Finding the "Wow!"

SETI is a collective term for anything that concerns the search for extraterrestrial life in the universe. SETI asks the question: Is there anyone out there?

In 1955, Ohio State University built a telescope they called “Big Ear” to continuously scan the cosmos for radio signals. It wasn’t until 1977 that Jerry Ehman, a project volunteer, witnessed a startlingly strong signal received by the telescope. On the computer printout of the data he famously wrote “Wow!” in the margin.

It only happened once. But they heard it. They heard it because they were actively listening.

A couple weeks ago we conducted a strategy offsite with a client in Canada. She has a interconnected series of brands and wanted clarity on the best way to organize and grow her businesses. 

We didn’t approach the session with a specific point of view or predetermined answers. What we did was ask the right questions. And then we listened. 

When you actively listen - a mysterious and convoluted problem can be distilled into a clear signal. At the end of the day, the wall was covered with giant Post-It notes. On the last one we wrote “Wow!” in the margin.

To Win Big, Think Small

“Alice in Wonderland-like” syndrome is a disorder of the brain. The symptoms are named after Lewis Carroll’s protagonist Alice, who went down a rabbit hole and found herself shrinking or expanding depending on her circumstances. People who are afflicted by it misperceive the size and distance of objects, seeing them as larger or smaller than their natural state. 

In a white paper, comScore has reported that a staggering 80% of social media viewing is done on mobile devices. How do people choose what to consume? They click on thumbnails that jump out at them. So not only are viewers encountering content at a tiny scale, they are choosing what to click from even tinier thumbnail images.

When designing artwork for social media, for Facebook, for YouTube, you have to zoom way out.  When people view your post, your thumbnail may be as small as 3/4 of an inch wide. If your designs have lots of copy, small font sizes or detailed imagery, people are going to get frustrated and scroll right past them. Opportunity lost.

But when people click your thumbnail, you get traffic. When you get traffic, you win. To win big, you have to start by thinking small.

Retail Trend: The Cattle Chute Method

Cows are distractible. They have 360° wide-angle vision and are confused by everything from moving shadows to puddles of water, as well as any surface they can see though. To get cows to go where you want them to go, you line them up single file in a cattle chute.

It’s like putting blinders on a horse: you set it up so they are seeing only what you want them to see.

Last week the New York Times published an article about how Amazon has developed over 100 private label brands - with dozens more planned. If you search for a battery, a cable, or some other household item you will find Amazon Basics dominating the top results. It's a shopper cattle chute.

The best way to compete against the encroachment of private label is through superior brand recognition, product quality and design. To create your cattle chute you must eliminate customer distractions. You show them only exceptional brand visuals and create a simple, compelling customer journey and experience.

Are your customers seeing only what you want them to see?

Sunken Treasure

Remus 6000 spends most of it’s time deep below the surface. An underwater robot, Remus’ long-range sonar scans the bottom and then goes back to take pictures of anything it finds unusual. 

In May, Remus took pictures of what the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution is calling the “holy grail of shipwrecks” 2000 feet down in the Caribbean. The San Jose, a 310-year-old Spanish galleon carrying gold, silver and emeralds worth as much as $17 billion.

You can’t see the bullion, cannons and artifacts scattered across the ocean floor from the surface you have to go deeper. And you need Remus 6000 to get there.

When speaking of brand value, many talk about how recognizable the logo is, how innovative the product is, the imagery used in marketing. But that stuff is what we see on the surface. The things today’s customers take for granted. You have to go deeper. And you need an agency partner to get there.

Below the surface is the realm of customer journeys and experience. Below the surface is where relationships are forged, where customer satisfaction is created and true brand evangelists are born. 

Below the surface is where the brand value treasure lies.

THREE LITTLE WORDS (AND PEOPLE ARE FREAKING OUT)

Companies regularly write lengthy vision statements, mission statements and mottos. Sadly, far too many turn out to be empty emotional BS.

Before Google got humongous they wrote a cheeky, three word, silicon-valley-punk credo for themselves: “Don’t Be Evil”. Having written a lot of long client credos, I loved it because it was only three words. And I loved Google as a business for putting a moral stake in the ground. 

