Author: remap_content_admin

I once analyzed Nuclino’s messaging while making a point about using customer voice.

Based on the general copywriting theory of melding emotion, logic, proof, and calls-to-action, in the customer’s own voice, I offered some ideas about what was wrong with what I had been shown.

You could call this a teardown (What is a teardown? is a common question – I have my own definition).

1 out of 2 times I get on a call with a prospective (or even an existing) client they ask for something similar.

They say, “look at our site – tear it down, what’s wrong with it, what do you see”. Sometimes they want validation, sometimes they want new ideas, sometimes they want to evaluate how you the expert think and express yourself.

Long ago, I might have objected to this request on the premise that it constituted free work. But now it seems so trivial, I oblige them. I can usually spot a few “mistakes”.

But that’s mistakes in quotes, with major caveats.

Brands have valid but invisible reasons for how they express themselves. Teardowns are useful exercises (and good practice for burnishing your expertise at anything). But ultimately, they are a flimsy business practice because they overlook invisible reasons.

From the outside, I don’t know:

• the internal team dynamics
• customer relationships
• the future product/company vision
• insight-rich metrics
• the founder/owner goals or other idiosyncracies
• what I don’t know
• etc

Maybe acquiring new customers is less important this year than retaining 2 or 3 existing ones. Maybe acquiring investors is more important. Maybe there’s one single partner the company is courting and that’s the audience. Maybe there’s an email campaign underway that I’m unaware of. Maybe the founder wants to wind down the firm and retire, after her own fashion. All of this affects the “right” brand messaging.

So take teardowns with a big grain of salt.. or look at them as a way to open a deeper engagement, not as a way to provide answers.

– Rowan

 

A teardown is a brief analysis of the critical problems with a product or brand, often delivered impromptu. Usually used in the context of digital, creative, and industrial product design (examples: websites, CPG packaging, database schema, brand book)

Hi again, my friends. Instead of predicting 2022, because I have no clue, I’m going to take us back to 1982, then ask you a question about your business.

For a brief flash in the early-1980s US, truly generic brands appeared on the shelves of supermarkets. Maybe you can still buy them but their impact was different then; appearing on a supermarket aisle was more of a statement. These generic products came as white cans, bags, or boxes with stark black titles. 

My mom bought them for a while because they made her laugh. She felt it was like an inside joke between her and the owner of the company. Their visual simplicity entertained me. I assume most people, though, liked their pricing.

I don’t think I have to ask you whether these products were branded – of course they were.

Since long before human beings existed, living things have branded themselves. For example, flowers brand themselves to their audience (bees) as safe and plentiful cornucopias.

And do the generic brands in question have a message? (Aside from their labels – “Bleach”, “Dogfood”,”Bread”).

Yes – your brand always has a message, whether you craft it deliberately or not, whether it’s expressed as words or not. 

The brand message of generic is: “Here’s something new. We’re less expensive than other brands, more trustworthy, and we don’t take ourselves too seriously”.

This message is pretty good at first, but both the novelty and the trustworthiness vanish quickly. This is why generic brands never last long in one marketplace.

So what are your brand’s messages, ones that outlast inflation and recession? 

– Rowan

 

I know exactly how my ideal client will answer the 16 questions below. When they answer them the right way, I can guarantee them a successful engagement with me as a consultant.

I’d like you to design your own questions, as a future-positioning exercise. More on that below. But first, take a look and if you know this person, send them my way (:

1. Do you pretty much always work from home?
2. Do you tend to prefer video conferencing on initial calls, or after it’s been a while, but are you flexible other than that? IOW, do you just dial in from your cellphone sometimes?
3. When someone asks you what you do, do you say entrepreneur?
4. Do you understand how software and other technology works without being a technical person yourself?
5. Have you created a venture leveraging some kind of emergent technology, such as AI, VR, cloud computing, or blockchain?
6. Does the business model package this technology into a succinct product that you sell to businesses or HNW individuals?
7. Is it at least your second business?
8. Are you based on one of the 3 coasts of the US? (Texas/Chicago count as #3).
9. Are you enthusiastic, engaging, laid-back, informal, fun-loving, and intrigued by your business?
10. Do those qualities define you beyond work?
11. Do you enjoy building valuable relationships with experts, whether as consultants, contractors, employees, partners, or just people?
12. Have you assembled a small core team of 2 to 4 people?
13. Do you completely delegate the work you do with consultants, partners, and clients – or are you hands-on with the ones that matter? 
14. Does your new business need to say what it does better, to make it easier to sell?
15. Do you want to invest 5-10k to make that happen?
16. Do you make decisions quickly and with your gut? Or through analysis?

