Branding Blog

Put on your mask. Breathe deeply. Now, help someone else find their own mask.

I put up a little post back in December about modeling delight. No research, just my own pithy advice as usual.

Kathy Sierra has done the research. She posted a wonderful essay on happiness yesterday. It's long...almost 2,500 words. But it's fantastic. If you find yourself frustrated, angry, yelling at your kids or screaming at God, you must read it. You simply must. I was delighted to find the same Flight Attendant Wisdom at the end of her post.

In reading some of the comments on the piece, there are some chronically unhappy readers who aren't happy with the news Kathy offers. Hmmm.

We, the happy, are obligated to remain so. Periodically, we must put on our oxygen mask and wade into the misery pit to help someone find their way out (or help some unhappy customer find some semblance of satisfaction). What Kathy is saying is that the pit is not a place to stay. It's true.

I've been a sideline fan of www.despair.com for several years. I find their material to be immensely funny, but experience has taught me that I don't want any of their products near me. My kids bought me the Despair calendar a couple of years ago and I had to take it off my wall by April. It was affecting my attitude towards the people I worked with. Funny yes. Dangerous as well.

I think as an NF personality type, my capacity for empathy makes it especially dangerous to venture into the pit without a safety harness. Kathy's article backs this up with the information about left vs. right brained preferences.

On the other hand, this empathy trait makes it easier for me to be a Persuasion Architect, developing personae for marketing purposes and interacting with a wider range of people. And it's true that I'll come home from strange places having picked up the local vernacular, accents and even gestures. The Angry Ones think we NF's are just goofy.

While we may have a tendency to let anger rub off on us, we also have the capacity to absorb joy and amplify it. Let's have a party after you read Kathy's post.

Link: Creating Passionate Users: Angry/negative people can be bad for your brain.

Tell Me A Story

A great story today from David Wolff on the power of story.

Last week I wrote a post about our built-in hype detector. It's called Broca's area and it's the gateway to the prefrontal cortex by way of the dorsolateral prefrontal association area. If your message is going to get to the decision-making prefrontal cortex, you've got to get it past Broca's area and it must be hype-free or Broca kicks it to the curb.

What David Wolff is describing is the secret entrance. Put your message in the form of story, with symbolic language and hype becomes irrelevant. Broca lives in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere will believe just about anything and will draw the story out on the visuospatial sketchpad in the dorsolateral prefrontal association area...which, conveniently enough, lands you right next to the prefrontal cortex where decisions are processed.

So how do I know all this stuff? A wizard taught me.

In its early years FedEx’s advertising stressed the value of saving time, a left brain pitch. Then it tried stories showing anxious workers who screwed up getting their bosses’ packages delivered on time in comparison with happy office warriors who did. Shifting to emotionally evocative right brain storytelling helped put FedEx’s growth into overdrive.

Ageless Marketing: Tell Me A Story

Perceptual Reality

(NOTE: This is one of Roy H. Williams' Monday Morning Memos from sometime in early 1999. I dug it out of the secret archives. There's a lesson on branding in this short piece for those who are brave enough to find it.)

Perceptual Reality
A Monday Morning Memo from The Wizard of Ads

The room feels cold to one person, yet much too warm to another. So which of these is right? Is it possible for the same room to be at once too warm and too cold? Is there a universe that allows for the peaceful coexistence of such mutually exclusive truths?

The universe of matter and energy which surrounds us is utterly objective. The immutable laws of physics which govern space and time create a physical reality which is the same for us all.

Perceptual reality however, is an entirely different matter.

When challenged with the question of the room’s temperature, most people will answer, "It’s a matter of opinion." But perceptual reality is much more than mere opinion. Perceptual reality is as real as a mother’s love for her child; as real as encouragement, triumph and joy.

When you’re angry, is your anger real? Yet anger does not exist in physical reality. Does that mean it isn’t there?

Physical reality is contained in the limited universe of matter and energy, while perceptual reality is uncontained in the boundless universe of the mind. Advertising doesn’t affect physical reality in the slightest. It affects only the world of the mind. That’s why the smallest minds will smugly contend they are "unaffected by it."

Small minds fear to make choices in the absence of verifiable facts, so they wrap themselves tightly in the security of physical reality and deny the existence of that which cannot be tested, proven and measured. (Note: It is these same, small minds which always shout loudest about the foolishness of faith in a world of science.)

So we have physical reality and perceptual reality and of course there is spiritual reality as well.

But we’ll leave that for another book.

Roy H. Williams