Recently Google has been considering working on lucrative contracts for the Defense Department. Something about using AI and video image recognition for drone accuracy from what I’ve read. It seems lots of folks who work at Google are freaking out. They think that helping drones kill people better falls into the “evil” category just a tad. I’d have to agree.

Establishing a credo can be one of the most powerful things a brand can create. It guides every brand decision and action. It keeps you and your employees grounded in the brand values. Sometimes those values are tested.

Ultimately, Google withstood their test by refusing the Defense projects, demonstrating to the world their credo is meaningful and authentic.

Even if it is only three words.

Different Is Better Than Better

If you’ve ever stayed in central London you know that the hotels are fantastic. The best.

There are hotels that have old world charm that come in a range of prices. There are contemporary design hotels like St. Martins Lane but these are always very pricey. What didn’t exist was a high-tech high-design option available at a lower price point.

The savvy folks at hub by Premier Inn noticed this empty quadrant in the X/Y map of the competitive landscape. So they did what any smart brand does, they filled it.

I stayed at hub by Premier Inn when I was at a conference recently. My room was about 9 x 14 feet - about the size of a generous jail cell. There was no window, just a backlit glass panel that made you feel like there was one. The headboard was a touchscreen that controlled everything from the “do not disturb” sign outside to the A/C. The interior design was so inspiring and clever I never felt deprived. In fact, I felt smart, stylish and just a little bit richer. 

By expertly delivering on an unmet need, hub by Premier Inn has expanded to 40 locations in under 5 years. Hub is killing it.

Take a fresh look at your competitive landscape. Does everyone look the same? Are they offering the same things, in the same way? Where is the white space that you can fill?

Your Best Self: 7 Mantras for Designers & Entrepreneurs

Mantras are not just for meditating. Mantras are simply ideas and philosophies to live by. Some people call them maxims, mottos or catchphrases. They have one purpose: to keep us on track. They prevent us from going a down a rabbit hole. They act as guardrails for our thoughts and actions so we can focus our energy.

Here are seven mantras that I think are valuable for designers and entrepreneurs to keep in mind. 

#1 Be human.

When your brand is your business, you can sometimes act more like your brand than yourself. No one wants to work with a brand robot – a brandbot. Strategy is great, processes are great, brand tenets are great, but underneath it all we're people. We're original, quirky, and unpredictable. In other words, we’re human. As a businessperson, you do represent a brand, but don’t hold back on showing your humanity (it’s called the Pratfall Effect). Be personable, because people like to work with people that they like. Be humble, because people like to work with people with compassion. Be flexible, because people like to work with people who are open to new things. Most importantly, be you.

#2 Choose fun.

We got into this line of work because we didn't want to have an uninspiring, humdrum life. We became designers and entrepreneurs because we wanted excitement. We wanted to have fun. We wanted to do creative things. Design and entrepreneurship are tough fields, and you have to work really hard at it to be successful. But remember why you're doing it. You're doing it to create a fun, invigorating, extraordinary life for yourself. So try not to take yourself too seriously. Throughout the day you make thousands of choices. As much as you can, choose fun.

#3 What’s the worst that can happen?

Fear can be really debilitating. Whether it’s fear of trying something new, putting ourselves out there or going against the grain, fear can stop you dead in your tracks. Instead of letting fear guide your action - or inaction, think through the fear to the very end. “What’s the worst thing that can happen if things go wrong?” is a powerful question that can shrink  fear dramatically. Think it through; Will you get fired? Lose your apartment? Lose your girlfriend? Most of the time these imaginary disasters never happen, and once you realize that, it frees you up to be more courageous and try new things. And if something does go wrong, simply ask for forgiveness. Making a mistake is never the end of everything. Put fear in its place. Be brave.  
 

#4 Build your resources.

As designers and entrepreneurs, we often like to do everything ourselves. But ultimately, if we want to do bigger and better things, we need additional resources. Be proactive about gathering service providers, companies, printers, coders, any specialists that could help you at some point in time.

