In the pursuit of making a dollar, we can often enable a mix of people to dictate what our brand is, says and stands for.
No doubt we ought to be recognizing a problem and providing a solution – not forcing a solution on people who don’t have the problem.
But there’s still dissonance between what we want our brand to stand for and the people that kind of brand attracts.
Without a clear (and unwavering) idea of what we stand for and the people who will stand behind that, we can attract a lot of people who will test our willpower, who will verbally abuse the brand and who will make you question why you got into business in the first place.
It’s not always about awareness and it’s definitely not only about making a dollar. Each of those happen, however, when we know who we want to attract – and design for that in the first place.
There are a lot of tools to evaluate your marketing behavior as well as to gauge it against competitors.
One in particular I’ve come to appreciate is the before and after chart.
On one side of the page you list all the tactics, all the gifts, all the noise-making you’re doing before someone takes the action you want them to take.
On the other side of the page you list all the tactics, gifts and connection you’re making happen after someone takes the action.
More often than not, it’s lopsided.
And once you do this for your competitors, too, you’ll begin to see opportunity.
Risk is tricky and we can be better at recognizing and handling it.
It’s tricky because we know that if something is risky enough, then we won’t do it.
It’s a great cop-out method for not losing all of our money or being heart broken, but it’s also a cop-out method for not doing meaningful work or not helping others achieve what they dream for themselves.
The bigger we make the task appear, the more risk we feel and so we become paralyzed to action.
The reality, of course, is that what we think is a risk, often isn’t.
We don’t risk much when we publish a post on our blog or when we meet friends for coffee to discuss a passion of ours even if it feels risky.
We don’t risk much when we put fingers to a keyboard and write the report we should have written last week.
There’s not much risk in having empathy for someone and taking a selfless action off that empathy to help them move forward.
There is, however, the feeling of risk.
But that feeling isn’t a good indication of actual risk. It’s a cheat to back off from doing meaningful work.
It’s time we stop confusing the feeling of risk with actual risk.
Often through articulation, we get to the gold of a thought.
Or it’s through articulation that we convince someone.
Or we realize we were wrong and don’t quite have all the information.
Or we begin to build a tribe who agrees with us.
Or we get smarter.
None of this happens by having an opinion or retweeting someone’s statement; it happens when we do the emotional labor of articulating what we believe and why we believe it–not to crush others, but to grow ourselves.
