Dear Webpreneurs,
Click this. Study this. Understand this. Change this.
Thanks to Chris at rawstylus for the heads up!
Category: Marketing Insight
How to kill a brand – 101
It seems that the National Heart Foundation just can’t help themselves. They’ve put the next nail in the coffin of the brand that was the once respected National Heart Foundation Tick.
A logo which once upon a time meant the food it appeared on was healthy.
If the Mcdonalds disaster wasn’t enough last year. Then surely they’re getting very close to the tipping point now.
By endorsing a certain pizza chain’s pizza, they are saying:
“Oh well, people eat junk food, so we thought we’d recommend the best of a bad lot”
Brands are never about ‘content’ they are about ‘context’. So what if this particlar pizza has less salt and fat? The association with fast food wont change the opinion of pizza, just marginalise the heart tick. Our world view on pizza is already formed.
You can read more about it here.
“If you can’t beat them, join them” ?
Startup blog says: such a mentality is a sure way for you and your brand to be absorbed into nothingness.
Decision time
Writer and pop culture specialist Thomas Hine reports the following: When consumers enter a supermarket they are exposed to 30,000 products in the average 1,800 seconds they spend walking the store.
Translation – any product only has 0.6 seconds to make an impression.
Imagine how little time we have before a web browser clicks away…so we’ve got to keep it clean.
The façade matters – a lot.
China beach
And you thought your market was crowded !
Business hygiene
We wake up in the morning. Stumble into the shower, have a shave (legs or face), wash our hair. We put on deodorant, brush our teeth, and head off to work.
We work all day.
We return home. We go to the gym or for a jog, return and shower again. Cook dinner, do the washing, tidy up the house, do the dishes, wipe down the sinks.
These are our daily tasks. Simple things which just become part of the fabric of living daily. They’re about hygiene and health.
Our business also requires daily hygiene tasks. Tasks which must happen on a daily basis: Paying invoices, managing cashflow, ordering stock, doing paperwork, answering emails, returning phone calls, talking with employees and customers, planning our day, reading industry related information…… ‘business hygiene’ tasks.
Business hygiene tasks are not game winners, but they keep us alive in a business sense. Forget these and our business can catch some terrible diseases, maybe kill it.
The best approach is to get them into a routine we perform on autopilot. Just like brushing our teeth. Then we can focus on the fun stuff.
Forget the answers
Exercise your mind
Really fit people seem to be good at all sports. Really talented at all the physical things they try. They seem to eat what they like at restaurants and yet remain svelte. How?
Here’s the trick. They don’t just play tennis, swim or jog. They do it all and more. They participate in many and varied types of physical activity and sport. So they exercise their entire body. They develop new motor skills all while refining the base they already have. They stay fit and get fitter.
Our brains work the same way. It gets fitter, stronger and more flexible the more challenges we give it. To just read about business and entrepreneurship only builds certain parts of our mind. Occasionally we need to stretch it in other ways. Read something different, watch a nature documentary, undertake some craft activity, do some gardening, go bird watching. Anything.
When we do this the interconnecting synapses in our mind will develop. We’ll then better cross fertilize our ideas and experience. We’ll open up the space for new solutions….
So please click out of this blog, and do something you’ve never done. Your mind will thank you for it.