Any fool can have a logo and some advertising.
That’s not what it’s about. Your brand is about people. It’s how your people make the people walking through your door feel. And just last week, something related to that happened right here. That little nugget of brand thinking fell upon us like a ton of gold bricks. The Fabulous Honey Parker and I are working with one of the world’s biggest names in luxury hotel brands. They want a podcast. Yes, you read that correctly: a luxury hotel wants a podcast. This show, which I’ve nicknamed Hidden Hotel, is an internal product. In a big hotel operation, there are always lots of staff members who don’t know each other. This show is an effort to shine a light on the people who serve the brand, letting the staff members see each other taking pride in their work. In producing the pilot episodes, we sat down to record several employees. The staff member who is acting as the host said, “You’re going to love this next guy. He’s great.” She was wrong. He was beyond great. He came into the recording session and sat down at the table. He looks young. His LinkedIn profile suggests he might be in his late 20s. Beneath his beard, he’s fresh-faced and bright-eyed. Like all the employees, he wears a silver lapel pin bearing the hotel’s initials. We asked him, “What do you love about working here?” There was zero hesitation. “I love having high-expectation guests stay at the hotel. “I love people that come in, expecting to have the most perfect stay with us, to have everything that they've ever dreamed of in a vacation come true. I love making memories for people. “Whether it's as small as giving out a smores kit, to upgrading a room and making someone's honeymoon exceptional, I really love working for the [hotel’s] brand. “I take a lot of pride in working for the brand, knowing that it's one the leading luxury brands of hospitality in the world. “I think that it’s special, that it’s something to take seriously, and that wearing [the hotel’s initials] on your chest is something to really take pride in.” Wow. Dude. I was ready to follow this kid onto the frontlines of the luxury hotel business. And I say this as someone who has worked in high-ticket retail and never wants to work with the general public ever again. Never underestimate the branding power of having a staff member who’s a cheery, bright-eyed fanatic for your brand. It can change everything about the business. What’s that? You work alone? Well, guess who has to become that cheery, bright-eyed fanatic for your brand… Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!)
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Romance, Meet Marketing. And weep.
The action in New Zealand right this minute has little to do with a pandemic, and everything to do with a sickness. At the moment these words are flowing onto the page, it’s the final day of the 2021 America’s Cup racing in Auckland. By the time you read this, the America's Cup will belong to either New Zealand (again), or Italy. You probably don’t care. Most people don’t. If you’ve seen any of the footage on NBC or the interwebs, you know that it’s all speed, all black, all inscrutable. When did yacht racing become a sport filled with crash helmets? The Fabulous Honey Parker asks, "Where are the cup holders?" Yes, this form of sailboat racing and the boats that race in it look a lot different today than they did in 1851. Ah, the romance of sailing. “I don’t like what America’s Cup has become. All the romance is gone!” I’ve heard people say this. What happened to the romance? White sails. Graceful sloops heeling over in the sun as the water does a diamond dappled sparkle in the waters off of Newport. Strapping young men with suntans grinding winches. Loud, middle-aged men barking orders from the helm. Smiling, suntanned women handing over trophies and bottles of frothing-over champagne. Those were the days. You know what? Be not fooled. Like advertising, America’s Cup yacht racing has always been about money. Romance has always been irrelevant. Today’s space-age yachting war of technology and determination is a place where exotic materials meet systems engineering, and it’s all seasoned with towering black sails, crash helmets, and big-money corporate sponsorships. It’s a great metaphor for the culture at large. And yes, the ostensible romance of advertising is also gone. The good ol’ days of advertising have sailed over the horizon. We are left slogging through a morass of technology and terminology. The 21st century digital culture has little to do with writing a message and everything to do with believing that the real message is the delivery system. “If you’re not marketing on social media, you’re missing the boat!” I saw a headline like that just this morning. It made me shake my head. While advertising has never been about romance, it was always easier for the poets to be seen. Writers were the visible heroes of advertising. But at the end of the day, it was never about them, either. Advertising was (and will always be) about money. It’s just that some romantics in the business think they can raise the bar and make people feel something less crass. America’s Cup racing is the same way. The first race in the 1800s was not the product of any romantic notions beyond making money. A group of six New York millionaires formed a syndicate. In case you were wondering, “syndicate” is not a word that has any romantic intent. The millionaires in this syndicate formed it to build a technologically advanced yacht. The six titans of industry involved