More than anything else, Take Back Your Brain! is a site about seizing your power to create the life you want. What is the desire that has been whispering to you for several months or years? I’ll bet you know what it is. Go ahead and write it down right now in a place where you’ll see it every day. Illustrate it if you can. Then let that “ad” encourage you to be a willing participant in whatever shows up for you next!
In my experience, regularly exposing yourself to any photos of you doing something you want to participate in more often, such as exercising, with normalize that activity and make it more likely to happen. However anything you can do to engineer your photo so it looks like the outcome you want to achieve is already true will make it even more powerful.
Steve’s “Belief Board” is hung on the wall in front of the desk where he works, so he exposes himself to the messages it contains for several hours every day. It’s in his field of vision, yet off to the side, so that it’s normally visible but not the focus of his conscious attention.
Several people have told me lately after discovering this site that they’re really excited about the potential of personal marketing so they’re going to start using Post-It notes to influence themselves. I’m very happy they’ve decided to try personal marketing and curious to learn about their results, but I always want to tell them that it works even better — much, much better — to use pictures.
Make sure to frame your ads as affirmative, rather than negative statements, and to include pictures if possible. Keep in mind that commercial advertising always seeks to emphasize benefits, and to tailor those benefits to the target demographic.
The whole purpose of personal marketing is to devise ways to automatically remind ourselves of the things we want to think about. Most of the time I’ve oriented my ad campaigns toward thinking about things I want to do. This one is more focused on being, and it feels good.
I’ve finally decided to quit waiting for a “good time” and just go for a site remodel. In a perfect world these changes would have occurred discreetly, behind the scenes, and been rolled out gracefully when they were ready for prime time. Hello, (imperfect) world!
By Lynn | February 27, 2009
Dear Brain and three other bloggers answer the question, “How do I remind myself of the long-term value of saving money when something I want RIGHT NOW is begging to be bought?”
By Lynn | February 19, 2009
Product, Price, Place, and Promotion — known as the marketing mix — are the four classic variables a marketer controls in any exchange. Each contains opportunities to shape a proposition so well suited for the customer that selling it doesn’t require much persuasion, because it meets a genuine need in a way they want to do it. Commercial and social marketers pay a great deal of attention to each of these areas in order to craft attractive offers for you.
Why should personal marketing be any different? If you get the Four P’s right — especially the first three — iron-willed discipline is seldom necessary.
By Lynn | February 11, 2009
Serenitext is a service that sends you text messages at random times throughout the day. You can write your own messages or choose them from a list, then Serenitext delivers them to your cell phone or email address. I really like this service. It’s very easy to set up and use, and it works well.
By Lynn | February 2, 2009
TBYB! wants to inspire you to DO personal marketing, because this stuff absolutely rocks your life. Here are ten very effective advertising techniques that you can implement in just a few minutes.
By Lynn | January 25, 2009
What you think about is what happens. Or at the very least is much, much more likely to happen than something you never think about at all. Your mind will receive a staggering number of messages in 2009 that you mostly have no control over. TBYB! suggests that you take a look at the input streams that you do control, to make sure their content is in alignment with your goals.
By Lynn | January 19, 2009
A digital photo frame may be the perfect tool for delivering advertising to ourselves. What do you think? Which photo frame should I buy? If you have a digital photo frame what do you like about it? Are there any features you wish it had? Which one would you buy if you were going to get another photo frame today?
By Lynn | December 28, 2008
Here’s an arts and crafts project that’s fun, powerful, and dare I say a reasonable alternative (or addition) to football for New Year’s day. You’ll be exposed to over a million commercial messages in 2009. As is true with so many of the techniques we use at Take Back Your Brain!, the New Year collage makes sure you are also reminded about the things you want to think about.
By Lynn | December 14, 2008
What do you think? How are we adults faring? Are young people getting slammed harder by commercial advertising than the rest of us? What do you think it would mean for kids to steal the tactics being deployed against them, to mold them into “a population of dip-shits,” and use them to power their own dreams?
By Lynn | December 8, 2008
I am starting to make a career change from accounting to human resource management. My ultimate goal is to obtain a Certified Human Resource Professional designation. I have enrolled in a HR Mgmt. course and joined the professional trade association and local chapter. Should I look for a position in HR now or wait until I have completed another course? I do have some HR and other transferable skills.
