From My Work-in-Progress Basket

Got a Tag Line? When It Makes Sense to Have a Personal Brand

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Tuesday, December  11, 2018

Delray Beach, FL.- A colleague refers to himself in his publicity as “the world’s most ___-ed man.”

Good idea or bad idea?

Epithets have power when they are short and apt and memorable. Like Honest Abe. Or Tricky Dick.

In my colleague’s case, the tag came honestly – borrowed from a book jacket endorsement. And he’s been repeating it lately in what looks like a strategic effort to carve out a “niche” in his market.

It’s an old but still interesting approach: Find an unoccupied knoll in the landscape of your industry, claim it as your own, and then do everything you can to remain king of it. If you can gain the reputation of being the smartest or most honest or most reliable person in your neck of the marketplace, you’ve achieved something very valuable.

Likewise, gaining a reputation for being a master of a particular business skill is immensely valuable. You will always have more work than you can handle. And you’ll be able to charge more for your time than your competitors will be getting. In fact, if you are smart in choosing customers/clients, you could make twice or three times the amount others in your field typically make.

And once you have the reputation, using an epithet is a super-efficient tool for establishing a personal brand.

Building True Expertise

If the field you work in is crowded, it’s difficult to rise to the top. This is when it makes sense to narrow your brand to a small or neglected niche.

For example, 20 years ago, when I first started writing about business (in Early to Rise), there were all sorts of people out there claiming to be experts in internet marketing.

But within five years, the field had expanded so rapidly that it was no longer credible to position oneself as an Internet Marketing Master. So what happened then was a proliferation of people promoting themselves as gurus of particular aspects of internet marketing – like free-to-paid or VSLs or webinars or product launches. Dozens of individuals developed multimillion-dollar businesses by claiming the high ground in these niche areas.

To be successful as an internet marketer today, you have to get even more specific. You might, for example, develop expertise in product launch formulas for natural health products using YouTube as the medium. So if I were starting out now and wanted to enjoy the benefits of a personal brand, I’d certainly consider using the efficiency of an epithet. But I’d make sure that it would be a very, very narrow handle that I could justly claim for myself. Because if you claim to be what you are not, you will do the opposite of what you want to do.

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Notes From My Journal

Steve Jobs on “Why Companies Fail”

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Tuesday, November 27, 2018

Sao Paulo.- I’m in Brazil, catching up on email before I get to work – and I came across a video by Steve Jobs that Sean MacIntyre sent me. (See the link to the video, below.) It’s very good. And Jobs was fundamentally right.

I’ve never thought of it in quite this way, but I’ve always had a gut feeling that product development should lead the business.

When you are just starting out, you have to focus on sales and marketing. That’s because until you’ve been in business for years, you don’t actually know enough about the kind of products your market really wants.

Jobs understood this. In launching his business, he was all about discovering what the market really wanted in terms of customer experience. He said so on many occasions. But as the business grows beyond the point where it is selling hundreds of millions of dollars of product each year, there is a natural tendency for the marketers to take over.

And that can be dangerous – even destructive.

Everything ultimately depends on customer experience. And customer experience is 50% the experience of buying the product and 50% the experience of using it.

The way I have dealt with this has been to preach what I call “incremental augmentation.” It is essentially a refutation of the old adage: If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it.

For me, a healthy business is one whose products are forever improving. And a smart founder/CEO is one that is never satisfied with yesterday’s product.

Jobs’ video provides a deeper insight into why that is smart.

One of the reasons I decided to rewrite Ready, Fire, Aim– my most popular business book – is because, since it was published,  I’ve had many new ideas about why some entrepreneurial businesses are incredibly successful, and some fail miserably.

I’ve posted the introduction and part of the first chapter of my rewrite here on this blog, and I’ll be posting the rest as I get each section finished. One subject that I’m quite sure I will include is the challenge of reining in a big and fast-growing company when its leaders are all very adept at creating profitable growth.

Take a look at what Jobs has to say about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fuZ6ypueK8M

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Miscellaneous Essays

Motivation

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I was once characterized by a book reviewer as a “motivational writer.” Apparently he felt that this moniker debased me. It didn’t.

I am very happy that my writing sometimes has the effect of motivating people. I find it hard to understand what is wrong with that. If he meant to imply that my work doesn’t have substance he should have said so. But I don’t think he dared say that because the book he was reviewing was about building businesses — and that is something I know a great deal more about than the average reader of that book, including him.

Still, a lot of folks have the idea that motivating people is somehow less legitimate than, say, just providing them with information. The thinking seems to go something like this: “Don’t try to excite me. Don’t try to get me moving. Just tell me the facts.”

But knowing the facts is only 20 percent of success. Testing the facts by putting them into action is 80 percent.

I can’t say for sure when motivation started creeping into my writing. But it was at least 20 years ago — well before I started writing books about marketing and business. I think it began when I became a consultant and realized that I couldn’t force my clients to execute my ideas. If I wanted them to follow my suggestions, I would have to take the extra step of motivating them to do it.

When I make presentations to a group, I try to motivate my audience to take the action I want them to take by using the persuasive techniques that I teach marketers to use in selling products. For one thing, I express the value of my ideas in terms of how the people I’m speaking to (not me or anyone else) will benefit from them.

I also sell one idea at a time. I have learned that if I try to do more, they (and I) will come away with nothing.

Whenever possible, I present my ideas through stories — because stories, more than any other information-sharing technique, have the power to inspire.

And I provide proof to support the claims I make. Tangible, relevant, and impressive proof.

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