Archive for November, 2008

“Advertising is salesmanship mass produced. No one would bother to use Advertising if he could talk to all his prospects face-to-face. But he can’t.”

— Morris Hite, author of Adman: Morris Hite’s Methods for Winning the Ad Game- 1988

“To establish a favorable and well-defined brand personality with the consumer the (marketer) must be consistent. You can’t use a comic approach today and a scientist in a white jacket tomorrow without diffusing and damaging your brand personality.”

— Morris Hite, quoted in Adman: Morris Hite’s Methods for Winning the Ad Game – 1988

“If a newspaper, a radio station or a TV station doesn’t please advertisers, it disappears. It exists to make you (the marketer) happy.

That’s the reason the medium (and its rules) exist. To please the advertisers.

But the Net is different.

It wasn’t invented by business people, and it doesn’t exist to help your company make money.

It’s entirely possible it could be used that way, but it doesn’t owe you anything. The question to ask isn’t, “but how does this help me?” as if you have some sort of say in the matter. You don’t get a vote on whether Google succeeds or whether your customers erect spam filters.

The question to ask is, “how are people (the people I need to reach, interact with and tell stories to) going to use this new power and how can I help them achieve their goals?”

— Seth Godin Source: The web doesn’t care: http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/07/the-web-doesnt.html

If you answered No, maybe you should consider paying someone else to do your thinking for you.

Seriously – there is no substitution for thinking.  But – you have to make time for it.  In our busy, gadget buzzing, screen staring society – finding time to reduce the noise around us and spend time processing our ideas can be difficult.

“Finding the obvious requires time to think…We have become a world of reactors, not thinkers, at a time when good thinking is so desperately needed.” – In Search of the Obvious by Jack Trout.

I love that quote from the 2nd chapter of Jack’s new book.  Really - do you value thinking?  Or is it just something you do on the fly?  Do you carve out time to think, research, ask questions, seek answers, and ask for feedback?

There are 2 basic ways to move forward with an idea.  It could be argued that both lead to the same destination.   One way is to move forward with limited information, bump your head, and then recover, recalibrate, and move forward again – learning as you go.  This can work but is often painful.

The other way to move forward with an idea is to make sure you’ve completely thought through all of the alternative moves, done your homework, played out various scenarios in your mind, and even tested your idea on a small audience.  This is the method I prefer – which makes sense based on how I’m wired up.

So I ask, Do you have time to Think?  And… What are you thinking about these days?