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Entries categorized as ‘Words of Wisdom’

Simple is hard: what do you live your life by?

6 March 2010 · Leave a Comment

I know you are here because you are looking for a lesson in philosophy. I know opinion is cheap.

But I would like to share with you a few things that I have learned. Some of it through blogging, but mostly just as I grow older and wiser.

These thoughts were penned on a recent flight, which I always use this as thinking time – there is something about the lack of space and oxygen – and I hope there is at least one that strikes chord.

I am reading Made to Stick (C&D Heath) which is about what makes ideas ‘sticky’. Aphorisms/ proverbs are held up as an example of ideas that have been stripped to their core, which equates to it being SIMPLE. Doing simple is hard, it is much easier to obfuscate.

One-liners and clichés don’t always get the credit they deserve; particularly those that have stood the test of time. So if you will indulge me for a moment, let’s share some thoughts/ questions and insights; which I hope are simple enough distillations of some underlying truth:

  1. If you are unloved, do you exist?
  2. Do you also want to go where the world runs out of maps?
  3. When you carry a map you lose the journey.
  4. When you are old enough to yearn for moments past, you are old enough to learn that nothing lasts.
  5. If you never bend, you will someday break. If you always bend, you will never grow.
  6. Footsteps are more uniquely you than fingerprints.
  7. To make a journey you must strep onto the road, To make a footprint, you must momentarily stop.
  8. Good things come from striking the right balance between wanting more and being more.
  9. Life’s arc: When you are born you know and hope for nothing, it expands, then shrinks again to nothing as you lie on your deathbed.
  10. Happiness is the difference between what you have and what you want. (Rather than chasing the one, accept the other…)

What have YOU learned in the last few years?

What is the one lesson/mantra you love your life by?

Looking forward to some comments here – and will re-post with attribution.

Have a go… (and that is lesson #11)

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Categories: People · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

The downside of branding

4 March 2010 · Leave a Comment

[This post was originally published in ReadThinkLearnLaugh - our monthly newsletter. Subscribe here to get the good stuff...]

Actually a better title would be: The Downside of Brand Loyalty and the Meaning of Life

  • Is marketing evil?
  • Do you feel guilty that your job is essentially the promotion of conspicuous consumption?
  • Is selling stuff for a living just so shallow?

Is or was it something that bothered you? Have you ever thought you should just chuck it all in and go and work for a charity or volunteer for missionary work because of the apparently meaninglessness of your day job?

This is something that took me a long time to resolve, and it was important to me that I was able to reconcile my desire to live a worthy life with my need to earn a living.

By their nature, organisations are systems that demand consistency and predictability – and ultimately repeat business. Converting customers into brand loyal followers achieves all of this. Organisations have created (or rather adopted) the notion of brand to hi-jack consumer decision-making; to improve the odds of repeat business.

Because marketers strive to make their brands the preferred choice (top of mind) to the exclusion of all others, a brand is meant to become some shortcut for decision-making.
When marketers succeed, there is a significant downside to the consumer. Once people become brand loyal, they:

  • Forfeit the opportunity to experience variety
  • Deny themselves the opportunity to seek and find greater value
  • Miss out on the epistemic value of new products/services
  • Impoverish their long-term decision-making ability as they fail to evaluate and incorporate changing values and product attributes.

Consumers trade all of that for a few seconds of thinking time when it comes to making a purchase.

If conspicuous consumption is undesirable and creating brand loyalty (arguably the marketers number one job) is the strategy to tip the odds in favour of the organisation to the detriment of the consumers; does that mean what we do for a living is bad or unworthy?

The answer, in my mind at least, is absolutely not.

Whilst any one job in any one organisation in isolation may seem to be promoting conspicuous consumption to the detriment of individuals, there is a bigger picture here.
Collectively, as we all do our individual jobs, we are contributing to a rich and diverse society that offers people choices. It is not just me promoting my brand, there is you, and John and Jerry and Mary and Sue too. And it all adds up to a market place that gives society a rich palette of options.

So while the individual’s pursuit of his or her own goals seems narrow and selfish, the fact that there are millions doing so simultaneously, means we have created a system that, as a whole, is a healthy environment.

That is the epitome of civilisation: people who are free to exercise their choices and have the opportunity to do so.