By Lynn | November 30, 2008
As we wrap up this series of personal marketing projects I’m declaring my own campaign a huge success. Not only can I walk again, but I have a completely different relationship to my body than I did when we began, or even before my injury. I feel much more IN my body, and yes, even athletic. I’m in better shape, have improved my balance, and am really beginning to enjoy and look forward to working out. All in all, I’d have to rank this right up there with the RV ad campaign as one of the most successful personal marketing campaigns I’ve ever conducted.
By Lynn | November 24, 2008
This week we’re going to use everything you’ve learned about yourself in the back-to-school marketing campaign to make one more ad for your goal. Ideally, it will pull together all the insights from your market research, competitive analysis, and positioning decision into a final ad that pictures yourself having exactly the result you want. Then you’ll set up a method to make sure you automatically see that picture every day.
By Lynn | November 16, 2008
Take Back Your Brain! is two years old and 100 articles deep!! I wanted to celebrate by giving something to you, the readers, so today I’m launching a free new coaching feature we’ll call “Dear Brain”. I envision it as kind of an advice column where you can tell us about a goal you have for yourself and receive suggestions about how you could use personal marketing to support it. Think of it as Dear Abby meets marketing geek.
By Lynn | November 9, 2008
TBYB! believes the most valuable thing we can do with our technological gadgets is to use the things they know about us to support our own growth. The Nintendo Wii, especially with Wii Fit, is one of the most elegant applications of computing power applied to human development I have ever seen. If your goal is to be more of an athlete (or just play one on TV), the Nintendo Wii is about as good as it gets.
By Lynn | November 3, 2008
The Small Talk hack uses one or more props to disrupt your visual presentation in a way that makes others feel safe, sympathetic, helpful, interested, or just curious enough to voluntarily begin conversations with you about a goal you have chosen. These conversations will remind you about that goal several times a day, cause you to return your attention to it, and give you the opportunity to reinforce the idea as you talk about it.
By Lynn | October 26, 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.
By Lynn | October 19, 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 [...]
By Lynn | October 12, 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.
By Lynn | October 6, 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.)
By Lynn | September 28, 2008
it’s my pleasure to review Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth because it’s so relevant to the work we’ve been doing on our back-to-school personal marketing campaign. Steve’s first published book reads like a volume of personal development’s greatest hits, but not in the tawdry, exploitative way that you might see on a late night info-mercial. Instead, you realize immediately that this is a guy who has read widely, thought deeply, applied fearlessly, synthesized intelligently, and then done us the enormous favor of writing down his observations. The result is a comprehensive yet simple framework for personal growth that helps you make sense of everything from diet to career choices to religion.
By Lynn | September 21, 2008
If I’ve learned anything at all from studying marketing it’s that the process is not random. The thousands of ads we’re exposed to every day are specifically designed to push the buttons of the demographic those marketers have decided to target — you.
The problem with many of our attempts to influence ourselves is that they’re much more generic than that. We exhort ourselves to eat less, exercise more, or save money without putting nearly as much thought into who we are and why we would do that as the people who sell us bathroom tissue. We try to change ourselves instead of understanding ourselves.
By Lynn | September 14, 2008
This week we’re going to look at your goals and choose one that you’d like to make real progress on between now and the end of the year. Since personal marketing can help with almost any goal, I encourage you to choose based not so much on what you think will “work”, but on how much it’s something you want to succeed at.
By Lynn | September 7, 2008
Regular readers will recognize that I’m just returning to TBYB! from a couple of months off. It’s been a great summer break for me, and I hope for you as well. The first article in the new series is called How to choose a goal for your back-to-school marketing campaign. In it, we take a look at your goals for 2008 and pick one that you’d really like to kick some butt on before the end of the year. Look for it in your favorite feed reader next week.
TBYB is a strong proponent of identifying the life you want and trying to get it. I notice that the life I yearn for lately has more leisure and fewer commitments; unexpected morning adventures and lazy afternoons. So I’m going to take a break for a few weeks, and then I’ll be back with a new season of posts about personal marketing, in which I’ll show you step-by-step how to take control of your own attention by advertising to yourself. If you’ve not done so already, you can subscribe to my RSS feed to be notified when the series begins again.