Start creating and curating a cache of professionals that allow you to do increasingly ambitious work for your clients. Keep those connections warm so they're there when you need them. Pick a day of the week, say, “Freelancer Friday” to reach out to one or two of your connections. Send a quick text or email, ask them what they’re up to, like some of their social media posts (see more suggestions here). It only takes a few minutes to reach out and if you do it faithfully for a few weeks, you’ll find yourself top-of-mind with them and ready for any project, at any time.

#5 First things first.

Procrastination is a killer for designers and entrepreneurs. Prioritizing tasks and projects can be difficult, but it’s the backbone of success. Tim Ferriss, human guinea pig and lifehacker, has some great advice, “You can spend the whole of the day busy, but fail to tackle the most important items, which in many cases are the hardest things on your plate. So isolate the one or two most important things you need to accomplish today. One or two only.” (Inc.com)

I noticed that Tim was right. Now I move the hardest things to the top of the list and do those first. It pays off. Mark Twain, commenting on doing the dreaded tasks before the easy ones, said, “Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.” Amen.

#6 Done is better than perfect.

Designers and entrepreneurs, as a group, are perfectionists. This trait serves us well most of the time, but if you lean too heavily on it, it becomes a crutch. Perfectionism is a way of resisting the future. “Perfect lets you stall, ask more questions, do more reviews, dumb it down, safe it up and generally avoid doing anything that might fail (or anything important),” (Seth Godin).

Instead of focusing on getting things done perfectly, focusing on just getting things done.

Get them out the door. Volume trumps perfection any day of the week. Consistency beats infrequency. More is better, and frequency boosts recognition for your brand. So instead of being a perfectionist and trying to massage every fine detail, get it out the door. No one is really going to notice that level of perfection except you. It's better to just get it done, and move on to the next thing.

#7 When in doubt, communicate.

Here’s the biggest complaint I've heard in my career from designers and people I've worked with; "I don't know what's going on. No one's telling me anything."

It's really hard to do your job well if you feel under-informed. Don’t wallow in victimhood about being out of the loop. It’s probably not intentional. Find the person who might know what you feel like you’re missing and ask them to brief you. On the flip-side, you have to make sure clients know what's going on in your head and you know what's going on in theirs. You need to be consistently aligned to deliver your best work. There is no other way to do this than to communicate. Over-communicate, even. Especially when the news that you're trying to communicate is bad. Always recap conversations and meetings in writing. Communication is a conflict killer.

These mantras have helped me keep my thoughts and projects focused and on track.  They’ve helped me sidestep many professional potholes. If some of these resonate with you, I hope you incorporate them into your daily life. Make them visible. Put them on a post-it, make a graphic as your home screen, or tack it on your office wall. Make up your own mantras. They will enhance your focus, energy and undoubtedly smooth your pathway to success.

The Sexy Potato

There are watershed moments in our professional lives where something happens that changes everything. Mine was during a photo shoot for Lay’s potato chips.

Lay’s is, maybe unsurprisingly to salty snack fans, the largest food brand in the world, selling in 50+ countries with revenue of $1.7 billion. With a business that big you have to be very careful what you do in a package redesign - well, for obvious reasons. 

So there we were, shooting the sliced raw potato that appears on the back of the core plain flavor of Lay’s. My marketing partner was not happy. The raw potato was unattractive. The raw potato was missing irresistible flavor appeal, that je ne sais quoi.

She said “Philip, we need a really sexy potato”. It was in that moment that I realized I was not in the right place. And that I needed to make a change.

We finished the shoot. We had successfully coaxed the requisite appeal from the potato - as reluctant a subject as she was. But something inside me had shifted. Four weeks later I resigned from Pepsico. A potato was my tipping point.

We don’t get to choose our watershed moments. The trick is to use them as a springboard for positive change when they happen. For me it was a sexy potato. A potato that launched the most exciting and fulfilling chapter of my life.

