Business Development

Good branding, bad branding and porn

Seth Godin wrote an interesting post today commenting on what he acidly describes as "dumb branding strategy." Here's part of what he had to say:

Jewelry Central is a really bad brand name. So are Party Land, Computer World, Modem Village, House of Socks and Toupee Town.

It's a bad brand name because Central or Land or World are meaningless. They add absolutely no value to your story, they mean nothing and they are interchangeable. "Here honey, I bought you these cheap earrings at Diamond World!" Not only are they bland, but you can't even remember one over the other. This is the absolute last refuge of a marketer who has absolutely nothing to say and can't even find the guts to stand for what they do. It's just generic.

Where I run into this is in helping clients think about tag lines. Particularly with professional services firms, there isn't much you can do about the actual name of the enterprise: it's the name of the founders. But you do have a chance to present a tag line, and that is where you can brand yourself. Or not. Frequently, what happens is "not." Here are a few examples (some of these are somewhat out of date, but trust me, they illustrate the current landscape nicely anyway):

"Power of Collaboration"
"Forging Results in a New Business Age"
"A Tradition of Innovation"
"Solutions For A Changing World"
"A Source of Strength"

These, and many more like them, beautifully illustrate Godin's point -- bland, forgettable, meaningless and interchangeable.

Now, let's consider our friends in the brave new world of pornography. Setting morality aside, let's look at this industry purely as a business. The adult market is ferociously competitive. They have been on top of every new technical innovation, including the Internet, for years. I have heard, and I believe it's true, that the industry's revenues exceed that of Hollywood's. And, to top it all off, they excel at branding. The names they give their products, and their stars, are memorable, unique, and  usually make it clear exactly what they're promising.  Can there be any doubt as to what a movie called "The Babysitter" is going to be like? Or about?

There are many more examples, which, for obvious reasons, I can't present here. But I'm sure you get the point. The first rule of branding is "Thou shalt not be forgettable." Pornographers get this. Law firms often don't.

How to Create a Powerpoint Presentation That Absolutely Kicks Ass

Several of the bloggers I read all the time, such as Jim Calloway and Tom Kane, have recently posted about how to give a great Powerpoint presentation. Since I just finished teaching a workshop on the topic, I thought I'd add my own take.

As usual, I approach the subject a little differently. Giving a Powerpoint presentation is a skill, like playing tennis or speaking Italian. The single greatest teacher, by a long shot, is experience and practice. Also, everyone has their own way of presenting, and my job as a teacher is to help them discover and nurture it. Therefore, I don't believe in feeding clients a million little thou-shalt-nots about how to present. Instead, I think it's a lot more helpful to teach them the underlying principles behind presenting in general, and then help them discover and refine their own technique.

Here, then, are the Sacred Seven Principles For Creating A Powerpoint Presentation That Absolutely Kicks Ass.

1. Your audience is only going to remember a few things. Almost all presentations are packed with way, way too much detail. The human memory and attention span is more than a little flawed, and there is no way anyone is going to remember more than about six things from your presentation. Think very carefully about what those six things are going to be.
2. You only have about twenty minutes of free attention. After that, if your audience isn't interested in what you're telling them, they will mentally check out, and you will not get them back. You have to give them a series of reasons to pay attention. Just being in the room and forced to watch isn't one of them.
3. Interaction is everything. The idea is not to have your audience sit there mutely while you pour information into their waiting minds. A great presentation is a participatory exercise -- everyone takes part, and everyone wins.
4. Nothing every works flawlessly. The technical guy is your new best friend. Murphy's Law was written for Powerpoint presentations. Be prepared for something to go very wrong, and have expert help at hand, along with a contingency plan.
5. You know a lot more than your audience does. Many people wake up sobbing in fear at the idea of having to deliver a presentation, because they're afraid of being humiliated or challenged by their audience. This isn't likely, and if it happens, it won't work, because you almost always know a lot more than your audience. Farewell, stage fright.
6. You must create and provide structure. The old saying "Tell them what you're going to tell them, then tell them, then tell them what you've told them" is absolutely right. Your audience needs to know how what you're saying fits together. Make it crystal-clear, and repeat it.
7. Your audience is there to listen to you, not to look at your slides. The slides are simply an accent, a decoration, if you will. They want to hear you, and feel like they connected with you. Don't let them down.

