Group items tagged

what you're saying with jargon is: A) You belong, and B) If you don't get it, you don't belong."

Language takes on added importance in management consultancy, says Lambert, because the report is the only tangible evidence that a client sees of what actually might amount to significant labor.

There's a bias to wanting to use big words and appear intelligent—obfuscation—to not be plain and direct."

Even brand consultants, a group that should be advising their own clients against hot air, are guilty of using jargon and stock phrases. There's a surprising amount of brand propositions and tone of voice guidelines with "simple," "dynamic," and "fresh" principles; most are not distinctive at all.

The hazards of Newspeak are illustrated in the unimaginative language of brands. If your vocabulary is limited, so is your range of thought.

Language can be brought to life through the use of stories. A brand's story can be about how a business first started, who the people are that run it, or the idea behind a product. Stories and words feed off each other. When the language comes alive, the brand is better defined and more robust.

If you try to regiment a brand's language you're stultifying its development.

training staff to be able to recognize when a piece of writing is in line with the brand's values. This will encourage sensitivity in staff's own writing

staff engagement and practice. Any time that an employee spends thinking about how to correctly implement the tone of voice is time well spent toward understanding and living the overall brand

A good place to start might be the internal newsletter. This is usually a one-way process originating with marketing. If other staff members write it, they are actively participating in the brand, while gaining practice on their own colleagues.

Simmons likens his brand language teachings to a "subversive activity." Being better with words certainly makes staff more confident and empowers them to shun the self-imposed Newspeak of management jargon. But this approach is also encouraging staff to put their personality into their writing and the organizations they write for. This not only gives writing a renewed status in brands, it unleashes a voice for staff too.     

It’s important to remember that these brands aren’t necessarily brands that make the planet or society better. A brand can improve a person’s life with great environmental costs, for instance. But that’s becoming less and less true

"Let’s say that you can deliver higher individual well-being--but only by amping up your value chain’s carbon intensity. That’s not really a strategy that’s competitive in 21st-century terms--it’s just another empty tradeoff, that’s going to come back to bite you in the end in both ways, when carbon costs rise, and when people realize those costs must be paid for you to positively impact their lives." Managing those trade-offs successfully may be what makes a truly long-lasting and meaningful 20th-century brand.

your customers, are beginning to take a quantum leap into what I call a human age--an era where a life meaningfully well lived is what really counts."

In today's world, it's advocates--not advertising's "Mad Men"--who have the power.

The biggest reason brand advocates are so powerful is a single, five-letter word: Trust. Nine of 10 online consumers say recommendations from friends and family members are the most trusted form of advertising worldwide. Only about 2 of 10 trust online ads.

Advocates' recommendations are the number-one influencer of purchase decisions and brand perceptions in nearly every product category from smartphones to software, hotels to housewares, cars to computers, financial services to fitness memberships.

In the old days (pre–social media), advocates' reach was limited to their immediate circle of family and friends. Recommendations were made over the water cooler at work or over dinner with friends. Now, empowered by social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, blogs, Foursquare, online reviews, and more), advocates collectively reach millions of buyers with trusted recommendations.

When you create and engage an advocate, you've identified a renewable marketing asset you

While the last decade was all about connections and integrating a social fabric to every facet of our digital and analog existence, this next decade is all about influence.

Game dynamics are fast becoming a critical currency of motivation. Their power lies not in connecting us to our friends, but in directly influencing our individual behavior.

Traditional forms of entertainment (movies, television... remember books?) are in a rapid decline. The demand for entertainment hasn't decreased, it's just shifted to a more interactive, pervasive form of entertainment. It's shifting to games.

We've seen simple game dynamics increase traffic to locations 4X over a matter of days. We've seen others extend the average amount of engaged time consumers spend at a business by upwards of 40%. This propagation of game dynamics into the real world via the social graph and mobile devices will have powerful business consequences for those who understand how to leverage them.

The appointment dynamic is a famous game mechanic in which to succeed a "player" must return at a predefined time to take a predetermined action. It's simple and immensely powerful. The appointment dynamic is powerful enough to alter the behavior of an entire generation — "happy hours" are appointment dynamics, as is the pervasive game "Farmville" by Zynga. But we've barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Imagine companies like Vitality leveraging this dynamic to improve the adherence rate to often less-than-pleasant medicinal regimens, or the government creating a large scale game (with financial incentives as rewards) to alter traffic patterns to decrease highway congestion in the mornings.

In the progression dynamic, a "player's" level of success is displayed in real-time and gradually improved through the completion of granular tasks. Somewhere deep-rooted in the human psyche we have this desire to complete any progression dynamic put in front of us as long as the steps to do so are itemized and clear. With this as a known dynamic, it's not hard to envision the ways that this can be leveraged even further in the real-world.

Communal discovery is a mechanic which involves an entire community working together to solve a problem. The reason I've saved the communal discovery dynamic for last is that it, perhaps more than all others, presents incredible opportunities to positively influence the world as we enter this decade of games.

DARPA launched a challenge late last year. They hid 10 red balloons at different locations all across the continental United States and offered $40,000 to the first team to correctly identify their locations. The winning team (a group from MIT) constructed a strategy that in many ways mirrored a pyramid scheme. It was a cleverly constructed waterfall of incentives that encouraged massive cooperation. Essentially everyone to give them data about any balloon's location won some portion of the prize money based on how many other people also submitted the location of that balloon. This created positive communal incentives across what rapidly became a large and self-propagating network. Their strategy managed to accurately identify all locations in less than 9 hours.