sat in their offices in New York while a professional crew sailed the yacht to England. The millionaires later followed as first-class passengers aboard a very comfortable steamship. Their mission was to win money in yacht races. These men were gamblers, pure and simple. It also didn’t work out in their favor. They failed in their mission. But their effort spawned the multi-billion-dollar madness that now happens every few years in some part of the world not New York or Newport. The days of white sails with no advertising and the pretense of gentlemanly sportsmanship are over. Yes, the visual poetry and thematic fabrications are gone. The game has become such a huge, technology-powered cash vacuum that it requires more sponsor dollars than anyone ever knew existed. And at the end of the day, then as now, it’s still about people who want to make money. It has just left any possibilities of sailing romance as we know it behind. And so it is with advertising. Sales messages are ubiquitous. Maybe there’s no hope for bringing back the romance of America’s Cup yachting that never really existed. There’s also probably no hope of bringing back the romance of the glory days of Madison Avenue, which also never really existed. But it is possible to remember the one thing that never changes. Romance is just one of many thematic components that inspire customers to buy. Maybe romantics like us can push past the ignorance of media chauvinism and aim for the juicy center of the person to whom we’re selling. Maybe then, we can all feel better about selling better by making people feel better about buying. And we can all feel like we’re sailing on the wings of a more poetic day of gentle waves and sea breezes with nary a black sail in sight. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) "Scared, but inspired."
I just sent a recipe to a friend. It’s about as simple as a recipe gets. The basics: combine flour, water and pineapple juice. Let it sit. And that was her reply: “Scared, but inspired.” Yes, she’s scared. But why is this so daunting? I get it. I’ve been there. A little backstory… Lockdown has been productive. Being forced to spend time inside has forced a realization of some simple pleasures. Like so many other folks during this bizarre time in history, my friend has rediscovered the actual joy of cooking. This friend also suffers from some actual, medical issues related to gluten. (Yes, she actually knows what gluten is. She’s not a victim of pop-culture anti-wheat fashion. She has not stopped trying to “Save the whales” in an effort to “Free the gluten!”) She and I were talking about how, for some people like her, organic flour and actual wild-yeast sourdough bread can be indulged without medical challenge. She wants to try baking wild-yeast bread. So I offered to send her a recipe sourdough starter. And it is insanely simple. It requires flour, water and pineapple juice. You let it sit for a few days. Periodically, you add more water and flour. And wait. That’s it. It also scares the crap out of people. Look at me. It took me years between first seeing the recipe and actually trying it. And I have a theory about why this is such a daunting undertaking. The process is so simple and the result so lovely, it seems like dark magic. To make such minimalism and austerity come alive in the joy of fresh bread, we feel we need to know some secret, some kind of voodoo, that we must possess some finger of God to make these things work. I suspect that part of the problem is we know too much about too many things. An uneducated peasant who can make bread from flour and simple liquids doesn’t know much at all. For instance… Why the hell is there pineapple juice? Simple science. Yeast thrive in an acidic environment. Hence, pineapple juice makes them happy. But once you know this, you start to wonder what else you don’t know. And the unknown looms large. You wonder, Can I do this dark magic that delivers the staff of life from mundane materials? As a result of all this wondering and thinking, people screw it up all the time. Writing advertising is the same way. It's a simple task that people screw it up all the time. With advertising writing, it’s often so hard to see the simple, straight line between the basic business and the best message. Writing, writing, writing. And what happens is nothing, nothing nothing. As failed taxidermist cum famous journalist Gene Fowler once said, “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” But it’s just not that hard to write. Writing well? Well, maybe that's harder. But still, if you let it happen, it’s just the right words on paper. As the famous New York Evening Sun columnist (and second husband of Kurt Vonnegut’s first wife) Don Marquis once wrote, “I never think when I write. Nobody can do two things at the same time and do them well.” Which might explain my friend’s response. “Scared, but inspired.” Think too much about it, and it seems impossible. Stop thinking about it, and it becomes attainable. So much in life seems to work out better when thinking steps out of the way of acting. And in the case of sourdough starter, it’s as simple as anything can get. Yeast are just fungi. Give them the right food, and they do all the hard work. All you have to do is stop thinking and get out of their way. And as the unknown copywriter and award-winning third husband of renowned novelist The Fabulous Honey Parker once said... Bread happens. If you let it. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Why on earth would you write 100 headlines?