5 Reasons Why You Should Be Developing Content Now

For any personal brand, entrepreneur, or business the most important thing is the power of attraction. How are you going to get clients, customers, and a tribe to come to you? How are you going to attract them to your goods, services and all you have to offer?

Once you get them, how are you going to retain them? How do you become their favorite? How do you build a level of credibility that creates a steadfast belief in you? Executing flawlessly on your offering, both in product quality and service excellence is one way. But today that isn’t enough. Today that is the baseline. How you rise above the competition is by establishing content development as a core competency. So, what are some of the benefits?

#1 It Contributes To Professional Independence

Statistics show 40.4% of the U.S. workforce is now made up of “contingent workers” -that is, people who are what we traditionally consider freelancers or independent contractors. The Bureau of Labor Statistics last reported in 2005 that number was 11.6%. Think about that trend for a minute. Sobering, huh? Some estimate that by 2020 up to 50% of the American workforce could be untethered from full-time employment. This means there's a lot of people out there who are going to have to start developing independent marketing messages to attract their own customers and clients. They won't have a traditional job or a company that they work for to do that for them. Therefore, developing a level of independence is in reality developing a level of income security. Developing content is a key personal brand building activity that can help establish that independence.

#2 It Establishes Credibility

By developing content; articles, blog posts, videos, infographics, presentations, courses, newsletters, curated material, it helps establish you as a thought leader in the marketplace. Content development gives you the opportunity to demonstrate that you truly know your stuff. That you are an expert. If you offer up real value, your audience will recognize, remember, and come to revere you. Additionally, when you offer content for free it draws your audience to you even quicker. Of course, paid advertising can also draw a crowd but that activity is pure promotion. Developing content exercises the law of attraction in a way that can't be bought.

#3 It Exercises Your Creativity Muscle

Developing content is going to help you develop a special kind of muscle. A creativity muscle. Any artist, singer, painter, musician knows that by practicing their craft, they develop a creative muscle that keeps a level of “flow” happening. And if they stop practicing their art for any period of time, they get rusty and it takes them a while to get back into that flow and creative output. By making a commitment to develop content on a regular basis you're exercising your creativity muscle. You become an idea generation heavyweight. Execution is easy, but killer ideas are the fuel of innovation and growth.

#4 It Increases Confidence

Developing content is an excellent way to feel great about yourself. You're going to rapidly realize just how much it is that you know. It helps to create a personal, internal resonance of the value you can offer the world. Simultaneously, you are demonstrating your knowledge to others while in the process providing real value to them. Simply put, helping folks just makes you feel good. Like anything truly worthwhile, developing content is somewhat awkward and scary in the beginning. But over time you get better at it and it feels like a much easier and more natural thing to do.

#5 It Grows Your Business

Content development used as in-bound marketing is great for business. I’m living proof. In two years my YouTube channel and brand•muse newsletter now generate over 75% of my agency’s new business leads. By developing content that's valuable to people they become willing evangelists for your brand. And because people trust other people’s recommendations more than advertising messages or a brand promoting itself, it means your tribe becomes your marketing department. Every new piece of content you produce seeds priceless word-of-mouth marketing.

Sure, the content landscape has gotten pretty noisy and the competition for eyeballs and ears is fierce. But the benefits of developing content are as much internal as they are external. So, if you haven’t yet begun to do it, now is the time to begin. No more excuses. At the beginning you will suck at it. Everybody does. But over time the creative muscle strengthens and the gears of the idea machine start to hum. You’ll get better. But to reap these benefits, you just have to start.

Photo credit: Getty Images

Philip VanDusen is a creative thought leader and principal of Verhaal Brand Design an agency that specializes in leveraging brand strategy and design to build brand affinity and equity for companies and entrepreneurs. Get more from Philip in his newsletter brand•muse, His YouTube channel or connect with Verhaal Brand Design on Facebook.

Did You Get My Message?

In June of 1886 the German ship Paula took part in an experiment to test the ocean currents affecting shipping routes. Over a 69 year period they tossed thousands of amber glass bottles overboard that held small slips of paper. The messages asked whoever found them to report back to the German Naval Observatory with the location of where it washed up on shore.