I watched lot of softball this week on the NCAA Women’s College World Series. It turns out that Katie Burkhart, the pitcher of the winning Arizona Sun Devils - is a very successful personal marketing practitioner. According to the announcers, she’s spent a lot of time working on her mental game in the past year, and one of the tactics she now uses is to write messages to herself on the back of her glove, to remind her of thoughts that help her focus out on the pitching mound during the game. How cool is that?
Personal marketing uses commercial and social marketing principles to help us succeed at goals we have chosen for ourselves. It’s powerful stuff that can really help your life. But the following feedback from a reader made me realize that some of you may be feeling overwhelmed about how and where to begin. This article shows you how to find that starting point, and then how to continue step-by-step to develop a great ad to influence yourself.
You can’t advertise to yourself all the time. I guess you could, but it would be time-consuming and exhausting, sometimes you don’t really know what you want to work on, and other times you’re just busy with other stuff. Besides, if you do it too much you risk having your own ads become part of the mental “clutter”.
What you can do during the fallow or busy times is take advantage of the delivery channels you’ve already established to throw up very easy, low-maintenance messages that inspire or nourish you until you’re ready for the next round of progress.
Wakerupper is a free online service that delivers reminders to your phone. It’s always good to remind yourself about the benefits of a behavior you want to adopt. The scheduling feature of Wakerupper gives you the power to remind yourself right at the time you might need that support the most.
Thanks to a reader from Canberra, Australia for sharing these awesome personal marketing ideas. Most of the time TBYB advocates advertising about stuff you DO want, but I think the results here speak for themselves.
Take Back Your Brain! wrestled with an interesting ethical dilemna this week. For the first time, someone approached me with an offer to advertise on the site. It was a pretty decent offer, too - more than two hundred dollars for doing very little work. Thinking about that offer provided an opportunity for me to analyze advertising from a different perspective than I usually do.
TBYB is on vacation. Your assignment this week is to go back and implement one of the suggestions you’ve read about in a previous article. We’ll return next Monday to your regularly scheduled blog.
You’re exposed to some kind of persuasive message every 7 seconds, on average, for your whole life. And every one those messages has at least one thing in common with the others: ALL of them are about someone else’s priorities!
Thanks to “Bathroom Reader” for suggesting my new favorite location to place ads. Early testing indicates that this location is a winner, folks!
One of the first rules of marketing is to understand as much as you can about who you’re trying to market to. The clearer picture you have of your target consumer, the better you can position your product to meet their needs.
In the case of commercial or social marketing, the target consumers are other people. But in personal marketing, the target is you. This difference has the potential to give you a huge advantage. While others must be content with grouping people into “market segments” with similar characteristics, you have the luxury of communicating to a demographic of only one person…a person you know very well!
If there were truly ads on the moon it would mean there is no place on earth - not a single one - that is free of marketing messages. But consider how close that is to being true already. From the time we wake up in the morning until we fall asleep again at night most of us are almost constantly exposed to marketing messages of one kind or another.
Because ads are almost anywhere, each vendor must try to find a way to stand out and get your attention. They call it breaking through the clutter. One way to do that is to put their messages in unexpected places. Like the moon.
After taking a marketing class winter quarter I’m more convinced than ever that it’s where the action is when it comes to understanding and changing human behavior, and therefore those of us who are motivated to grow can benefit greatly from learning about its fundamental techniques.
Marketing includes deciding exactly what you’re selling, honestly assessing your strengths and weaknesses, sizing up the competition, learning as much as you can about your consumer, and strategizing about how to position your product to appeal to him. It includes deciding how to manipulate the four classic variables over which you have control: Product, Price, Place and Promotion. Promotion, in turn, is divided into many possible persuasive activities, one of which is advertising. Other elements of a “promotional mix” can include direct marketing, interactive marketing, sales promotions, public relations and personal selling. In other words, advertising is just one tool in what is often a carefully planned and well-orchestrated campaign to convince you to do something.
The reward centers of your brain seem to be stimulated by anticipating a benefit in a way that’s very similar to actually receiving it. The implication for marketing is that you can create a very rewarding experience for your consumer - you - by helping yourself to vividly imagine how good the outcomes of a behavior are going to be. The idea is that stimulating the reward center in your brain will create positive associations about the target behavior. By advertising the benefits to yourself it may be possible to begin collecting positive, rewarding experiences about a behavior before you even begin to do it!