“I’m not feelin’ it.” OK, that’s not exactly the line Honey used, but it might as well have been. She was talking about the headline I’d just given her for a client’s home page. The client is very smart. She’s funny. She enjoys a laugh. And she unafraid of smart writing. She also has an unusual job. That’s why she ended up with an unusual headline. It’s a headline that would make some clients very afraid. This client is a Certified Divorce Financial Advisor. Yes, such a thing actually exists. It seems the financial decisions made in divorce are often uninformed and emotional. For instance… “I want the house!” That’s a great thing to want. But can you afford it on only one income while you’re crying in your soup? And lawyers are not typically trained to examine such things. They’re merely trained to “make it so.” “I want the house!” “Let’s make it so!” A CDFA asks, “But can you afford the house?”, then looks at the numbers. Hiring a Certified Divorce Financial Advisor means making smarter financial decisions. You end up with a divorce that’s fundamentally healthy and doesn’t leave anyone twisting in the breeze of financial devastation. The headline I’d first given to Honey was so prosaic, I can’t even remember what it said. Honey, doing the right thing, rejected it. So I sat down and wrote many, many more headlines. I probably hit 42 possible headlines of varying degrees of electricity before writing this one… “Why let bad financial decisions ruin a perfectly good divorce?” I liked it immediately. And I kept writing. Because writing something you like doesn’t mean the job is done. There is always more, and there might be better. Too often, a writer stops as soon as there are words on the page. That’s not how copywriting gets to a place of surprise that inspires response. There were close to 100 possible headlines in the writing that happened for this client. Some of that material ended up as subheads, headlines for other pages, and body copy. But when I read aloud, “Why let bad financial decisions ruin a perfectly good divorce?” Honey laughed, I laughed, and we knew it was a winner. And when we presented it to the client, she laughed, too. And we all laughed for the right reason. Better than that, our Certified Divorce Financial Planner understood it to be just the kind of sentiment she needs to surprise her core client into responding to her message. And she loves where her brand is going. It’s smart, funny, informed, concerned, friendly and approachable. Those things don’t happen by accident. This is another page from the Purpose & Intent Playbook. No copywriting happens in a snap. As the very famous Mary Heaton Vorse once said, “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.” Sitting and writing past the first thought is how the writing gets to a place that makes you say, “Hey, this feels a little dangerous, but in a good way,” instead of “Well, I filled up the space.” Write yourself into The Zone. Let flow happen. Write more than you need to. And stop thinking about it. Just sit. Write. And Win. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Big words are fun! Recently, I was reading a marketing agency’s pitch for themselves. It made me scratch my head. Among the first things they say is, “When you want a new marketing firm, it’s important to look for an agency that is entrenched in all aspects of your industry, approaching every project from a fresh perspective.” Here’s the good news: they start by talking about me instead of about themselves. They realize the most important person in the equation is the prospect. The bad news is, they clearly don’t know what they’ve just said. If they did, they wouldn’t have said it. I know what they mean to say. But if they knew what their words really mean, they’d realize it’s not what they mean at all. Phew. Being entrenched is a bad thing. According to Oxford Languages, the definition of “Entrenched” is “of an attitude, habit, or belief that is firmly established and difficult or unlikely to change; ingrained.” In other words, here’s what the marketing agency is saying… “Look for a guy who is resistant to new ideas so you can have new ideas!” And by that sentiment, we have another example of how simple ideas are often best expressed simply. Wanting to write well is good. Not knowing you’re writing bad is a problem. When your business is communication, you need to know the words you’re using mean what you think they mean. Writing about a bad thing as a good thing in a sales pitch looks silly. It could cost big money. Granted, water finds its own level. Someone out there could read that line and think, “Hey, that’s for me!” But look where we are now. We're talking about the problem with the word instead of about the intent. Knowing what your words mean is a good idea. Being word aware matters. Checks and balances are useful. Sometimes it's having someone read what you’ve written. At the very least, using a word that is in any way questionable ought to be questioned. Ask Google. Or Jeeves. Or somebody. Questioning my own usage has saved my pork belly more than once, and I ended up cooking bacon instead. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City