Last month a woman was walking on the sand dunes on a remote beach in West Australia and found what is now the world's oldest known message in a bottle, almost 132 years after it was thrown into the sea. Let’s just say the location report didn’t do the Germans much good at this point.

When you send your messages, your in-bound content marketing, your social media communications out into the world, are you doing so just hoping that your customer target happens to come across it on their digital shores? 

Knowing how, when and where to target your efforts constitutes the difference between truly effective brand building activity and tossing a message in a bottle into the sea. Because no one wants to wait 132 years for a new business lead.

photo credit: Getty Images / Paul Barton

The 7 Commandments of Brand Design

"Your brand is the single most important investment that you'll make in your business."
- Steve Forbes

When I talk about branding, I often talk about the 3 R’s: recognized, remembered and revered. The success of any brand can be measured by how well it has achieved those three simple words. But how do you get there? The design of a brand has to hit on a lot of cylinders to get to those 3 R’s. Here are seven of the key attributes of a brand’s design that are critical to success.

1st COMMANDMENT:  Make It Beautiful

Beautiful design is proven to be a quantifiable competitive advantage. Having an elegant, contemporary design is what today’s consumers expect. Great brand design is easy to look at. You need to look successful to be successful. A homely, amateurish brand design is going to make people click away from you, and you're not going to build your business that way. No one is going to volunteer to be an evangelist for an ugly brand.

2nd COMMANDMENT:  Make It Simple

The world is way too noisy and too complicated. We're inundated with a tremendous amount of visual stimulation and information every moment. Everyone's looking for simplicity in their lives. If you make it simple, you make it a less complicated and less stressful experience to interact with your brand. You also make it easier to be remembered (there’s an R again) and easier for customers to communicate what you do to others.

3rd COMMANDMENT:  Make it Strategic

Hoping it looks good is not a strategy. Your brand design has to be created with intentional focus on what your target customer avatar wants and is expecting from you. You have to display an aspirational aesthetic and speak their visual and verbal language. Great brand design is about reduction. Getting rid of all that is unnecessary and boiling down to the essence. Brand design strategy is as much what not to show as it is what to show. All design execution needs to stem directly from the brand strategy.

4th COMMANDMENT:  Communicate

All strategic brand design is communication. You need to communicate who you are, what you do, how you do it, how you do it differently and why people should care. Powerful brand design communicates through three things: semiotics, the meaning of symbols and images, through color theory and color psychology, and through verbal or written communication. By artistically weaving those three together, you tell a brand story.

5th COMMANDMENT:  Be Different

From the time we're adolescents, we all seek to fit in. Humans naturally gravitate towards the median,  to “normal”. It takes a lot of work, concentration and real courage to be different. Just like the brand’s unique selling proposition, having a brand design that visually differentiates you from your competitive environment can make breaking through the noise a hell of a lot easier. Just ask Method the home cleaning products brand. By adopting a product line in clear bottles with whimsical shapes and a rainbow of liquid colors they smashed through the sea of blue and orange dominating the laundry aisle owned by Tide and Gain. Not an easy thing to do. But they did it through design.

6th COMMANDMENT:  Be Consistent

In order to be recognized, you have to be remembered, and in order to be remembered, you have to be consistent. Everywhere your brand shows up, at every brand touch-point; online, retail, social, outdoor, packaging, media, your imagery, your color, all of your brand design elements have to be absolutely consistent. Every inconsistent touch-point erodes customer recognition. Inconsistency bleeds brand equity.

7th COMMANDMENT:  Be Memorable

If you're simple, if you're different, if you're consistent and if you communicate, you'll be memorable. And being memorable is the gold standard of brand design. If you're memorable, people will return to you, and they'll recognize you wherever they come across you. You'll create brand evangelists who will ultimately do the work of building your brand for you. And it doesn’t get better than that. Amen.

photo: Charlton Heston in Cecile B. DeMille film "The Ten Commandments"

The Wipe Out

When I was in art school, I had a drawing instructor who had this one exercise that I never forgot. He would instruct you to draw a model for 90 minutes in soft charcoal. You would work slavishly, perfecting every curve and shadow. Then when time was up, he’d say “OK, take your chamois cloth and wipe it all out”.