Here’s a quick and easy ad hack for Windows Mobile users: write a text message on your Owner Information screen, and set it to display every time you turn the device on. It’s a great place to display a goal or affirmation that you really want to keep in your awareness for a couple of days.
By Lynn | February 24, 2008
More than any generation in history, people who are young today are not free to create an authentic culture of their own. Instead their hopes and desires are intensively studied by marketers, then amplified and sold back to them in a diabolical feedback loop.
That’s the premise of the PBS Frontline documentary “The Merchants of Cool”, which makes a chillingly compelling case for the distortion of youth culture by its massive commercialization.
By Lynn | February 17, 2008
TBYB encourages you to level the playing field, as it were, by stepping up the production values of your own advertising. Though you’ll likely never decide to sink a million bucks into producing an ad to influence yourself, it’s certainly possible to add a little color, a photograph, or a slogan. Rather than just writing your goal on a list, consider introducing interesting imagery to reinforce the concept.
By Lynn | February 11, 2008
Hey guys. I sat down late last night to publish the article I had written for you this week and discovered to my dismay that due to problems with my host (don’t get me started!) that version of the Wordpress database has vanished. ARGH!!!!! Hopefully this is a temporary situation that can be resolved from either their backup or mine, but in the meantime I encourage you to browse the article index for tips about personal marketing that you may have missed.
By Lynn | February 3, 2008
For the past three weeks we’ve been looking at a tool that marketers use to understand and manipulate human motivation - Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. I showed you how to locate a goal you have for yourself on the hierarchy of needs, intentionally frame your messaging about that behavior to a different layer on the hierarchy, and then design advertisements to yourself based on that strategy. See Target your hierarchy of needs - part 1, part 2, and part 3.
This week I’ll show you the details about how I used the instructions in those articles to make a group of ads for myself about exercising.
By Lynn | January 27, 2008
In part one of this series, I showed you how to manipulate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to decide how to best frame a message to motivate yourself. In part two we selected a slogan, took photos, and developed a creative concept. This week we’ll create the ads for your campaign and set up an automatic system for delivering them to yourself.
By Lynn | January 21, 2008
In part two of this series I show you how to develop an ad campaign that targets a level on the hierarchy of needs, including how to select a slogan, do the photo shoot, and and discover your creative concept.
By Lynn | January 13, 2008
Advertisers are very interested in what motivates our behavior. One of the models they use to understand motivation was developed in 1943 by the psychologist Abraham Maslow. Maslow studied healthy, high-functioning people and from that research postulated a five level hierarchy of human needs. Maslow’s thinking goes that humans are motivated to meet these needs in ascending order. So someone who is hungry, alone, or fears for their life is not that concerned with self-esteem or reaching their potential. On the other hand, people who have their basic needs handled are most motivated by needs that are higher up on the hierarchy. One of the strategies advertisers use is to bump their messaging for a product up one or more levels, from where it naturally fits to where they believe their target demographic is most concerned. You can use the technique of moving your message up or down the needs hierarchy to motivate yourself to reach your own goals, too.
By Lynn | December 21, 2007
Alerting the people around you to your goals has many positive benefits:
* Someone else now holds the idea of you doing this thing in their mind, in addition to you.
* They are likely to ask you about it, which gives you an opportunity to talk about your goal.
* It creates the opportunity for them to inform you about resources they know about and offer other forms of support.
* It activates the psychological principle of consistency.
Postage stamps with a custom picture on them are a great way to activate all of these benefits, especially at a time of year when many of us correspond with people we care about, and who care about us.
By Lynn | December 6, 2007
Americans spend a half trillion dollars on Christmas. 60% of them carry more than $13,000 in credit card debt. Friday I went to the Seattle opening of What Would Jesus Buy? - a documentary movie by Morgan Spurlock that follows Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping Gospel Choir on a month-long road trip [...]
By Lynn | November 28, 2007
TBYB! is always looking for methods to deliver our messages that will be automatic; that is, they occur frequently in the normal course of doing things you would do anyway without requiring any additional action or thought on your part. Dressing up your avatar can be a great way to accomplish that automation. Now that I have all mine all suited up and at the gym I see “myself” working out every time I check my email!