User-Car Seduction Beyond The Big Game
A long week has passed since Super Bowl Sunday assaulted our sensibilities with all manner of virtue and villainy for and against advertising. If you read last week’s screed, I joked about Vroom. I stood and applauded them for a commercial that delivers both mirth and message. Then, 12 hours later I couldn’t recall what they do. Well, now I remember. And you know why? Frequency! That combined with a potent message. They’re running those commercials like crazy. There’s the spot from the big game, and now I’ve seen another. The formula is brilliant in its simplicity. They set up a relevant joke. For instance, a guy is being held captive in the car dealership from hell. The salesman looks like the vile antagonist from a Roger Corman B-movie. He jokes that the customer can leave any time he wants (as he chortles and taps together the clamps from a pair of jumper cables that spark and sizzle). Then, the scene flips 180 degrees. The beleaguered car buyer is back home in the sunlight of his front yard with his wife. He’s enjoying a beverage as Vroom delivers his newly purchased used car on the back of a flatbed. CAR BUYER: “Wow, that was painless.” ANNCR: “Never go to a dealership again. Go to Vroom dot com, buy a car, and we’ll deliver it, contact-free.” The setup is funny, showing the dark side you don’t desire. The payoff shows the alternative to the conflict as the easiest, best possible sunshiny day. And that USP? So good. “Never go to a dealership again.” The Vroom tagline is almost invisible. It’s part of the logo. “Get in.” That’s good, too. In funny advertising, there’s a often a disconnect. There’s a vivid demonstration of the bad because the bad is funny. There’s never an equally vivid illustration of the good. Nothing makes you say, “Hey, I want that!” Vroom does it right. “The bad sucks. Ha! See how much more desirable we are? Phew!” And that’s the key: you can see, richly, vibrantly, intensely in mere seconds, how much better the hero advertiser really is. In a jam-packed, affecting and arousing 30 seconds, Vroom hits all the right emotional notes. Vroom turns the key to start the engine on a psychologically charged buying process. They make themselves desirable. And they are buying frequency well beyond the Super Bowl. For Vroom, the Big Game is just the beginning of the long game. The naysayers love to tell you Super Bowl advertising is a waste of time and money. Here's an advertiser who knows how to make it honey. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City www.SlowBurnMarketing.com www.CoupleCo.com www.LessonsInLightning.com LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) Several Random Things I Learned Before Super Bowl Halftime
This is the time of year when young men’s minds turn to thoughts of ranting about the the commercials in the Big Game! Not this year. Since this year’s event was so much different by being presented in a stadium filled with super-fan super spreaders consorting with photo cutouts of actual human beings who stayed home and enjoyed the televised soundtrack of crowd noise from Big Games past, we’re going to be different about this year’s screed on commercials. Be prepared. You might decide that you want to quit your job and become a Canadian rapper. Or quit your job as a Canadian rapper and do something else. Then, you won’t have to compete with Drake or The Weeknd, both of whom were very much in evidence Sunday, and are too big for you to ever compete with them. (If you are one of our many friends north of the border who subscribes to the screed, you might wish to become an American rapper who kicks ass and takes names. More on that in a moment.) Here now, a short list of the things I learned before halftime of last Sunday’s game… Logitech makes it clear everybody is a creator. And even if they’re not, they are anyway. Buy more tools and mistake them for talent! Ridley Scott has produced a documentary for YouTube. It is based on the lowest of the low-budget footage possible: cell phone videos from around the world! By the way, Mr. Scott