That’s my question set to them. Maybe you guessed the answers.

Now here’s my question to you: what 16 (or 15, or 20, or 10, or whatever?) questions will let you identify your absolutely perfect client?

Because your ideal client IS your future positioning. You want to position yourself as the solution best suited to work with your perfect clients.

Of course, these aren’t the questions I ask to help me understand a client’s strategic priorities.

And actually, I don’t ask them at all, most of the time. Because the most important things about a person, they can’t reveal to you, as I discussed last week in talking to/about black swans. You can ask a few questions, but you have to infer the rest.

In hindsight, these questions are easy to answer because you got to know someone when you worked with them.

But these questions are for someone you don’t know. Asking them is a matter of divination.

*    *    *

First things first – how do you know what questions to ask?

I’ll share my exact process. I analyzed the 50 or so clients I’ve worked with over the past 2 or 3 years by transforming them from memories into a spreadsheet.

The columns of the spreadsheet look like this:

[client name]
My Profits
My Happiness
Client’s Happiness 
Company Maturity
Technical Founder
AI or Blockchain
Product or Service
Client Type [kind of like industry and/or business model]
Work Directly With Owner
Services
Funding
Core Team Size
Client Personality
Top 5 Personality Traits
Client Score

I used the first three metrics – my profits, my happiness, client happiness – to calculate a client score. This is pretty common advice, often expressed with a Venn diagram. But those “choose your career” Venn diagrams only scratch the surface.

So then I added new metrics to look for patterns – and found plenty of interesting ones. Mostly they confirmed what I suspected, but some were entirely new realizations.

Some columns (“Technical Founder”) I added after a few days of reflection. And each time I did so, I was asking a new question of my memory of the client engagement. I simply asked the questions I really wanted to know or think about. I do better working with non-technical founders, despite the fact that I myself have a technical background.

If you do this positioning exercise, it should look completely different. There are different questions you need and want to ask. Ask whatever you want, let me know how it goes.

Best
Rowan

In a movie remake of “The Swan Lake” entitled “Black Swan”, a talented young performer with a promising career is threatened by a rival who seems better suited than her to play the role of the “black swan”. The black swan is just one of the two characters comprising the lead role, the swan queen (the other character being the “white swan”). But it’s the more difficult part to play. Will her rival displace her with her superior ability to embrace the black swan’s darkness?

Spoiler alert – the young performer’s rival is actual a figment of herself, sort of like an “alter”, in the parlance of Disassociative Disorder (née Multiple Personality Disorder).

It’s literally her black swan, a part of her personality whose existence she can’t accept (because it’s too deviant and devil-may-care, maybe even immoral).

*    *    *

“We don’t understand our own motivations because it’s not in our interests to know them”
-David Ogilvy

This essential psychological insight is the foundation of The Swan Lake’s plot, of Disassociative Disorder, and most especially of marketing and selling anything.

The challenge is to connect this insight to the people for whom you make or do things or whom you advise. What motivations do they not understand because it’s not in their interests to know them?

Ogilvy’s premise is at the heart of “Black Swan Theory”, which these books touch on in different ways:

• Chris Voss’s book on negotiation, Never Split the Difference
• Rory Sutherland’s book on branding, Alchemy
• and of course Nassim Taleb’s book on sociology, The Black Swan

While their focus varies greatly (Taleb is more concerned with external rather than internal events), they share this premise:

(a) each of us behaves in mostly irrational or even random ways 
(b) for motives that are largely hidden to us 
(c) and, even if unhidden, not understood at all
(d) because to expose and understand them would force us to accept an unflattering, at best, and soul-crushing at worst, version of ourselves

And if you’re soul is crushed you become a terrible hunter-gatherer, or consultant, or whatever line of work you’re in.

In other words, black swans are the hidden motivators that self-preservational vanity conceals from us.

As Sutherland puts it, “We must be descended from humans skilled at self-deception”.

Of course, the reality is less simple; I think most people slowly uncover, at a non-traumatic pace, their own black swans and those of others around them. Perhaps Google is good at this, like Richelieu.

Still, skill at self-deception is a biological imperative.

*    *    *

Successful businesses tend to cater to biological imperatives. Fats, sugars, warm places. But the hidden ones are fatter cows. Or swans in this case.

