Author: Garth Beyer

You’ve heard the expression that if you stand for nothing, then you’ll fall for anything.

But have you heard the expression that if you stand for something, then stand for it everywhere?

Standing for something–truly standing for it–is an action that will constantly be questioned.

You’ll be pressured to side step your values for the sake of appealing to someone else or because it’s practical or it saves money to skip out on your value.

Simple example is the coffee shop who uses plastic creamer containers when they should be using mini-metal jugs of creamer because what they say they stand for is urban comfort food. Costco coffee creamer cups don’t align with the shop’s posture, what they say they stand for.

It’s worth looking at any action you take as either standing for the same thing you have been standing for or if you’re settling, deviating from the core values and confusing those who buy your product/service.

The brands we remember are the ones who stand for the same thing … everywhere and every day.

 

Stay Positive & Gives A New Meaning To Standing Ovation, Doesn’t It

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It matters who you surround yourself with.

You’d never play a game of tennis with someone who consistently says you’re not worth their time or that points out every one of your faults even when there are none and that tells you to get back up when you flop from true exhaustion. Yet we hit our work back and forth with these people.

Or consider the adage that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. We all believe it, but have you actually written down the five people you spend the most time with? Is the average of them who you want to be?

What about when someone tells you “That doesn’t sound like you.” What an alarming phrase to hear from people like you. It’s a gut-check moment of who you want to be. The person before the thing that doesn’t sound like you or the person after?

You decide who enters your kitchen. Don’t forget that.

 

Stay Positive & Surround Yourself With The Best Of ‘Em

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It’s easy to blame the industry when things are down and to celebrate it when they are up.

It makes a great argument when you’re talking about a new idea.

“Well, it worked in X industry. It could work in ours.”

It makes a great argument when you’re trying to destroy a new idea, too.

The thing about the industry is that it’s made up of people. Plural.

There is no single person in charge. No dedicated lead. No one person designing where the industry goes, how it floes or what it shows.

It’s worth reconsidering how you do “industry research,” because it can often be either misleading or not informative enough to make a decision that will matter to the people in it.

 

Stay Positive & Better To Do “People Research”

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It’s infinitely smoother to move forward in life if you treat different people differently.

Despite us all having shared attributes that move us (love, belonging, safety, etc.), the moment we step outside, we’re different from others walking beside us.

The best way to begin treating different people differently is to draw a bell curve.

Place the person or group you’re working with on the far right, then fill out the type of person or group that fits the middle and the other side of the curve.

Everything is perception, and we have to stop acting like everyone fits in the bell of the curve.

Every year it becomes less of a mountain and more of a small hill, anyway.

 

Stay Positive & Goodbye Bell, Hello People

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Most stickiness sucks.

Gum on your shoe.

Not moving up at work.

Deciding between movies with friends or date night with your siggo.

As often as I write about avoiding getting stuck, there is one stuck that’s a good sign.

It’s the creative sort of stuck. After hours of concepting, thinking of ideas, and struggling to improve them you get stuck.

That’s a healthy stuck because it doesn’t mean you’re stuck; it means that you’ve made it through the hell of all the bad ideas, the easy swings, the cliches and everything anyone would expect you to come up with.

This is the stuck that when you notice it, it should be fuel to go beyond it.

After this kind of stuck, it’s all up from there.

 

Stay Positive & Go Ahead, Get Stuck, But Then Keep Going

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Repeating yourself isn’t always helpful.

It’s not that they didn’t listen, it’s that they didn’t hear you … really hear you.

The best thing you can do is to say what you said differently.

To empathize. To switch from what you want them to hear to how they’ll actually understand you. To putting their shoes on for a moment.

And if roles reversed, the best phrase you can speak is “Can you say that in a different way?”

Hearing and understanding are two different actions, and repeating might help with one, but not so much the other.

 

Stay Positive & Said Differently, Ask More Questions

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For any sort of marketing to work, there needs to be tension.

Consider any story you’ve remembered throughout the years from Peter Pan and Star Wars to family memories and your greatest educational triumphs–there was conflict happening in each.

The problem with a lot of advertising is it tries to get to happily ever after right away.

The irony is that for people to seek out a solution, you have to put the problem in the spotlight.

Parking assist doesn’t really matter to you or I until we’re faced with parking in a tight space. Here’s an ad that shows the problem. Far more effective than showing a car parking for you.

Consider where the conflict is in your marketing material, your brand story, your financials.

There is conflict, right?

 

Stay Positive & Now Leverage It

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