By Lynn | November 18, 2007
Take Back Your Brain! is one year old this week, and what a year it has been! Researching and writing these articles for you has been a fascinating, exhilarating adventure, so thanks to each of you for a great ride.
I have plenty of new articles planned for 2008, including a series that should be really interesting about the psychological hooks copywriters use. Of course there will also be a bunch of ideas and tips about ways to create and deliver advertising to yourself, using things like Vista widgets, audio reminders and passwords. As always, we’ll cover both technical hacks and easy low-tech projects. Plus we’re going to get a pet.
By Lynn | November 11, 2007
It seemed a bit early, but of course that’s the point. Who was thinking about Christmas shopping on November 8th? Yet when I walked into Starbucks last Thursday morning, the holiday transformation had occurred completely. The store is now entirely decked out in red with a few green accents. Special holiday drinks are on the menu. Numerous displays of potential gifts are available to browse while waiting for my drink. And of course each employee was wearing the obligatory red shirt; one even asked me if I was ready for the holidays. Are you kidding?
It was all kind of a shock the first morning, but within a few days I’ll be used to it. In fact, that’s already happening. And again, that’s the point. Aggressive reminders about the need to complete holiday shopping will have become a normal part of each morning; perhaps something I’ll hardly notice.
By Lynn | November 5, 2007
The Christmas season is a fascinating time to study advertising methods. The rule set of the festival (everyone buys a gift for everyone else) ensures that more money is spent during these few weeks than at any other time during the year; thus the competition for holiday dollars heats up into a massive no-holds-barred persuasion frenzy.
By Lynn | November 1, 2007
A few days ago I climbed Angels Landing in Zion National Park. This 1500 foot climb is billed as one of the most challenging and spectacular hikes in the world, and it did not disappoint. The view from the top is amazing. It was a wonderful, difficult, exhilarating, challenging, sometimes scary, beautiful day; one of the high points of the road trip. Definitely the current ad on my cell phone was a factor in convincing me to try it.
By Lynn | October 29, 2007
All of a sudden I saw a huge tree growing out of a dry wash. It could have been the only tree in the county, as far as I knew. As I drove closer I noticed there seemed to be something hanging from the tree. Lots of things, suspended from the tree in large clusters like huge wisteria blossoms. I was nearly on top of the tree when I realized that these giant blossoms were composed of shoes. Hundreds of them. What a odd thing to do with your only tree! It would have been funny anywhere, but in a landscape where I’d seen little but sand and sagebrush for several hours it was hilariously bizarre; radically out of context. It sure did get my attention!
By Lynn | October 22, 2007
Sometimes I wonder if messages from the past are so different from this one. As citizens of the future, we usually ascribe deep spiritual significance to ancient petroglyphs, but what if it was just some kid defacing a rock?
By Lynn | October 20, 2007
These petroglyphs are on a sandstone wall about 100 feet off the ground in a stunningly beautiful area near Lake Mead. The interpretive signage suggests they may have had religious or ceremonial significance. Although their exact meaning has been lost, the images are still reaching audiences 1000 years later.
By Lynn | October 19, 2007
We normally focus on advertising TO ourselves here at TBYB. What if we advertised FOR our own goals, but TO others? What kind of visible public commitment could you make about your goal?
By Lynn | October 17, 2007
Just north of Portland, Oregon on Interstate 5, I passed a huge sign for Rosa Parks Way. It occurred to me that naming streets is one way a community advertises to itself what its collective values are. For example, this sign may be reminding the citizens of Portland that there is no longer room in the world for racial intolerance; and that it’s important to stand up (or sit down) for what is right.
By Lynn | October 14, 2007
For the next 3 weeks I’m celebrating the achievement of a huge goal with a three week road trip in my new RV. Seeing America, baby! Normally I stay pretty close to topic on this blog, but since I believe it was personal advertising that got me into the position to be able to do this, I’m considering that anything that happens during the trip IS on topic.
By Lynn | October 10, 2007
My early ads in the RV ad campaign were mostly just pictures that I downloaded from manufacturer’s websites. They worked well to keep the idea in my consciousness, and prompted me to take many actions that I’m sure I would not have otherwise. However, as the campaign went on I discovered a few other techniques that were so effective they produced huge shifts in my mental journey from impossible to inevitable.
