Rise and Shine: No matter what time you to go to bed – you’re alarm should go off each morning at the same time, 7 days per week. When I started this self-programming, I chose 4AM and today, regardless of the time I hit the rack, I am up at 4AM without an alarm. I have gone to bed at 2:30 AM on occasion and still gotten up automatically at 4:00 feeling good.
Sleepy at Noon?: We’ve all heard the some countries encourage lunchtime naps. Well, me too. For lunch, I eat a sandwich and when possible (and only when I feel tired, this is not daily) I take a power nap that lasts all of 20 minutes. Instead of sitting at my desk for lunch, I will hop in the car and head to a forest preserve, behind a strip mall, etc. I eat, and then turn the radio down for a quick nap (set your cell phone alarm). I wake up totally refreshed. It’s actually kind of eerie because the energy I have after this little midday nap easily trumps the energy I had in the morning. |
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| by asking these three simple questions: Who are you? What do you do? Why does it matter? Sounds simple, and people usually do pretty well with the first one and even the second one, but the third one — why does it (or you) matter? — whoa, this is where people stumble. Yet, that is what people (including most audiences) are hoping and praying that you’ll tell them. |
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| “A scrupulous writer, in every sentence he writes will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?” |
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Branding is not about how hard you can yell, how much you can interrupt people, or how much you can manipulate the market to look in a certain direction or think and feel in a certain way simply because you tell them to (over and over and over). More than anything, to me a brand is a promise and it is built on trust. And trust takes time. |
| A brand is a person’s gut feeling about company |
| It’s what THEY say it is.” |
| . The logo won’t help make a sell or make a point, but the clutter it brings does add unnecessary noise and makes the presentation visuals look like a commercial |
| The logo is an important part of the outward expression of a brand (part of brand identity), but the meaning of brand and branding goes far, far deeper than simply making one’s logo as recognizable as possible |
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The whole post is good, but here is a snippet
| As Thor pointed out in his post on “Why Customer Service is the New Marketing,” companies often see customer service as an after-the-fact cost center — a post-sale, one-way transaction. And when that’s the case, it’s true that customer service does end up cast in a supporting role. But now we have the Web, and the Web is all about two-way communication. With the expanded voice the Internet affords people through blog posts, pod- and videocasts, discussion forums, even simple commenting, there’s a huge opportunity for companies and customers to expand the definition of “customer service” to include a whole lot more of the conversation going on around the things they sell. |
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| Genius bars for everything |
| The whole process seemed downright medieval. I couldn’t help but fantasize how Apple would re-engineer the clinic. I’m sure they’d allow us to pre-process ourselves online (either from home or in the lobby), filling in our own insurance information and description of symptoms from a point-and-click interface. We’d get an approximate time-slot rather than waiting around for hours. Perhaps the doctors would see patients in a space-efficient set-up that kept them maximally engaged at all times–standing at a bar, with patients sitting on stools across from them. (Alright, this last part is ridiculous given strict health privacy laws, but still the simplicity of it is appealing). |
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| Smart marketers already know that marketing is more than advertising. Here’s one tactic that might be overlooked: time. |
| Domino’s rode this for a while with 30 minute deliver |
| At a conference I recently attended, the group was 50 minutes behind schedule after only 2 hours of the program. For the speakers, the message was, “I’m important, as important as the last guy, so since he went over ten minutes, I will too.” For the audience, the message was, “this is a conference about the guys on the stage, not about us.” |
| When a doctor overbooks her schedule and it’s typical to wait ten or thirty minutes for an appointment, then the story is made really clear to the patient. Who’s more important? |
| A contractor that prides himself on finishing every single job on the day it’s due, regardless of what it takes, is telling a powerful sto |
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Here’s the problem: You agree that feature X can be done in two hours. But four hours into it, you’re still only a quarter of the way done. The natural instinct is to think “but I can’t give up now, I’ve already spent four hours on this!”.
So you go into hero mode. Determined to make this work, but also embarrassed that it isn’t already so. So the hero grabs his hermit cape and isolates himself from feedback. “I really need to get this done, so I’ll turn off IM, Campfire, email, and more for now”. And some times that works. Throwing sheer effort at the problem to get it done.
But was it worth it? Probably not. The feature was deemed valuable at a cost of two hours, not sixteen. |
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what about KDS?
| When you deliver bad news (a price increase) with the reasoning behind it (higher gas prices, labor costs, etc.) your customers are more likely to accept the increase as inevitable and reasonable. The absence of reasoning will annoy the customer and she will assume you’re just trying to squeeze more money out of your relationship. |
Advance Notice
Don’t pull a price increase out of thin air. Give your customers an advanced warning that changes are coming. Include the timeline of when changes will happen. |
When you surprise customers with a price hike, even your loyal consumers will start to shop around. Why? Because they’re mad. It is a lot harder to retain angry customers.
So keep customers happy: communicate, explain, prepare, and smooth the price change transition. |
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