Author Archives: Lynn

Goodbye Schmu, hello SPK

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?

Posted in Uncategorized | 3 Responses

Dear Brain: How can personal marketing help me change my career?

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.

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Project wrap-up: Report on my fall marketing campaign

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.

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Make an ad for yourself and play with delivery systems

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.

Posted in Deliver your message, How to make ads | 1 Response

It’s our second birthday! Here’s your present

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.

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Best. Excuse. Ever! How my personal marketing campaign compelled me to buy a Nintendo Wii

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.

Posted in Deliver your message, Marketing strategies | 2 Responses

How to prompt others to remind you about your goal

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.

Posted in How to make ads, Marketing strategies | 4 Responses

Create a brand for your goal: Decide how to position your change

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.

Posted in Marketing strategies | 5 Responses

Know your enemy: Who or what is your competition?

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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A picture of your target result is worth at least 1000 words of crisp, powerful copy

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.

Posted in How to make ads, Marketing strategies, Personal marketing | Leave a comment