Some students would gasp, others were incredulous. But I’ll lose all my work!

Once the drawings were erased he said, “OK, now you have three minutes to draw the entire thing again.”

Inevitably, the resulting drawings would be amazing. More full of life than the over-worked 90 minute versions. Why? Because we hadn’t really wiped out the drawing. The previous 90 minutes was visually engrained and in our muscle memory.

As entrepreneurs and creative professionals we may start a project, a product, a business that gets wiped out. Clients lost. Customers vanish. But what we have to remember is that the work we put in, the brain power we invested isn’t gone. It is in our muscle memory, ready to be released, full of life. Refined. Essential. The next one will be amazing.

photo: Shalom Jacobovitz

The Brand from the Black Lagoon

When the film The Shape of Water was released my first response was disbelief. One of my favorite films as a kid was The Creature from the Black Lagoon, a black and white classic that was terrifying and yet somehow comforting in memory. How could they remake it? 

But when I saw the new version I was stunned by its beauty and poetry and thankfully it was a lot less scary. I guess I wasn’t alone. It just received the Oscar for Best Picture. 

Last week I was contacted by a prospective client who wants me to revise their brand identity. In doing my research I checked out their website. The site was like looking at a faded postcard from 1991. Unresponsive, a clunky columned layout, low resolution photographs.

The client had no idea how dated it had become. They remembered it as classic and comfortable. 

Is there an aspect of your brand that is due for a remake? Something you might revise to reach a level of beauty, poetry and performance that you hadn’t thought possible? And maybe at the same time make a little less scary?

photo: ©Universal Pictures

That Sinking Feeling

The Millennium Tower in San Francisco is sinking. Instead of using supports driven 200 feet down into bedrock, the 58 story structure was built on 950 “friction piles” in the sandy soil.

Now, 7 years after completion it’s sunk 15 inches and is leaning 2 inches to the northeast. The tower sits on a massive fault line in the earthquake-prone city, so having a stable foundation would probably be a good idea.

I thought of the Millennium Tower last week when talking with a client who has built a large online presence. They lamented that they had never invested in a full brand identity system when they launched and instead tacked on bits and pieces as they grew.

Now they find their brand aesthetic is inconsistent across a huge range of visual assets. The brand equity they have tried to build is sinking. 

We’re going to fix it, but in the earthquake zone that is today’s marketplace, it pays to build your brand foundation on bedrock.

photo credit: SFGATE

This How You Pack a Punch

There’s a diminutive undersea powerhouse called a mantis shrimp. It does one thing really well. It packs a wicked punch. Mantis shrimp strike out with their little arms and hit their prey in three-thousandths of a second with 1,500 Newtons of force. So fast that the water actually boils and causes a tiny bubble-shock wave that kills their prey - even if they miss.

The power of being little, fast and packing a wallop reminds me of influencer marketing. Over the last few years brands discovered the value of being promoted by social media influencers. But the major stars with millions of followers are increasingly perceived by their audiences as less “authentic”. Defeating the whole reason for engaging them in the first place. 

As a result, micro-influencer marketing has emerged. Brands that have historically engaged large-follower social media personalities are increasing going directly to much smaller influencers, and more of them. This way they can pay less, diversify and regain the valuable punch of authenticity in the endorsement.

Big or small, are you making the most of your brand's scale? Do you have a marketing tool you could reconfigure? There is no excuse for not packing a wallop.

photo credit: iStock.com

You're Making Too Much Noise

At Orfield Labs in Minneapolis there is something called an anechoic chamber. Also known as the world’s quietest room. The sound level inside it is -9 decibels. There is literally less than zero ambient noise. When you are in it, the only signal you hear is the sound your own ears make (yes, they actually produce a little noise). That, and your own heart beating. 