Networking and the Kitchen Timer

Too often, and for too many people, networking is one of those "I know I should do it, but I never quite got around to it" activities. Over at one of my favorite sites, LifeHack, they have an approach that offers hope. And a solution.

In case you're not familiar with it, LifeHack is a productivity blog. The term "hack" is based in computing (remember I'm in Silicon Valley, right?) and refers to doing something quick-and-dirty, usually when programming, to rapidly solve a problem or untangle a mess. A hack isn't always elegant, completely thought out or impressive, but it makes the problem go away.

LifeHack, then, is a site about litle tricks and tips that make  your day-to-day life smoother and more productive. Everyone has these. Sometimes they're physical -- they're the hook your keys always go on when you return to the house, so you never have to waste time searching for them.

But they can also be mental. These are the tricks you use to compensate for your shortcomings, or to overcome some kind of tedency. Like, say, the tendency not to network. Which got me thinking about my kitchen timer.

I hate to file. Stuff piles up. This becomes a recurring nightmare. I solved the problem through a lifehack. I bought a kitchen timer at Target. You wind it up, set the time, and after 30 minutes, 45 minutes or whatever, the bell dings and time's up. If you're in the kitchen, it's time to take the cake out of the oven. It ticks loudly, so you always know it's running.

I don't bake a lot of cakes. Instead, I use it to force myself to file. Left to my own devices, my filing doesn't happen, and chaos ensues. So what I do is set the timer for 30 minutes, and during those thirty minutes, I don't allow myself to do anything but file. The ticking reminds me to stay on task. If I use this technique two or three times a week, the filing gets done, and my stress level about it drops.

This is a lifehack. I use this trick to compensate for my lack of discipline, and although it isn't pretty, the filng gets done.

Think of ways to apply this to your own networking. Networking, like filing, is something you need to keep doing, repeatedly, basically for your entire career. If there is a list of people you need to stay in touch with, suppose you printed all the names out on index cards, and asked your secretary to pick one, at random, every morning and bring it into your office? And no matter what else was going on, you would take the ninety seconds, RIGHT THEN, to simply pick up the phone and call them? Your networking would be right up to speed.

How else could you apply this concept?

Responsiveness

It is INCREDIBLY important to be responsive, and this is nowhere more important or impressive than on emails. When a client, or a prospect, emails you, if you can respond right away, you immediately, and potently, reinforce the impression that you are thinking about them and their issues, and create a chance to have a dialogue, which is what builds relationships. Responsive is good. Responsive and fast is terrific.

Today's Golden Blackberry award, then, goes to Kipley Bruketa, marketing director of Littler Mendelson, in San Francisco. I emailed Kipley about something this morning at 6:12:34 Pacific time. I happen to be on the East Coast, so it's 9:30, and I expected my email to land in her inbox, to be perused when she got in.

She responded three minutes later. In her response, she informed me that she was traveling, so she probably emailed me from a Blackberry, standing in line at an airport somewhere.

Wow. Kipley, your award is in the mail.

Want to See a Great Presentation? Watch this.

Over at Marketing Catalyst, Bruce Allen has written what may be the single best post I've ever read on how to deliver a great presentation. Part of it is storytelling.I live within ten miles of the best person at this in the world: Steve Jobs.

Anyone presenting anything can learn an enormous amount from Jobs. His speaking skills are legendary. He is so persuasive, so compelling, and so good, that hearing Jobs speak has been described as entering a "Reality Distortion Field." Here's how Jobs' presentation skills are described in the book iCon: Steve Jobs -- The Greatest Second Act In the History of Business.

Almost anyone but a professional lecturer or a self-help guru would put an audience to sleep. Not Steve Jobs. He is a captivating speaker who exudes as much charisma to an audience of thousands as he does one-on-one (when on his best behavior). . . While his public relations people stand in the wings, panicked because they have no idea what to expect, Steve takes the stage with the aura of Mick Jagger. He is a sensational speaker, gripping, magnetic. To know that he does this without notes, without a TelePrompTer, without rehearsal, is to know you are witnessing a magic act. Steve Jobs, magician extraordinaire, pulls the rabbit out of the hat every time.

