nobody had responded to that button but they wouldn’t have any of that. 0 empathy, 0 care.
An opportunity passed to prove customer satisfaction matters, to be seen and lend a helping hand, turn a negative into a positive experience. Granted, it’s nothing major but the obvious neglect was disappointing. I wonder how AI will impact customer service. Will it become better or worse? Will we loose opportunities for human connection?
Money equals energy
We continuously buy things, services, something, with money. It pays off (pun intended) to realise money is nothing else but energy with which we fuel someone else’s activities. Further down the timeline, the money we spend is being used to pay for something else, circulating energy. It never seizes to exist, it just changes its location.
What god made for fun
Following up on my last post, here’s a quote I recently came across that made me chuckle:
“Man suffers only because he takes seriously what the gods made for fun.”
Alan Watts
I wonder how often we inflate things by attaching a story to it that is much more elaborate than what is actually going on. Fact vs. fiction? In a way, we are sense making machines through stories. It’s how we manage to agree and disagree too, in politics and elsewhere.
This reminds me of my German classes in High School. Each time we’d read a poem our teacher asked us to interpret it. What did the poet mean with this? Inevitably it triggered an avalanche of hypothesis which made me wonder if the person who came up with the poem in the first place could have ever imagined all of this.
What stories are you adding to your life?
There’s always a story
Whatever happens in our lives, we attach a story to it. Someone threw a stone at our window, said something about us to a colleague at work, send us a greeting card, cut us off in traffic, it’s never only that. We create a story around it, the why, the who, the what, it becomes so much broader than the mere occurrence. We have to make sense of whatever is occurring, attaching both our mentation and imagination, our perception and interpretation, to what is going on. For better or worse, it creates the frame for our reality. There’s a chance to look outside of the frame, through introspection and a deep dive into the mental models and deeper beliefs based on which we we operate. It’s not easy but it can be done. Here are 3 recommendations on how to do it.
1. Sit in stillness
I believe the world would be a much more peaceful place if, from a young age, we learnt how to sit in silence, how to be with ourselves, observing, in a non-judgemental way, everything that comes up.
2. Talk to a professional
It could be a counselor, a psychologist, a psychotherapist, a monk…someone who is schooled in the arts of conscious living and wisdom.
3. Explore the deeper realms
Family constellation, spiritual retreats, personal growth events, get to know yourself, the spiritual being that you are who is having a human experience.
My favourite 3 personal development books
Throughout the last decades the personal development bookstore section, often referred to as popular psychology, has been gaining shelf space. Here are my all time three favourite books when it comes to personal growth:
Title: The Little Prince
Author: Saint Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
It’s the most translated book in the French language for a reason. It tells the story of a little boy who travels the universe, learning through extraordinary encounters.
Title: The Alchemist
Author: Paulo Coelho
There’s something deeply human to the arc of the story, of embarking on a far away journey, to eventually discover something meaningful about oneself and life in general.
Title: Man’s Search for Meaning
Author: Viktor E. Frankl
The descriptions of life within a Nazi concentration camp, written by a psychiatrist. Suffering is indeed optional.