Kafka, van Gogh and the Lonely Blogger

Franz Kafka published only seven short pieces in his lifetime. Vincent van Gogh sold only one painting.

Even the most prolific bloggers sometimes feel like they're wasting their time, writing for a world without readers, performing in an empty auditorium, painting pictures nobody wants.  The feeling's understandable.

Thank goodness Kafka and van Gogh didn't give up.  They had what it takes:

Passion.  Kafka wrote, "By believing passionately in something that still does not exist, we create it."

Patience. van Gogh wrote, "Great things are done by a series of small things brought together."

Perseverence.  Kafka also wrote, "From a certain point onward there is no longer any turning back. That is the point that must be reached."

Do you have what it takes?

Is Your Brand Scary?

I've done a ton of branding work in my time and can tell you with some authority it's no wonder so many brands are a fright.

Sales guru Paul DiModoca offers a white paper, 3 Reasons Why B2B Branding Fails and Scares Prospects Away, that goes farther than anything I've read in explaining in simple terms why so much branding flops so hard, so often.

While he finds most branding fails to drive business performance or create inbound leads, DiModoco says CEOs continue to invest in branding efforts because they believe branding will grow revenue. 

But why does branding so frequently fail to do that?  DiModoca gives three reasons:

1. A lot of branding is ego-driven and inwardly focused.  "This occurs," DiModaca writes, "when a group of senior executives gather together and create marketing messages that talk about how great they are and why the prospect should buy from them."
2. A lot of branding is generic.  "When trying to build a brand message that communicates company value, frequently businesses use their offerings’ product or service category as a prime foundation of the brand description."
3. A lot of branding is copy-cat.  "With the Internet providing easy access to view any company’s marketing and sales approach, brand effectiveness has decreased because so many companies just build their brand positions as an adaptation of their competitor’s messaging."

Branding efforts like these confuse and turn off customers.  What attracts them instead?  DiModica believes, "you need to deploy sales value propositions instead of branding messages."  

Sales value propositions, he says, describe the business results your product or service delivers.

"Branding costs money. Sales value propositions make you money."

Workingman's Dead

Pardon my sexist title, but if you're a hands-on marketer beavering in the trenches, by all means read David Scott Meerman and Brian Halligan's new book, Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead. 

It's a fun read (in no small part due to the book's packaging) and well worth the effort because the teachings are practical and, for the most part, easy to apply.

In keeping with the band's "experimental" style, Meerman and Halligan urge readers to push beyond marketing best practices of a bygone era and embrace continuous trial and error. 

If that advice makes makes you nervous, you probably already feel out of sorts in the new age of marketing.  If so, Meerman and Halligan's book will help you get acclimated.

Here's just a sampling of the lessons you'll find (there are a couple hundred altogether in the 150-page book):

• Organize your marketing team around three accountabilities: lead generation, lead conversion and lead analysis.
• Abandon annual marketing plans in favor of monthly ones.  Each month, execute for 19 days; then spend a day assessing and planning activities for the next month.
• Give graphic designers the freedom to play with your branding elements.
• Involve all your employees in social marketing and teach them how to help your organization through "Lunch and Learn" meetings.
• Delete all content from your Web site, blog posts, and emails that resembles your competitors'.
• Communicate product news to your most loyal customers before you communicate it to anyone else.
• Create an e-book or video about your industry's future and give it away.
• Instead of lashing out at competitors, find ways to strike mutually beneficial deals with them.
• Skip over middlemen (sorry, sexist again) of every sort.
• Identify a cause-related nonprofit consistent with your brand and begin giving part of your profits to it.

Gotta Have the Want-to

Eighty-four-year-old cowboy Delmar Smith was asked on National Public Radio what it took, above all else, to succeed in the rodeo business.

He answered in three syllables: "The want-to."

The trouble with so many organizations today is easy to figure out. 

Most employees have no want-to. 

As hapless customers, we witness the results more than once every single day.

I'm not just playing the curmudgeon (although I enjoy the role immensely).  There's hard proof that most US employees have no want-to.

The vast majority of US employees, according to a survey by Gallup of 42,000 randomly selected adults, are want-to deficient.

To be precise, 49 percent of US employees are "disengaged" from their jobs and 18 percent are "actively disengaged" from their jobs, according to Gallup.

In case the difference eludes you, employees who are "disengaged" sleepwalk through the workday; employees who are "actively disengaged" labor hard to demonstrate discontent.

How can the majority of our workers recover their want-to?  I'd start by indexing all corporate officers' weekly compensation to measures of their subordinates' want-to.

How to Boost Tradeshow Attendance

Lord willing and the creek don't rise, I'll speak next month at a terrific little conference in downtown Washington, DMAW's Association Marketing Day.

My topic will be tradeshow attendance promotion.

I'll share this year’s best practices for building attendance.  The guidance comes from new research among 40 of the nation’s largest event organizers, provided to me by the producer of the Large Show Roundtable.

But the reason you should be there is to learn from the three other panelists joining the one-hour session, Innovations in Increasing Your Meeting and Convention Attendance.

They're truly impressive.

Direct marketing agency authority Craig Blake, Senior Vice President, Nexus Direct, will explain how to counteract the macro-trends that are putting downward pressure on attendance.

And master marketers Margaret Core, Managing Director, Sales & Marketing, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO), and Christine Maple, Marketing Manager, Packaging Machinery Manufacturers Institute (PMMI), will provide dozens of strategies and tactics designed to drive attendance.

Check out the conference Website, okay?