Three of the four methods below use a variant on visualizing your desired future reality with you (or your home) already in it. I’ve written about that pretty extensively in the Put yourself in the picture series. Basically you use technology like your digital camera and/or Photoshop to help you make a picture of that future.
The fourth method uses large high-resolution color images that change very frequently. Think TV. Although this method was not at all technically sophisticated, I was surprised by how much it engaged my attention and emotions.
By Lynn | October 4, 2007
I just met a HUGE goal, largely due to a relentless advertising campaign I’ve been waging on myself for the last couple of years. Two years ago purchasing a motorhome seemed impossible. By last month it felt inevitable. Today I have a new RV sitting in my driveway. I’m completely convinced advertising is what made the difference.
By Lynn | September 25, 2007
Normally we buy souvenirs after we do something we’ve been dreaming about: t-shirts, mugs, postcards, whatever. TBYB suggests front-loading your souvenir shopping instead. That is, buy the t-shirt first to jump-start the process.
By Lynn | September 19, 2007
A key piece of our strategy here at TBYB is to borrow the tools that advertisers use to persuade us and deploy them in the service of our own goals. Before Phrases that Sell, the text usually felt like the weakest part of my ads because I didn’t know what I was doing. Now I have one of the same tools the pros use on my desk.
By Lynn | September 10, 2007
Look around you. Most of the ads you see contain both text and images. With all of the zillions of dollars at the industry’s disposal to test the effectiveness of different advertising methods, one has to assume that we see the image/text combination so frequently because it works. With the addition of one word to my cell phone ad I’m now using that same method to reinforce my own dream of one day hiking the Wonderland Trail many times every day.
By Lynn | September 4, 2007
How many of you have a photo of your pet as the background image on your cell phone screen? I must admit that I still do, even though I’ve been writing about personal persuasion for almost a year. Loyal readers know that I adore my dog. It makes me happy to see his picture and of course there’s nothing at all wrong with that. But I consult my cell phone many times every day because I use it for both a clock and a telephone, and I’m starting to wonder if I might be seriously underutilizing some really prime advertising space. In fact, I’m thinking that a picture in a display location I’m exposed to that frequently should probably be chosen very consciously; possibly to support very high-priority goals.
By Lynn | August 26, 2007
In the blizzard of sensory input I encountered while driving through the neighborhood yesterday morning why did this particular sign catch my attention? There was nothing particularly attention-grabbing about it, other than being relevant to one of my goals.
I submit it’s exactly that relevance, reinforced by my collage and slideshow ads, that made the sign stand out. I think we notice opportunities that are related to whatever has been introduced to our attention as significant. By running ads about improving the soil in my back yard I had put my brain on notice that this is an important project, and when I saw the sign I recognized its message as a potential match between that intention and opportunity.
By Lynn | August 13, 2007
I think of a campaign as several ads that work together to deliver persuasive messages about the same objective. I’ve found that making a group of ads around the same theme has the potential to create a very powerful synergy. Each of the ads can illustrate a different facet of your theme, and thus reinforce the larger message.
Motivator is a free online tool that lets you upload a photo, add some text, and choose a border. It then spits out a really professional-looking poster that you can either order as a large print or save to your computer to use in ad delivery systems you may already have in place. You do have to pay if you decide to order printed posters ($15-$40), but saving the finished image to your computer is completely free.
I made several posters a week ago for my Google Sidebar slideshow and just love them. Something about the slickness seems to be very effective. Let me stress how easy it was, too.
One of the most successful ad campaigns I ever ran was designed to get myself to ride my bike to work. Instead of basing it on standard motivators for exercising like health and fitness, I observed how commercial advertising works hard to associate positive feelings with a product and modeled my campaign after that.
I order to add an emotional dimension I thought about WHY I wanted to ride to work. Of course, the usual reasons about exercise and health applied, but they had not been enough to get me to do it so far. Instead, I reached back to the memory of the time when I was riding my bike all the time, and tried to identify the things about it that were pleasurable.
Here’s a very easy, low-tech way to put yourself in the picture. It works just as well as technology-based methods like Photoshop, but the only tools you need are scissors and glue. This project is cheap, simple and fun … and you may get to buy school supplies!