And despite what you may read in pseudo-science magazines from time to time, marketers cannot control consumers’ minds. Subliminal advertising (and the story about coke & popcorn ads flashing during a movie) is just urban legend.

So, when you are promoting your product, you are actually part of a bigger ecosystem which is a crucial part of our social fabric – without which our lives would be so much the poorer.

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Categories: Branding · General · Marketing · Newsletter · Words of Wisdom
Tagged:

If you are good, you can afford it

13 February 2010 · Leave a Comment

I watched a movie on DVD the other day – Looking for Eric – starring (and produced by) Eric Cantona.

If you are not a soccer fan, Eric Cantona is the Andre Agassi of soccer (football as they call it) and the bulk of his career was spent at Manchester United. He was an artiste – and there is no higher compliment.

I won’t spoil the story (well worth watching – and not about football at all) but at one stage his biggest fan (his namesake, but an ordinary postman) asks him about his greatest moment on the pitch. His fan then rattles off many of the great goals he had scored – with the accompanying goose bump footage.

But every time the fan asks him if that was the moment, Cantona shakes head and says ‘non’. (He is French.) Eventually, the fan (Eric the Postman) is exasperated and asks which moment it was. Cantona responds:

It wasn’t a goal. It was a pass. Goose bump footage follows where Cantona lobs a divine pass into the path of a team mate – who scores…

Cantona explains that, as a (gifted) soccer player, it was his privilege to GIFT opportunities to other players.

This reminds us that as a manager or business owner, we should also know that our job is not to score goals, but to give the opportunities to the team!

Soccer isn’t life, but it is revealing that one of the most gifted players of our time realises that there is more joy and satisfaction to be had by giving the gifts that our talents and our opportunities offer, than there is in grabbing the headlines ourselves.

How do you give? How much do you give? Or do you think this is the naïve chatter of an ex-manager who has officially lost the plot? 

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Categories: Management · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

Lessons from Poetry

5 February 2010 · 2 Comments

love is a beautiful face
and life
that same face wounded
after shattering through the pane of glass
separating our dreams from reality

Few people read poetry – presumably because they don’t appreciate it. I have wondered about that. As the occasional poet (and you can see above why it is not more regular) I don’t even read much poetry myself any more.

But there is a tendency for people to revert to poetry – or at least appreciate it more – when the emotions are at their highest.  Maybe that is why we read poems at weddings and wakes. (Songs are poems as music?) Even the pithy quote after victory or defeat is nothing but pure poetry where one sentence can capture so much.

Poetry is exceedingly hard to craft – much harder than an essay, and arguably the hardest of all forms of communication, at least on a scale that would measure intellectual effort per word.

My view is that it is because poems are so lean – every word is a considered word that cannot be substituted or omitted or improved. Poems are the purest form of story telling. Poets do not have the luxury of context or character. And certainly never the luxury of explanation.

What does this have to do with business?

Businesses and brands are about telling stories. Customers relate to the story that a brand represents, and express their identification with that story by purchase loyalty. All things being equal, as long as the brand story is relevant, the customer will continue to buy.

Poetry teaches us that emotions can (and should) be captured simply; by focussing on the essentials of the story: Few words. Powerful imagery. Sharp insight. Eloquence without pretension. Expression without clutter.

People get it. They are wired to get it. Life is too busy anyway for you to present them with an essay. They want the essential truth and they want powerful emotion. And they want you to tell it honestly.

Then they might be bothered to remember.

And let’s face it, if they can’t remember who you are or what you stand for, there isn’t much hope of doing business any time in the future.

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Categories: Branding · Marketing · People · Words of Wisdom

The other side of the road

20 January 2010 · Leave a Comment

On a family holiday to the US a few years ago, we were walking the streets of Washington. (An interesting holiday destination, really.) My eldest daughter was about 10 at the time, and she suddenly realised something about the traffic and she said: ‘Look Dad they’re driving on the wrong side of the road.’

I responded by saying that it wasn’t the wrong side; it was just the ‘other side’. She thought about that for a few seconds, and then said, to my eternal pride: “‘oh, I get it… there is no wrong side – they just decided to drive on the other side.”

She is now studying pre-med in Utah, and has adapted amazingly well. I have no fear that she is going to turn into a Mormon, or worse, end up in some weird-beard’s concubine. Because she understands this very important principle in life:

It is OK for people to believe in different things. And different is not always wrong, it is just different.