Almost every major tech company has found success by catering to the black swans of the Internet-age human.

And usually, they have done so by accident. But also intentionally. Does it seem cynical to conclude that accidental satisfaction of black-swan motivations accounts for more business success? 

Netflix accidentally became the world’s biggest movie theatre. Facebook accidentally became the world’s biggest “morning newspaper”.

By accidentally bumping into (and then skilfully exploiting) black swans at Internet-scale, their profits have been equally scaled.

Why so profitable? Because the Internet brings us the freedom to sidestep conventional behavior – but not the psychological ability to unroot conventional morality.

In other words, we like to glut ourselves and many of us can do so now more easily than Louis IV himself. But we don’t like to think of or be thought of, as a glutton.

In fact, you could say that our black swans are often concealments of Christian theology’s “Seven Deadly Sins”: lust, gluttony, greed, sloth, wrath, and envy. 

How can technology products and services let us behave motivated by these seven sins without the nasty label? Sinner.

*    *    *

Take sloth, for example. Sloth is the absence of interest in almost anything and/or a pathological avoidance of physical and mental exertion.

As such, and to add insult to injury, it’s also the foolish neglect of the “Seven Gifts of Grace”: wisdom, understanding, counsel, knowledge, piety, fortitude, and fear of the lord.

At least according to theologians like Thomas Aquinas. Now, who wants to be labeled slothful – raise your hand? No one. But the fact is that this label does apply to all humans, to varying degrees. Just like the other six deadly sins.

But what if sloth is actually relabeled “relaxing” or “self-care”? We’ve entered the age of Netflix vs Aquinas.

The business models of much of big tech, notably Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Amazon.com e-commerce, Amazon Prime Video, and Netflix, are based on cultivating and exploiting sloth.

Netflix has other value propositions of course:

• No ads
• Many types of media (feature film, TV, documentary)
• Enormous selection
• Easy signup and cancellation
• High technical quality
• Relatively inexpensive
• Streamable

(Because strategy is a tangled set of ideas, however mundane)

But at the root of Netflix is this unique value proposition: Netflix will let you indulge in sloth without having to admit or understand that you behave in a slothful way.

Your sloth Black Swan is safe with Netflix, Facebook, and Amazon e-commerce 

Your gluttony Black Swan is safe with Uber Eats. 

Your vainglory Black Swan is safe with Instagram and Facebook.

This is why the suggestion algorithm and autoplay features are so important to YouTube and Netflix; together they exact the bare minimum of exertion, down to the actual arm movements you perform to click play or look things up. 

But it might be the fact that autoplay and suggestions exist at all that matters, not the logic behind them. Because we’re basically illogical, at least when it comes to what we do and buy.

Like Sutherland in Alchemy, Ogilvy rejected “big data” entirely as a source of insight while embracing it (in the form of direct marketing) as an execution technique. Its only purpose was to fine-tune a living marketing campaign, whose idea has already been put in motion. He got the ideas mostly from talking to a handful of people. 5 is the number he often cited. Imagine, talk to 5 people and figure out what 5 million people are hiding from themselves. Thus was not just the image of the product shaped, but the actual product itself.

People ask – how do you use data and metrics to refine your strategy? Absurd question. Data is for building bridges and predicting the weather, not doing business.

The real question is what do you want (to be, to feel, to be seen as, to enjoy, to do when no one else is looking..) that you don’t know you want?  And how do I give that to you without forcing you to acknowledge that you want it?

If you have an idea, let us know (:

Rowan

There’s a difference between messaging and propaganda. One answer is specialization. But there’s more to it than that – there’s integrity.

Why does this matter to you, reader?

Because most niche ventures, engaged in some kind of sophisticated knowledge-work, accidentally use propaganda.

At worst, this means being misleading or factually inaccurate, such as inflating the headcount of the full-time contributors to your business.

At best, this means using empty business jargon (ie “digital transformation”, “web design”) which is unintentionally meaningless or misleading.

The latter is common.

And both are bad for business.

*   *   *

So is war.

For a select few, war is unimaginably profitable, of course. (Pick any random day from this US government listing military contracts and reflect on how much money is on offer – billions, every single day.)

But war is bad for our collective societies – and economies – as a whole. Every time a region becomes more peaceful, it becomes wealthier. We conflate the 1950’s post-war reconstruction with the war itself. It was the post-war that created immense US wealth, not the war. And when taxpayers’ money doesn’t go to war, it will likely go somewhere more beneficial.