Want to float the Amazon River? Climb Mt. Everest? Visit the Taj Mahal? No problem. Maybe you want to attend the Olympics, the Tour de France, or Burning Man. Heck, maybe you want to win the Olympics! You can use photo editing software to create a believable picture of yourself in any situation you can imagine.
Any photo editing software that supports layers will work, such as Photoshop or its less expensive sibling Photoshop Elements. I’ll write these instructions generically enough that you should be able to follow them using any photo editing program.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 is small, light, phenomenally easy to use, and has one of the best designed user interfaces I’ve ever seen. This camera makes it really easy to do the thing I care about most - take decent pictures and transfer them to my computer.
A few months ago I met a woman named Fran at a party. When the inevitable “What do you do?’s” were exchanged, her answer boiled down to: “I’m looking for a job and worrying about it.” I told Fran about personal advertising, and suggested that the primary thing I it could do to help her was move her from a place where she primarily identified as someone who was unsuccessfully looking for work to thinking of herself as someone who has a job. We designed an ad campaign for Fran that yielded several requests from high-level executives at the organization she wanted to work for, asking her to help with projects requiring advanced skills and a lot of responsibility.
An amazing (and disturbing) video posted recently on YouTube. Think of your attention as the baby buffalo…
Soon after I started making ads that put myself in the picture I discovered what the challenge was going to be: who would hold the camera and take the picture? About the time I was getting really frustrated, Cool Tools came to the rescue with a review of the Joby Gorillapod tripod. I love my Gorilla tripod. It’s light, portable, inexpensive, and functions exactly like the all the glowing reviews say it does. The Gorillapod has freed me up to take timed photos of myself - both alone and with friends - just about anywhere I want to. It’s a great tool!
Visualizing yourself achieving a goal has traditionally meant seeing it in your mind. But technology like digital cameras and photo editing software gives us the ability to actually SEE a picture of ourselves doing something that we have not done yet in real life. With a little imaginative costuming, props and scenery you can take a photo that looks like the reality you want to create already exists.
This is an astonishingly powerful technique. If you can visualize yourself doing something, you are more likely to accomplish it. One of the most effective things you can do to create the future you want is to literally put yourself in the picture!
While Google bots are out crawling the internet to discover web pages, they also keep track of the pictures those pages contain. You can get access to that entire collection of pictures with a feature called Google Image Search.
Image Search is especially useful when you’re looking for a picture of something really specific. That makes it a great source of images for your ads.
I can remember vividly how difficult it was to learn how to drive nails. When I was training we used to practice by pounding hundreds of long, thin 16 penny box nails into a large beam - trying over and over to drive them all the way in without bending. Most of them did bend for the first few weeks until I learned the secret: focus all of my attention on the nail going in.
I think that’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the techniques I’m describing in this blog: keep our attention on the outcomes we want. Whether that outcome is a job, a behavior change, an adventure, an object, a relationship, or whatever - encountering images and messages about it regularly helps keep our attention focussed on that goal.
This article is the last in our series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. The scarcity principle boils down to this: we want what we’re afraid we can’t have. Fear of losing out on something can be an extremely powerful motivator.
Availability might be threatened by limited quantity, a time deadline, or by competition. Whatever the reason, the item in question becomes more attractive to us if we think we can’t have it. Whether it’s a potential mate, a used car, or an item on sale, once its availability is threatened we WANT it!
This article is the seventh in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion In this chapter, Cialdini convincingly demonstrates that most of us have a very strong tendency to follow the instructions of someone we perceive to be an authority.
This article has been more difficult to write than the others because so much of Take Back Your Brain’s emphasis is about taking back our own power. Why would we want to give it away again? The answer to that question comes from Cialdini. He says that anytime we see a technique widely used by compliance professionals it’s because it works. TBYB is interested in taking ownership of any technique that others use to hijack our attention, and applying it instead toward achieving our own goals.
Take Back Your Brain is very honored to be nominated for a Blogger’s Choice award in the Best Marketing Blog category. If you have enjoyed reading these articles I would be extremely grateful if you could take a few minutes to vote for this blog.