The amount of noise that we have to filter today is ridiculous. The signal that we want to hear, that holds a meaningful message, is getting harder to discern. Unfortunately, sometimes we are responsible for creating this noise ourselves. Trying to be on too many social platforms at once, reflecting and bouncing too much content around. You can drown yourself out.

This is why I left Twitter last year (for the most part). My analytics revealed the promotions for my agency were mainly reaching the feeds of other marketers - who were all busy reverberating their own noise. Everyone was talking, but no one was really listening.

How quiet is the room you’ve chosen to be in? Is your customer there with you? They need to be able to hear the heartbeat of your message.

The Shark and the Chumsicle

Sharks are trendy. There is a shark feeding dive I do in the Bahamas where they use a 3ft. ball of frozen fish chum (yum!) suspended from a float in 40 feet of water. They rev the boat engines like a dinner bell. In a blink of an eye there are 60 sharks milling around.

The sharks start circling the “chumsicle” in a wide rotating arc. You get to join in and swim along side them. They don’t even notice. The sharks are busy strategizing.

Soon the most ambitious peel off and attack the bait. But they have a hard time because the chumcicle is still frozen. Later, it begins to thaw and the action gives new meaning to the word “frenzy”. At the end, when the ball is dwindling, the remaining sharks fill up on what’s fallen to the sandy bottom.

When feeding off new trends you have to strategize where you want to play. Do you want to be the first to try to sink your teeth in? Do you want to join when it’s a frenzy, the food is flying and the competition is the fiercest? Or do you exercise patience and benefit from the work of others? There is no one correct answer. You just have to commit to where you want to be in the food chain.

photo credit: where2wander.com

Your Wolf Pack

There is a behavioral phenomenon in wolves called the Beau Geste Effect. When a wolf begins to howl, his pack mates will begin to howl also. However, when they join the chorus, they don’t howl in the same tone. They pitch their howl up or down an octave - modulating the tone mid-howl. It makes the pack sound larger than it is.

During the Civil War, General Ulysses S. Grant wrote that judging from the nightly cacophony, "a pack of twenty wolves" had been shadowing his unit. When the pack was eventually spotted, it turned out there weren’t twenty. There were two. 

When you make yourself appear larger than you are, two things happen: 1. You stake out your territory and lay claim to its resources…and 2. You give the competition second thoughts about messing with you.

Entrepreneurs and creative professionals are leveraging social media, blogs, articles, podcasts and video to multiply their voices and appear larger than they might be in reality. 

Ruling your niche is a smart move. Being small is no excuse for not owning your neck of the woods. What more can you do to keep the competition at bay?

Control vs. Creativity

Driverless cars are off to a bumpy start. The newest vehicles are racking up a crash rate double that of cars driven by humans.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is they obey the law all the time. This may not sound like a bug, but it turns out not following the rules is sometimes the best answer. Just try following the rules while merging onto a chaotic highway at rush hour. Following the rules doesn’t work out so well when no one else is following them. 

Sometimes you have to think creatively to be successful.

So how much should the car break the rules? Answer: Just enough to do what’s right. Somewhere in the valley there are a lot of AI programmers losing sleep trying to figure out how to make that happen.

When it comes to leadership in business the problem is the same. When you empower people and give them control over decision-making, most often they will simply choose to do what’s right. Or should you issue commands to follow the rules no matter what? It’s Control vs. Creativity.

How can creativity drive your success?

A Smell That Will Make You Money

Last week I was cooking a recipe that called for coconut oil. When I opened the jar I was immediately transported to being 16 years old on a beach in Michigan putting on suntan lotion. I almost got smell memory whiplash.

Smells are processed by the amygdala, the part of the brain responsible for memory functions and processing emotions. Scientists have proven you are 100 times more likely to remember something that you smell than something that you see, hear or touch.

Now brands are increasingly putting the power of scent to work.

In Orlando, a company recently projected "waffle cone" smell adjacent to an ice cream parlor, driving a 50% sales increase. REI used the smell of “campfire and pine” and guess who started selling more backpacks? Don’t even get me started about what Cinnabon does. You know what they do.

Do you have a service or product that you can enhance with a scent? If you do, you might be closer to smelling success.