So of course, for our little niche businesses, war is quite bad, if not horrible, for business.

It’s also bad for language, including that which comprises our own brand messaging and marketing copy.

We think of the combined, overlapped sphere of tech, start-ups, and marketing as society’s epicenter of meaningless words. Cringedom. But compared to the giant of war, they are microbes in their destruction of the meaning of words. 

Consider that war actually consists of:

• mass bombing of the landscape
• mass firestorms of cities and towns
• mass shooting to kill
• mass dehumanization of soldiers – and their consequent ailments, such as drug addiction and impoverishment
• the inadvertent (or not) death of innocents, including children
• painful, humiliating, and life-altering physical injuries for both of the above groups
• the permanent psychological damage to both of the above groups 
• torture

To repeat and sum up, war is mass pain. Of course, it’s hard to hear about.

So what do we do? In countries such as the US, which has been in some kind of war for every year of its 240-year existence, we change the words we use.

In particular, we choose misleading terms and names.

We even renamed war itself – our Departments of War became Departments of Defense. The US did this in 1949, the Soviet Union in 1953, the UK in 1964.

In each case, it was described as a “dissolution” of the Department of War, as if the governments were re-organizing themselves around peace. But it was just a name change.

In addition to “defense”, we also call war, “military intervention”, “conflict zone”, “regime change operations”, or “tactical support”.

(Support, Operations – business as usual).

But in each case, it’s still war – with all of its above-bulleted hallmarks. And we practice naming on those bullet points too.

When war kills children and other non-soldiers, that’s “collateral damage”.

Torture is “enhanced interrogation techniques”.

Bombing people to death is “drone strikes”. 

But a bomb is a bomb and bombing is bombing. Good messaging is extremely precise, which is the reason one of the principal differences between messaging and propaganda is specialization.

*    *    *

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran this headline:

“Pentagon acknowledges Aug. 29 drone strike in Afghanistan was a tragic mistake that killed 10 civilians.”

Now imagine if it had precisely stated the most relevant facts:

“Pentagon admits its mistakenly bombed to death a family of 7 children.”

Because the last time I checked, when 7 children are killed at once, that’s the headline – as was the case with some other news publications.

And because we all know when it and where it happened – those details don’t add value and dilute the message.

Good messaging is honest, accurate, and short. That’s how it creates change. (The New York Times, a good publication with respect to US arts and culture, has been shown to have zero interest in creating change when it comes to US war policy).

Hence, blatant propaganda.

If what you’re doing doesn’t “create value”, to put it lightly, then good messaging can’t fix that. There’s some little room for spin, to draw the attention you deserve, but there’s no room for deception. Only the cultivation of expertise can help you increase the value you create.

Are you using the word, “drone strike” in your messaging when there’s a more accurate term?

Or even a more accurate, or relevant, manner of speaking? Or are you using too many non-relevant details and saying too much?

If so, it’s not what you’re writing that’s the problem.

The real problem is what you’re thinking.

*    *    *

For those of you who have been told that George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language is worth reading (it is – and its short), I will now direct you to the money-quote, explaining why we “use” English badly:

“It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.”

He goes on to cite over a hundred specific examples of such bad habits, some of which are still relevant (some definitely aren’t). For example, he wrote that:

Adjectives like epoch-making, epic, historic, unforgettable, triumphant, age-old, inevitable, inexorable, veritable, are used to dignify the sordid process of international politics, while writing that aims at glorifying war usually takes on an archaic colour, its characteristic words being: realm, throne, chariot, mailed fist, trident, sword, shield, buckler, banner, jackboot, clarion.

And sure enough, a recent Washington Post opinion piece was titled, “The inevitable horror in Afghanistan”.

This kind of lazy thinking translated into words is a luxury for big organization. Verizon, McKinsey, Exxon, The New York Times, Amazon. They can say almost anything they want; all that matters to them is the UX copy at the point of sale.

But for the rest of us, we have to measure every word and use as few as possible.

