I can't think of one pithy comment or stab or observation today.
So, I'm sending you over to Wonderbranding, where Michele has a great post on the use of fMRI imaging.
Read it. Learn. If you own a business, hire Michele today. Seriously.
More good stuff (this time with a zesty citrus aroma) from Ageless Marketing.
Oranges are right-handed. The fragrance of an orange comes from limonene, the same chemical that gives lemons their distinctive odor. However the molecular structure of an orange’s limonene is the mirror image of "left-handed" limonene in lemons. All of nature, from spinning electrons to spiraling galaxies, seems organized by left- and right-handed preferences. Biasing entities toward the right or left is Nature's way of avoiding symmetry, indeed, of avoiding perfection. Natural diamonds are more scintillating than human-made diamonds because the latter are structurally perfect.
I love the way my friend Juan Guillermo writes from his big Guatemalan heart. If you want to understand the Hispanic Market in the U.S., a good first step is to understand JG, by reading his blog.
[Sidenote advice for dealing with your Hispanic Friends: Stay away from them when you have a bad sunburn on your back. Unlike your stiff white buddies who are happy with an arms-lenth handshake, your Hispanic Friends want to hug you and pat your back like JG did to me at least three times last week in Austin.]
I have seen it first hand: 1st generation Latinos going back to their home countries after a couple of years of living in the United States; the obvious difference is their accent: it definitely differs from the one they had prior leaving, it has a little bit of Mexican/Cuban/Puerto Rican, depending on where they moved to, along with a mixture of couple other Latin American accents intertwined with English. Then comes the words they use… i.e. they begin to refer to a “picop” (pickup truck) as “troca”… They don’t feel it, but they have “drank the Kool-Aid” sort of speak, of the U.S. Hispanic/Latino Community.HispanicTrending: Changes in Rhythm for FloridaIt was interesting on a personal level, but it was not until I had spent some time living in the U.S., that I realized that never before had I been so proud of my Latin American heritage, as now that I had been away from what I’d called home all my life. Before there were Mexicans, Argentineans, Cubans and Peruvians; now I only see Latinos/Hispanics; even given the differences among us, there is still a vast common ground that holds us together.
Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg sent me this link to a blog post about the parallels of architecture and web design. It's a helluva good read, so I'm not going to dissect it for you. Read it yourself. If you care about brands, like I do, you'll see some great advice for building them. Just keep your brand in mind as you read some fascinating advice about buildings, web sites and beetles in giant oak beams. Enjoy.
A look at how Stuart Brand’s classic work of social and architectural criticism, How Buildings Learn, applies to web design and development.
How Websites Learn | Acts of Volition
Sam Decker starts out with some quotes from the latest Harvard Business Review, but the golden nuggets of wisdom are all his own...
Here are three principles where I believe imitation is good…Good imitation is looking for parallels. Parallelism is when you take a principle from elsewhere and apply it to a different situation, perhaps differently. Perhaps it can be called ‘inspired imitation’. Ex: Henry Ford applying the division of labor from slaughter houses to the car manufacturing. Roy H. Williams calls it Business Topology. Jay Abraham calls it something else.
Good imitation is when being unique negatively impacts your customer. For example, there’s no need to get clever with standard navigation nomenclature (i.e. ‘Home’, ‘About Us’, etc.), checkout forms, etc. Copy the online leaders where the majority of shoppers have learned from.
Good imitation is invisible to the customer but adds value to your proposition. For example, I think there are best practices in supply chain and manufacturing. Dell is recognized for this. That simply leads to lower costs for customers. What company would not want to lower costs so they could invest margin in other ways to differentiate, or pass savings along to the customer? Or investing in standards that save money and widen applicability – such as programming in .NET or JAVA.
Great advice from Penelope Trunk. This story reads like a letter from dad.
During the roaring '90s, you could jump from job to job without help from anyone else. Now, you need staying power since you're going to be at the company a while. The easiest way to stay a while is to make sure you feel connected to the people you work with.So make some friends. And even when you can't be friends, be nice. Work late on your boss's stupid pet project without complaining. Give a sympathetic ear to an annoying co-worker. Mentor someone who you think is hopeless. Respect the fact that each person in this world has something to offer; you just never know when it will reveal itself.
The HooK: THE BRAZEN CAREERIST- Branding U: Find your wider base
I came across Ageless Marketing this weekend and immediately subscribed to the RSS feed. I think we could all learn something by sitting at David Wolfe's feet and listening very carefully.
Drawing on extensive quantitative analysis, Mark and Pearson illuminate the qualitative aspects of brand personalities. They infer that brands fall within 12 archetypal personalities, ranging from Pepsi’s and Harley-Davidson’s Rebel archetype to Hallmark’s and Victoria’s Secret’ Lover archetype.Consumers evaluate brands through human personality traits, whether you’ve imputed traits to the brand or they’ve done so because you haven’t. Of course, this is largely an unconscious evaluation.
He goes on...
A Duke University study found that brands, somewhat unique among proper nouns, are processed primarily in the emotional right brain. That and other research indicate that brand loyalty depends on emotional arousal. As with humans, we will reject brands that lack attractive and consistent personality characteristics.
Ageless Marketing: The Criticality of Brand Personality
Learning Opportunity: Roy H. Williams will be in Australia in July. Find out how you can spend a day with him learning about brands and advertising.
I need an agent. If I can't play the part of Guy Swift, maybe I can land a spot in this '70s based reality show. I have a killer fake British accent. I've played Henry Higgins in two different productions. Any agents out there?
For two weeks, the ad execs will live and work without any trappings of 21st century technology. The '1970s Office' will see the ad execs taken back to a time when there were no computers, mobile phones, internet or even motorcycle couriers -- things today's everyday creative takes for granted.
[This is another memo extracted from the archives of The Wizard of Ads. It was originally sent to subscribers in November, 1999.]
A Monday Morning Memo from the Wizard - in a Reflective Mood
by Roy H. Williams
You've seen the screen of a television and doubtless will again. But you've also seen the screen of the imagination. Deciding what to put on which screen is a writer's greatest challenge.
And it's also why the movie is never exactly like the book.
The eyes are objective organs, taking in only what's really there, even when what's "really" there is a Hollywood special effect. But words are not objective. Like the keys of a mental piano, words trigger mental images. And each mental image comes with associated images that are unique to the individual.
Craig Arthur always has some great stories to tell. [blogging note: Craig also posts his stories in pdf format]
Like me that night, customers worldwide are desperately searching for people willing to help them, to solve their problems, to go beyond what is expected.
Do customers leave your business with positive associations and lasting memories?
Is your business delivering the help?