In an ever-changing Australia where the demographics of our customers and our employees are shifting significantly, we must increasingly walk the very fine line between preserving traditions and ‘the Australian way’, whilst being tolerant (even embracing) of change and different values without damaging the foundations.

When was the last time you examined whether the way you do things are still relevant? When was the last time you (for instance) changed your advertising message? Have you noticed that the ‘yuppies’ you once thought frequented your restaurant have been replaced by young families? Or that the traffic flow has changed and you need to open earlier or stay open longer?

Just because you did something one way (successfully) for a long time does not mean that it was or is the right way. It was just one way of doing it. And there plenty other ways of doing it.

Some of them may even be better.

Categories: Future · Management · Strategy · Words of Wisdom

Stuff that, do this!

4 January 2010 · 3 Comments

Tossing a coin is common in many sports, such ...
Image via Wikipedia

Here we go for 2010.

A post about ‘new year’s resolutions’ seems to be the way everyone goes.

I don’t know where I read it first, but I think there is a better way to go about this than compiling a list of objectives and goals which are soon discarded under the pressure of everyday living. Stuff that.

I suggest that you do this (as I will be doing): Pick ONE word as your ‘theme’ for the year.

My word for 2010 is: FINISH.

I am an ideas person. But ideas that are not executed, are worth absolutely nothing. I don’t want to suggest that I am dreamer who never ‘finishes’ anything because as entrepreneur, that would equate to starving. (And in fact, I could do with a bit of starving if you know what I mean J).

But that is the one area where I want to improve because it is not about finishing per se; it is about quality of life.

By focussing on ‘finishing’ I will do less ‘starting’ – and the fewer projects I start, the more time I will have for other things – like reading and playing cricket with my son or going for walks on the beach with my wife. (Why live in Kiama if you don’t capitalise on it, right?)

One word of caution though. Don’t pick a ‘negative word; as in something you WON’T be doing. Don’t say DIET, rather say HEALTH.

So, I won’t be starting anything until I finish something else. I have just chucked a partially completed tender document in the bin. I have made a start…

What is your ‘theme’ in 2010?

Dennis

We have built a place where retailers and suppliers & professionals can share ideas and resources: retailsmartresults.com

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Categories: General · People · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

Geseënde Kersfees

15 December 2009 · 4 Comments

Thanks for 2009

Video 29

Video 29

This movie requires Adobe Flash for playback.

 

To all our friends and clients (and sometimes it is hard to tell the difference) as well as our business partners and suppliers. Without you we would not be here – and nor would want to be, frankly.

Our gift to you is the (long promised) free EBook on Visual Merchandising.

For the FREE version, you must register here.

For the PREMIUM edition you must register (and pay) here, but feel free to check out what you are getting first.

 And most importantly:

Geseende Kersfees is Afrikaans for: “Blessed Christ Feast”

And THAT is precisely our wish for you.

 

 

Categories: General · People · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

What are you afraid of? Freedom?

14 December 2009 · 2 Comments

What would you do if you were free to do anything you like?

(This is an extract from our monthly newsletter. To subscribe, register here.)

In the lives we live, we don’t always appreciate the things that are free precisely because they are free. Too many clichés to mention, but my favourite insight into this topic as Victor Frankl’s observation:

Everything can be taken from a man but … the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

In the current economic climate there is still the omnipresent fear of being let go. Retrenchments still happen every day. Just the memory of once working in an environment like that makes my heart tighten. I know people to whom it is happening and people it will happen to. Even if doesn’t happen, the constant apprehension makes one a lesser person and diminishes your life.

How can this be avoided?

Watch this short video (the lemonade movie) if you haven’t seen it yet.

As Victor Frankl said above, the one freedom we have is that we are free to choose our attitude towards this (any) set of circumstances. It is easier said than done – I know that. But coming from people who did it, trust me that it can be done.

I have just completed the last of series of workshops that I conducted with newsagents all over the state. I spoke about success (in a sector that is being ripped apart by changes that are mostly out of their control) and I gave them a clear path that would lead them to build their own future.

Out of every group there may be one or two who would respond proactively. Some of them have proudly shown me what they have done or are doing. And others just look at me and I can see the fear in their eyes.

There is no secret. There is no checklist. There are no 7 steps or 12 commandments of success.

The only thing that they can control and can do about going after a different future is the DECISION to do so.