My best
Rowan

 

This definition comes from William Wordsworth:

I ask what is meant by the word Poet? What is a Poet? To whom does he address himself? And what language is to be expected from him? He is a man speaking to men: a man, it is true, endued with more lively sensibility, more enthusiasm and tenderness, who has a greater knowledge of human nature, and a more comprehensive soul, than are supposed to be common among mankind; a man pleased with his own passions and volitions, and who rejoices more than other men in the spirit of life that is in him; delighting to contemplate similar volitions and passions as manifested in the goings-on of the Universe, and habitually impelled to create them where he does not find them. To these qualities he has added a disposition to be affected more than other men by absent things as if they were present; an ability of conjuring up in himself passions, which are indeed far from being the same as those produced by real events, yet (especially in those parts of the general sympathy which are pleasing and delightful) do more nearly resemble the passions produced by real events, than any thing which, from the motions of their own minds merely, other men are accustomed to feel in themselves; whence, and from practice, he has acquired a greater readiness and power in expressing what he thinks and feels, and especially those thoughts and feelings which, by his own choice, or from the structure of his own mind, arise in him without immediate external excitement.

1

I took a late-August hiatus from it all. And plot twist – I met new people in person for once.

A guy who’d hitchhiked from Krakow to Ghana, in honor of Kapuściński. He defined travel journalism. A woman working Portuguese leather in the traditional way, deeply understanding why Italian luxury brands outsource to Portugal. She defined craft leatherworking. A man two years into owning his own eco-construction business in Andalucia. He defined eco-construction.

So the common throughline of my summer acquaintances was new, personal definitions.

That and stories.

2

A study published in the 2012 edition of the Scientific Study of Literature exposed participants to stories in literature, including Why Do We Love by Bergson, and East and West by Tagore.

And the outcome was an immediate change in the “Big 5 personality traits”, with participants assessed before and after.

1. Extraversion
2. Openness
3. Neuroticism
4. Agreeableness
5. Conscientiousness

Which of these traits changed the most, I wonder? I guess depends on the story. Zorba the Greek might make you more extraverted, The General of the Dead Army, more introspective.

How is it possible that a personality might change so rapidly?

Because we have unimaginable plasticity, a fact we overlook and take for granted. 99.999% of humans can learn perfect pitch (regardless of DNA), as proven in studies discussed at length in Ericcson’s Peak. Drop a bucket of potatoes on a rusty washing machine? Any of us can tell, with training, whether the resulting clang-thud sound is in middle C or down an octave in G minor.

So of course, powerful stories shape our minds. As do the messages that come with them.

These hit in different ways.

Take this short tragedy from Tagore, the poet and author from Bengal who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913:

When I was young a stranger from Europe came to Bengal. He chose his lodging among the people of the country, shared with them their frugal diet, and freely offered them his service. He found employment in the houses of the rich, teaching them French and German, and the money thus earned he spent to help poor students in buying books. This meant for him hours of walking in the mid-day heat of a tropical summer; for, intent upon exercising the utmost economy, he refused to hire conveyances. He was pitiless in his exaction from himself of his resources, in money, time, and strength, to the point of privation; and all this for the sake of a people who were obscure, to whom he was not born, yet whom he dearly loved. He did not come to us with a professional mission of teaching sectarian creeds; he had not in his nature the least trace of that self-sufficiency of goodness, which humiliates by gifts the victims of its insolent benevolence. Though he did not know our language, he took every occasion to frequent our meetings and ceremonies; yet he was always afraid of intrusion, and tenderly anxious lest he might offend us by his ignorance of our customs. At last, under the continual strain of work in an alien climate and surroundings, his health broke down. He died, and was cremated at our burning-ground, according to his express desire.

I’m guessing that when those study participants read this, there was a shift in the fifth Big 5 personality trait: conscientiousness.

Tagore didn’t want to make that happen. It happened as a byproduct of his primary purpose: to describe reality as accurately and artfully as possible.

He followed this short vignette with a message:

We all have a realm, a private paradise, in our mind, where dwell deathless memories of persons who brought some divine light to our life’s experience, who may not be known to others, and whose names have no place in the pages of history.

At this point, the offer is to reflect on who these persons are in your life.

3

The point is that crafting messaging (or propaganda) is not a joke or a gimmick. It’s not wordplay. It is the alteration of someone’s personality, if only for a short time, so they become more receptive to whatever is on offer

An approach to content marketing that calls on the founder to take on a high-frequency, non-polished, interests-based publishing practice for a given period of time. Examples of publishing mediums would be LinkedIn status updates, Tweets, newsletters, videos, or essays. In founder-led publishing, the founder’s professional interests and inclinations dictate the content created – as opposed to a content plan.

A brand community includes not just company ownership and staff but everyone who touches the brand. Chiefly this consists of past, present, and future clients (the “audience”), employees, competitors, and partners.