October 26th, 2008
Branding is about how you position your product in the mind of the consumer. In personal marketing, the product is your goal or behavior, and the consumer is you. The position of your brand has less to do with what that goal actually is, than with about how you think it, which benefits you associate with it, and what feelings those benefits evoke. Positioning is also about differentiating your goal, with its associated benefits and feelings, from competing options.
This is the point in the marketing process is where you have an enormous advantage over commercial marketers, because you know so much about you! While they’re busily segmenting the population into ever more specific sub-groups and then studying them to discover a position that will be appealing, you only have to appeal to a demographic of one consumer that you already know very well.
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October 19th, 2008
If you’ve been following along with the back-to-school personal marketing campaign you have now finished one quick and easy ad about your goal. I suggest you let that ad run for awhile on your bathroom mirror, and notice any ways that it seems to influence your thoughts or behavior. This week we’re going to dig [...]
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October 12th, 2008
Images get to us; we remember them and act on them. Sometimes we even seem to try to make our world look like it does in the picture. Advertisers know this, so they make sure to expose you to lots of images of their logos and products, especially pictures of people that look like you using their products.
This is one reason it’s so effective to visualize a result you want - to see yourself succeeding in your mind’s eye. Your brain sees the outcome in your imagination, believes it, and gets busy changing the parts of your world that don’t match that mental picture.
We can do even better than mental pictures, though, because technical toys like digital cameras and photo editing software give us the ability to externalize our visualizations, and then to repeat our exposure to them more frequently than we might remember to do on our own. Sound familiar? Yeah, that’s advertising.
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October 6th, 2008
I want to tell you what’s been going on for me with the Post-It note hack, because I believe the results I’ve experienced from these very simple steps we’ve taken illustrate a critical fundamental principle of personal marketing:
YOUR AD MUST ILLUSTRATE THE RESULT THAT YOU WANT TO ACHIEVE!! It cannot be about you WANTING it; it must be about you HAVING it. (As a corollary, it’s also very good if it makes you feel something.)
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