This article is the sixth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I’ve been writing about the principles in Cialdini’s book in some detail because the primary mission of Take Back Your Brain is to level the playing field between the advertisers and us in the competition for our own mindspace. While we use weak methods like “trying to remember to do it more”, they possess an arsenal of incredibly effective psychological techniques that are very difficult to resist.
One of the ways advertisers get to us is through the principle of liking, which asserts that we are more likely to say yes to a person (or product) if we like them. Therefore, a useful question is, what makes us like someone? It turns out there are several dimensions to liking that are relevant to our personal advertising campaigns.
This article is the fifth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion.
The principle of social proof suggests that we tend to look to others to decide what to do, especially when we are uncertain about the correct behavior. Seeing others doing something has a powerful influence on us, especially if we perceive those others to be a lot like us.
This article is the fourth in an eight-part series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. Social psychology research suggests that taking even a small action creates commitment in us to the position that action represents, and that we will thereafter want to appear to behave in ways that are consistent with that position to both ourselves and others.
This article is the third in a series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. According to Cialdini we are massively socialized to feel uncomfortable if someone has given us a gift or done us a favor that we have not returned. This feeling of indebtedness generally originates from one of three sources: favors, gifts, or concessions.
This article is the second in a series about Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. If we see two things in sequence that are different from one another, we will tend to see the second one as more different than it actually is. This is called perceptual contrast. For example, a realtor or car salesman might show us a unit that is overpriced and in poor condition before showing us the one they really want us to buy. By contrast, the second one looks like a great deal and we want it more.
I believe a lot of expertise about how people change their minds and their behavior resides in the selling and advertising and industries. A core mission of Take Back Your Brain is to learn the secrets those industries know about how to influence us and use them to make it more likely we will achieve our own goals. To that end I’ve been reading lots of books about sales, marketing and advertising. One of the best so far is Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, by Robert B. Cialdini.
Cialdini identifies what he calls “compliance professionals”, such as salemen, fund raisers, con artists and advertisers. He researched the book for three years by trying to learn what they know about how to influence us. He distills and organizes the thousands of tactics he observed down into a handful of basic techniques that he calls “weapons of automatic influence,” the common denominators found in most of the techniques he studied. He claims that each of them is based on a human psychological principle that has the “…ability to produce a distinct kind of automatic, mindless compliance from people, that is, a willingess to say yes without thinking first.”
The Hipster PDA is an ideal environment for personal ads. You proably already have cards in your stack for a calendar, to-do lists, and notes. To start advertising just include a couple more cards with personal messages or pictures on them. Once you have “installed” an ad, you will likely encounter it several times a day as you flip through your cards. Of course it’s ridiculously easy to move ads cards in and out of the stack, and I change them frequently to keep it fresh.
Sure. Affirmations are messages to ourselves advocating things we want, repeated many times. That’s exactly what we’re doing. But 21st century technology gives us tools to do it really, really well.
The idea was first introduced by a French psychologist named Emile Coue in the 1920’s. What has changed a great deal in 80-plus years is the technology we have available to create and deliver those messages.
By Lynn | February 28, 2007
This technique uses a gadget called The Quote to display one- or two-sentence ads to yourself throughout the day. The Quote is a great tool for displaying advertising concepts that are more verbal than visual. Like the Photos gadget, it lets us use the power of repetition - one of the tools advertisers use on us all the time - to magnify the effect of our messages.
The content for the gadget is contained in a text file that contains a list of statements, separated by blank lines. The Quote gadget randomly selects one of them at a time and displays it in a box on your Google Sidebar.
By Lynn | February 22, 2007
This is the article the whole gadget series has been building up to. As I said before, The Google Photos gadget is my favorite method for delivering ads to myself. It’s designed to display a slide show of images on your desktop, from whatever source you choose, and rotate them as frequently as you want.
Whatever else you’re working on, those pictures are rotating on the edge of your screen - and your awareness - all day. I think this is analagous to a lot of the advertising we receive in our environment. We’re not directly watching many of the ads, but some part of our consciousness takes them in. The slideshow method also takes advantage of another strategy advertisers use on us: repetition.
By Lynn | February 19, 2007
In the last article in this series I showed you how to install Google Desktop so we could get the very cool Google Sidebar, which is the container for the even cooler Google Gadgets. This article describes how to configure the Sidebar, how to use Gadgets, and how to customize your Sidebar by getting more Gadgets.
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