is the man who created the most famous Super Bowl commercial ever, and the one that started the mega-commercial madness: Apple Computer’s 1984. How’s that for irony? CBS is letting us know: The Equalizer is back! Originally an old, rich white guy who's a retired covert ops specialist with a hint of James Bond, he’s returned to network TV as an American rapper, actor, producer and talk show host named Queen Latifah, kicking ass and taking names! Will Ferrell is still ridiculous. On purpose, of course. And he can get away with saying "Damn it!” in a national TV commercial. Raymond James Stadium only looks like an ultra-super-spreader event. I figured that out between commercials. More cutouts. Less behind-a-mask, mouth-breathing madness. Except for the wild cheering and/or booing during the respectful moment of silence for the 400,000 COVID dead. Way to go, America! Thank you and goodnight! The Pringles Super Stack is now a huge deal. In fact, judging from the message, it is far more important than human life or even just doing your job with a modicum of competence. Do Canadian rappers and/or Queen Latifah partake in this processed potato madness? Mountain Dew is now pink. I missed the reason why. Does it have anything to do with supporting breast cancer awareness? Asking for a friend. Oops. Google just informed me that the new pink Mountain Dew product is called “Major Melon.” Unintentional bad joke. Apologies. Using the Indeed app means your job search now comes with a caterwauling soundtrack. Also, the job search in 2021 can mean just rolling over in bed and looking at your phone. Probably can be done from bed with a modicum of competence while Pringles Super Stacking. CAUTION: crumbs in the sheets. State Farm is confusing. Canadian rapper Drake is now inexplicably doubling for the inexplicably new Jake from State Farm. And is being a Canadian rapper in the US now a growth industry? Plummeting fruit causing a guy to ride his bike into a pile of trash bins? Always funny. So is a guy’s head suddenly jammed inside a plummeting bees nest. Slapstick never goes out of style! Another new growth industry: developing dairy-free beverages by squeezing plants and calling it “Milk.” Even though it is not milk. Milk comes from a female mammal or a coconut. SIDEBAR: Does oat “milk” pair well with the Pringles stack? And can Queen Latifah kick its ass? Will Jake, Drake and Will Ferrell just stand by and watch while collecting their SAG residuals? So many questions. Salvador Dali would be impressed by Toyota’s ad agency. Toyota’s ad agency suggested their client make a disturbingly surreal TV commercial and got away with it. (It’s loveable much in the way one loves having woken from a bad dream. Most people were probably freaked out by it. WWRD: What Would Ridley Scott Do?) And speaking of surreal… Turbo Tax and their invasion of the creeping desks makes me scared of them. Salvador Dali would not be impressed. It feels like an episode of The Twilight Zone gone wrong. Yay, Vroom! At almost halfway through the game, Vroom is the first advertiser to both a) get a laugh and b) clearly convey the benefit of their product. SIDEBAR: 12 hours later, I couldn’t tell you who Vroom is or why I felt that way. The advertising lesson here? Most of the time, one insertion does not work without a powerful offer. Most times, repetition and frequency are everything. And finally, no Budweiser commercial clearly does not mean no advertising for other Anheuser Busch products—including, covertly, Budweiser. There were many, many commercials for AB InBev products, including one for many, many of them that tells you it’s not about the beer. Budweiser logos were hidden about like Easter eggs. No actual advertising for actual Budweiser was a canny PR move as well as a useful non-profit investment. Among other things, Budweiser is putting those millions into the Ad Council’s COVID Collaborative efforts at vaccine awareness. And at halftime, I stopped trying to pay attention to the commercials. That’s because I was at a small, COVID-bubble party where nobody cared about the advertising. Every time CBS went to a break, my mask-free friends just began talking about other things. Interestingly, they all kept coming back to the question of whether Queen Latifah could really kick ass and take names. Meanwhile, if you’re looking for me, you’ll find me rolling over in bed and jamming a Pringles Super Stack in the hole while searching the Indeed app for a new job milking oatmeal… Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) People are often in one camp or the other…
The Anti-Masker Appeal For Fun & Profit!