In addition to boatloads of natural talent, Jobs is a brilliant speaker because his presentations track the three points in Allen's post. He keeps his slides incredibly, almost childishly simple. He tells a story. And he saves the technical details for later.

Any effective presentation or speech has to have some emotional content. Some drama, some humor, some impact. Endless, hyperbulleted Powerpoint presentations completely squash this. The presentation itself needs to be light on bullet points, and needs to tell a story. The audience does not want to sit and read the slide. They want to HEAR YOU SPEAK. The Powerpoint deck is merely decoration. Another excellent blog post on this topic is on a site called Presentation Zen, and explores the differences between the way Bill Gates does PowerPoint and the way  Jobs does. Gates' presentations are terrible, because they're not very visual, and filled with bullet points. Jobs' are spellbinding, because he tells stories, talks to the audience, and uses a lot of images.

The handout is where you can dig into details. But people who are hearing a speech love to hear a good story. The rest, as they say, is detail.

For a brilliant example of Jobs at work, watch this clip. This is Jobs introducing the iPod. Although he goes into some technical detail in this speech, more than anything, he tells a story. "Here's what the world needed. Here's what we did. Here's why it's great. Look!"

If you're reading this, and you need to give a presentation, you can do the exact same thing.

Marketing by Publishing Your Own Book

For several years, one of the hottest advertising agencies in San Francisco has been Goodby, Silverstein. They're famous for the quality of their creative, and a couple of years ago, I also got an inside look at how they pitch new business. Part of how they do it is by publishing a book.

As I recall, the pitch was for Pacific Bell. At the end, they gave each PacBell executive who attended the presentation a custom-designed book. The book itself was kind of dreck -- it was a compilation of half-baked biographies of the creative team, and some marketing baloney about the firm.

However, it was beautiful. The designers at Goodby, who are really talented, had done an incredible job. The cover had a set of really neat illustrations of the different forms of communication through history,and so on. It was a thing of beauty, and a giveaway that the recipients of the pitch hung onto for a long time as a memento.

In today's blog post, David Maister explores how technology has made publishing your own book easy, quick and relatively painless. It's a good read. If you have the content, creating a book is easy, and it's an unbelievably impressive thing to give clients. What used to take a team of professional designers weeks can now be done in a matter of days, for a lot less money.

Read the post. It's instructive. And you may just have a book in you after all.

Marketing through storytelling

I have been doing a lot of work lately in the area of networking, and one of my heroes is Keith Ferrazzi, author of "Never Eat Alone." In his blog, Keith wrote recently about the power of storytelling in marketing. He's on to something.

Stories organize reality. In the real world, events don't occur in a structured, meaningful way -- they just occur. Stories are how we make sense of them. They mean arranging events in a narrative, with a conclusion. Basically, they're a way of bringing order to chaos.

One of my favorite examples is the final scene from the movie The Graduate. Remember? Benjamin storms the church where Elaine is about the marry the other guy, and he and Elaine flee together -- she's in a wedding dress. They run down some street in Los Angeles, and make their getaway by climbing onto a bus. The final shot of the film is the two of them sitting in the back of the bus as it heads down the street.

But what makes the scene amazing is the look they exchange at the end. After a scene like this, had they gazed into each others' eyes, and passionately kissed, we would all have known this was a Happily Ever After story, and all the preceding events would have been seen that way.

Instead, they give one another this look of utter ambivalence. Dustin Hoffman, in particular, makes it clear that he doesn't really know what to do next, what he's done, what's going to happen. He looks a little baffled. This completely changes how we perceive all the events that preceded that look, and the whole meaning of the story.

People have been telling each other stories since we climbed down out of the trees. Stories, really, are what marketing is all about. The best marketers know this instinctively. Apple spends hundreds of millions of dollars a year on marketing. They employ over 17,000 people. Steve Jobs is worth around $5 billion. Yet, their stories are all about quirkiness, individuality, creativity. And their 1984 commercial may be the most powerful, famous little story ever told.

Understand stories, and you'll understand marketing.

P.S. For an in-depth at how this all works within organizations, take a look at John Seely Brown's book Storytelling in Organizations.