Even then there are no guarantees, except this: I can guarantee you that there is nothing that will make you feel more alive than acting upon your own convictions.

So I ask again: What would you do if you were free to do anything you liked? Or more importantly, why are you NOT doing it? Because you are free to do so if you can let go of fear.

Categories: Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

Check your traps

28 October 2009 · 3 Comments

We attended a conference in Melbourne earlier this month which was opened by Shane Jacobsen (Kenny of the eponymous movie). He regaled us with the story behind the Kenny story, and to make a long story short, one of the key messages was that they could make the movie as cheaply as they did because over his life up to that point he was almost fanatical about acquiring new ‘licenses’.

He is licensed to drive almost anything on wheels and most things on water. He is lighting guy and a pyro-technician and much more. All of this happened because his father always stressed the importance of ‘checking your traps’. The expression is something that rural Australia understood all to well: if you don’t want to go to bed hungry then you should set a lot of traps (in the wild) and check back often.

That life lesson stood him in good stead and when they time came, he was prepared for it. In a previous post we also wrote about luck, but this is so important that we want to stress again what our attitude towards ‘luck’ should be.

  • Lisa Minnelli (?)is quoted as saying that you should always be preparer to get lucky.
  • No lesser luminary than Donald Trump said: Everything in life is luck.
  • Of course, Jean Cocteau was a bit more cynical when he said: I believe in luck: how else can you explain the success of those you dislike?

It is just luck/ bad luck depending on whether you catch something in the trap (unlucky for the animal, lucky for you). But the reality is that without actually going to the trouble of setting the traps (using all your knowledge and skills) then all the luck in the world will be of no use. You have to be prepared to get lucky.

So the question I leave you with is:

What are you doing to prepare yourself?

And I leave with a few tips (not only questions)  too:

  • It is never too late to start preparing your self to get lucky.
  • Bad luck is not an excuse, it is just an explanation.
  • Good luck is never cause for boasting.
  • If you look for luck, you will find it where others never even notice.
  • If you think you are unlucky, start counting the ways you are better off than
  • Luck is a boomerang.

Just imagine that luck is an aeroplane out there and it is looking for a runway to land on in your life. Unless you build the right runway, your luck will never be able to land.

Categories: People · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom

The paradox of success

8 October 2009 · 3 Comments

The opening statement (of a conference presentation I am preparing) is this:

The purpose of merchandising is to make more money.

Many may disagree. What about branding? What about communicating merchandise benefits? What about customer convenience?

My response is that all of the above are only valid to the extent that it ultimately, somehow helps you sell more stuff.

But there is an inherent paradox. If you focus on making money, then you won’t. To sell more stuff, don’t focus on selling more stuff but on how customers want to buy.

One agency (Dorothy Allan, svp-retail strategy for TracyLocke ) recently conducted a campaign where they redesigned the space based on how the shopper wanted to move through the store, not how the operator wanted to run his store.  Results were a 25 percent lift in margin and 29 percent lift in sales, not to mention the savings the client gained on a 20 percent SKU reduction!

For instance, your primary trading area (platinum zone) is your most productive area and screams for your highest margin, best-sellers. But, paradoxically this also happens to be your customer’s landing zone and they need space (not stock) to relax, and switch from passerby to browser. So, having less stock in that area may paradoxically contribute more towards making money than crowding it with 17 different types of specials.

But this is also a principle of doing successful business, not just retailing.

The fundamental paradox of all business is this: if you want to satisfy your own need (optimal return) then you must, paradoxically focus on meeting customer needs and not on your own.

Don’t think about:

  • what you have to sell – think about what they want to buy
  • how you can make money – think about how they can save money
  • what will make you happy – think about what will satisfy them
  • whether they are right or wrong – think about how you can make them right

But this is not just a principle of business; it also applies to living a successful life.

  • If you want to be loved, focus on loving someone more.
  • The essence of strength is to turn the other cheek
  • The essence of leadership is to serve
  • If you want to be successful, help other people become successful.
  • If you want to be held in high regard, be humble.
  • The harder you work the less you will get done.

Some people get it and some people don’t. I wrote in my last newsletter (and a copy on the blog here) that success is mostly luck anyway, and should not be a source of arrogance.

Life is full of these paradoxes and recognising and managing them is a key to real and lasting success.

Categories: Customer Service · Management · People · Personal Development · Words of Wisdom