Like me, you might be a big, hairy, anti-masking man. I’ve been thinking things through. And I want to talk to you about a power we may be missing out on. This power can change lives, make former enemies love us, and give us the ultimate power of persuasion in getting our fellow Americans to believe we’re helping to change the world, even if we’re not. We’re talking about appealing to the Placebo Effect. You and I know the pro-maskers are falling victim to nefarious forces determined to control our brains and democracy for the sinister creep of global socialism and crappy health care. If you’ve ever read about Mary Mallon, she believed something equally nefarious was at work when she was told that she had highly contagious typhoid, and she should take herself out of circulation as a cook inside people’s homes. Typhoid Mary knew better, of course. She was no fool. She infected only 53 people, and only three of those people died. Everyone else enjoyed her mad skills at corned beef and cabbage casserole. She’s so famous as a denier, she's even got her own Wikipedia page. But let’s forget about Mary for the moment. Instead, let’s look at the power of the brain to make people feel better. The Placebo Effect is all the rage right now. You’ve certainly heard about the legendary sugar pill used in Big Pharma medical studies. (Just by the way, Big Pharma does not rule the world, despite what highly reliable sources are telling you on highly reliable social media channels in between adorable videos of kittens with sidearms and photos of Bernie wearing mittens made of recycled plastic bottles.) It turns out that merely participating in a pharmaceutical study, being told what the study drug should do, then being given a sugar pill is potent. It can fool your brain into creating the intended effect of the actual drug. This is placebo in action. Placebo Effect switches on the brain’s neurotransmitters, bringing good feelings about the sugar pill, and lulls the subject into the poetic complacency of actual wellness. This sugar pill makes your migraine melt away! Seriously. This is actual, medical science stuff. People are stupid enough to be fooled into believing a sugar pill is effective medicine and they feel better. That’s the classic situation. There’s a new and exciting placebo for big, hairy fat people like me. You’re not going to believe this one. Ready? Think yourself thin! A new study shows that people who merely imagine themselves exercising are actually in better shape than people who don’t. Have you wanted a Peleton, but the bike is on backorder or otherwise too close to the cost of three mortgage payments for you to feel good about buying it instead of just going running and doing pushups or riding that actual bike that’s already in the garage? Forget about it! Now, I can just think about my husband giving me a Peleton, and I, too, can become an object of interwebs scorn and derision for welcoming inferred fat shaming from my spouse AND be better toned in the process! Placebo ho! Actual exercise be gone! Anyway, despite centuries worth of supposed evidence both clinical and anecdotal, going as far back as the rollicking good times of The Black Plague, we all know the mask is a pointless exercise in preventing the transmission of a potentially deadly disease. The surgeon who cuts us open is wearing that surgical mask only as malpractice suit prevention because in court you can’t say with 100% assuredness the guy on the stand is the same guy who had the scalpel. Kill all the lawyers! But I digress. Let’s forget that. Let’s go placebo! Think of the potent national thought storm that would erupt from sea to shining sea if everyone came together and became unified under the same N95 mask. People’s neurotransmitters would start going crazy! Everyone’s brains would light up and say, “Hell, yeah! We can kick this COVID crap to the curb!” All those at-risk people who are afraid to leave the house would suddenly feel less at-risk--as if maybe there’s some actual hope. Imagine the domino effect! The entire nation could fool itself into eliminating a disease. All those feel-good endorphins and all that dopamine would get busy inside everyone’s system and make stuff happen. And then, the United States would be like weeny little New Zealand, where months ago, millions of people fooled themselves into believing this nonsense and are now running around in shopping malls and hanging out in bars and breathing in each other’s faces like there’s no tomorrow. All that dopamine and all those endorphins go rushing around in our heads and create better moods and more positive emotional reactions and (ready for this?) enhanced self-awareness. Think how thoughtful you might become! Like me, you could win friends and influence people and might even have career potential for the highly profitable diplomatic corps. Because when we start thinking tactically, like “Oh, maybe maskless me has been scaring that old fat man with diabetes and that mother who just went through chemo. I don’t want them thinking I’m Typhoid Mary, even though Mary never wore a headdress like this one made of racoon pelts and buffalo horns,” everyone feels better about things. (I’m now hanging my headdress over the fireplace.) Think about how this impacts the Super Bowl. If everyone gets on the Placebo Effect bandwagon by wearing a mask, Budweiser could turn around and take that five and a half million bucks they’re channeling into COVID-awareness advertising and put it back into a Super Bowl commercial where it belongs. Then, big, hairy anti-masking men like me can get all blubbery over a 30-second story about Clydesdale horses once again making the world safe for puppies and democracy. Placebos. Emotions. Brain chemicals. Moods. Cooperation. Happiness. Happy cooperation has happened before. Americans used cooperation to make this nation great enough to get through World War II. It can work again on this new war. Or I’m not an American. Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) How To Hate Bird Seed For Fun And Profit
The birds keep thrashing through it and throwing it away. The bigger birds especially. Like the giant jays. They fly up, jump on the little feeding tray, and start flinging great masses of seed everywhere with a maniacal abandon, interrupting their frenzy only when they peck at a morsel that seems to meet their discriminating pallet. The smaller birds are more covert about it. The finches don’t fling as freely. You can see that they’re doing it. But they do it with this delicate, “Who, me?”, behind-the-napkin demeanor that seems so of another time, when we didn’t require Miss Manners to be endlessly pointing out our flaws of social ettiquette. Anyway, all this bustle of activity and flinging at the feeder. What are these birds doing? Is this the avian equivalent of opening the Whitman’s Sampler and flipping over each chocolate, poking a hole in the bottom of each until you find the one that meets your fancy? In a word: Yes. As Mr. Canary could tell me, I’ve bought cheap seed and it contains filler. While I’ve not done a laboratory test to determine the nature of said filler, I have it on good authority (some interwebs expert known to me for a minute or so) that we’re talking about things like cracked corn. Give my birds cracked corn and they don’t care, the crap they fling away! But, watching the birds at work is fun. Never before has this feeder seen so much activity. Ya know what else is fun? That huge pile of seed that collects beneath the bird feeder. That’s because it attracts the ducks from the pond across the way. All those mallards waddle over and pick up that mountain of cracked corn and other detritus. Even more fun is when the neighbor decides to walk his dog. He comes around the corner by the feeder, and the mallards go into a panic, flying off in a frenzy of flapping wings that sound like furious applause from a crazed audience all wearing down mittens. Now that I know why the birds are flinging their feed with abandon, will I replace it with something better? I could. But the better seed costs twice as much. And it’s guaranteed to not generate as much crazed activity. Spending more will diminish the entertainment value. And herein lies a potential sales message using a little known tactic called “exploitable weakness.” We’re not talking computer terminology, where a bad actor finds a flaw in a software system and uses that vulnerability to commence an attack. (I’m not clear on how they attack. Maybe the peck around, flinging zeroes and ones into piles until they find the digits they desire.) In sales, sometimes you’re tasked with selling a product that might seem flawed. But that apparent flaw might have a benefit that can make the item desirable. It just requires a sales perspective that spotlights the benefit in the flaw. Ready? “Hours of entertainment from the cheapest, biggest bag of birdseed! Crazy big activity from all kinds of birds! Finches, jays, mallards and more! Why spend double the price when you can have all kinds of fun for pennies on the dollar!” I wrote that line while standing in front of the birdseed selection at Home Depot. And I sold myself on staying with the cheapest seed. Birds know what they want. And so do I. What’s your favorite exploitable weakness? Cheers, Blaine Parker Your Lean, Mean Creative Director in Park City LIGHTNING BRANDING ON AMAZON The Kindle edition of our new book is now available at Amazon for the bargain price of $19.95. For details about our new Lightning Branding courses, both do-it-yourself and we-do-it-with-you editions, click here. (There's even a video of us!) |
AuthorBlaine Parker is prone to ranting about any and all things related to brand. In many ways, he is a professional curmudgeon. While there is no known vaccine for this, the condition is also not contagious. Unless you choose it to be so. Archives
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