But these days after years of advertising and marketing campaigns pulling in huge earnings from the businesses they serve to promote and build customer relationships with, my belief is as a tactic (like scantily clad men/women) in and of itself, it’s failing. Here’s Why.

Burger King is not doing so well. But I don’t understand? Their product is exactly the same as it always was and they have this hilarious bizarre creepy King guy that is their new campaign. And if you say you don’t like him then “you’re not cool enough to understand it”. Hmmm.

I could be naive and perhaps not looking deeply enough into the campaign but it seems to me, that Burger King is betting that being edgy and cool and funny (Indy?) is going to make them desirable by association. Unfortunately and as their quarterly profits show that’s not happening. So what’s wrong?

For a brand to be effective in inspiring its creative strategies and execution those projects need to be rooted firmly in the simple truths of what makes that business truly unique and fulfilling to its customer’s needs.

There is definitely something one goes to Burger King for, and it’s not the creepy plastic King dude. It’s the fresh crunch of pickles and lettuce and creamy mayo and that smoky grilled burger that we who still eat that stuff lustfully with eyes rolling back in our heads allow ourselves to indulge in (burger snobs step off, I love me a good Shake Shack/Burger Joint burger ok?).

Comedy and laughter is a tool, but it is certainly not a means to an end. It gets people open, relaxed and ready to be suggested to. That’s a powerful thing, but it’s not the actual message, unless your Comedy Central. Making a date laugh doesn’t mean she’ll (place desired outcome here) you, but you certainly have her attention. But connect to her passions, her desires, the things that interest her that she wants and you have a soul mate.

For years almost everywhere I worked and the studio I was running there was this strange undertone of our clients somehow being our enemies. There’s this pervasively snarky “they don’t understand design and what we do and it’s our jobs to save them from themselves” attitude. Does this sound familiar?

On top of this there was this constant need to be accepted by our peers in the design and creative community. Strangely enough I constantly found myself colluding with my peers, those who I should be competing against and constantly competing against our clients, those who we should be working with! This is so completely backwards.

For years I subscribed to this approach and it consistently failed me. The people on my team took my lead and felt the same. Eye rolling on calls, and ultimately the lack of respect for our clients ultimately led to a constant rift in our relationship where we felt like we couldn’t tell them what we really thought so we cow towed to what we thought was their desires. Not their best interest mind you, just what we thought they wanted.

This ultimately led to some abysmal work. Not always bad, but generally watered down. And ultimately this ended up with relationships that were unproductive and negative.

So why does this happen?

It all happens at 2 stages of the relationship.

1. The first date: You need to be confident enough to tell it like it is, explain your process, show a genuine interest in the success of their business, tell the truth, seek a connection. Walk away if it doesn’t feel right.

2. Therapy: When you’ve been working with someone for a while and things aren’t going well know well enough when to cut the line and move on. Our job as branders, designers, communicators is to enhance the value of our clients’s businesses and products. To help them grow, and if we’re not doing that we have an ethical responsibility to help them find someone who will do this for them.

So what have I been doing that’s worked so well for me?

1. Listening better:

Rather than trying to come across as the expert I’m trying to ask the right questions. This is about understanding their business not selling mine. My goal is simple now: How can I help? If it’s 20 minutes of free chat time I’m game. My goal is to help people succeed. It’s all about them, not all about my work or my portfolio.

2. Explain and stand up for your process:

You need a system, a process. Brand work is too complex to wing, and if you’re passionate about the science of design your work will reflect a depth that it may not have before. Walk someone through your process, tell them how you work, give them a sense of what to expect when they hire you. Explain how you’ll approach solving their problems. Maybe even dive in a little bit to give them a taste. Don’t worry about giving away the show, if they think you’re capable and smart they’ll hire you. What you’re talking about if you’re good is too complex to steal. If they get bored when you explain process, or ask you to skip over it, then this is a giant red flag. You need a partner to get good work done. And they need to be sold on how you work.

3. Zen Out:

The last thing I changed was to be absolutely calm and understanding no matter how tense things get. Our clients are people, often challenged with the same stressful professional and personal challenges we are. When things get tense it’s usually because of a miscommunication. Don’t be reactive. Stand your ground and work towards a resolution of the problem at hand. Since I started doing this I’ve been blown away by the responses I get. Clients genuinely value someone who they know is stable and can handle the stress of day to day business. Be like water and they’ll lean on you more. Be someone they’re psyched to talk to, so when they have a call with you it’s a highlight to their day, a ray of sunshine and calm, not a stressful battle over minutiae.

I’ve been working at this myself and I’ve seen a huge turnaround in the relationships I have with my clients. I feel like I have partners now, we’re a team, not a client and a vendor (oh how I despise that word). They love my work and it makes sense to them, they feel part of a process and so do I, and I feel blessed to be able to step into their world and learn about their business and what makes them tick.

But her understanding of what she needed to do was to go on some sort of “military diet” thing where she could lose 11 pounds in 3 days of suffering and then be done with it. I decided not to press the subject or tell her the human body is only capable of losing 3 pounds of fat a week, really no matter what you do, since I’d be crashing her dream of a quick fix. This is a commonly known fact among nutritionists and trainers but not among the average person.

The problem is that even the best sources of information are branded like the ones that peddle false hopes of and easy fix to a complex problem. Ironically, the ones that sell are telling people a version of the story they want to hear and therefore illicit a behavior, they buy it, but upon certain failure many give up and never come close to their goals. But no one is checking statistics to measure the success rates of those readers before they buy, they instead buy based on the $15.00 hope that the manufactured fantasy of rapid effortless weight loss that the book promises is true. It isn’t!

So what’s wrong with this picture and where’s an opportunity to redesign the strategy?

1. The publishers marketing these books are all crowding together under the same umbrella afraid to get wet. They’ve decided there’s one way to market a diet book that will work. Design it like an airport bookstore business title and make sure there’s a picture of the celebrity (or soon to be celebrity) author on the cover. Budget for author photo shoot? $500.

2. With a huge health and organic food craze going on right now, how come nobody is designing a weight loss system based on wholistic, sustainable food choices? This could be huge if positioned properly. Farm partnerships and tours?

3. The real change that most people need to make to succeed at weight loss is by eating more fruits and vegetables, especially raw. Why not piggy back on the raw craze and create a designer diet?

4. The reality behind the successful training programs is that they retrain your mind and body to crave foods that are good for you. This is a paradigm shift for anyone used to eating take out and restaurant food. By changing the position from promises of “rapid weight loss” to helping people get re-acquainted with the vegetarian in them there’s a huge amount of different opportunities for sustainable and culinarily interesting “diets”.

This occurred to me while doing the “Fat Smash Diet”. Really the gist of it is you drop all the wheat and fried foods and empty dry carbs, even meat for the first couple weeks in place of fruits and vegetables. At first it was hard, but once underway I realized it was less about weight loss and more about retraining my brain to crave and be satisfied by foods that make my body happy. This is what they’re all afraid to say! But why?

My question is, why is this not an attractive story to tell markets? Dropping meat and expensive packaged foods for sustainable fruits and veggies, grown locally and organically, this is the real secret behind the best diets, and ironically it’s huge now in the media. So when are these two going to marry?

Good design is innovative
Good design makes a product useful
Good design is aesthetic
Good design helps us to understand a product
Good design is unobtrusive
Good design is honest
Good design is long-lasting
Good design is consequent to the last detail
Good design is concerned with the environment
Good design is as little design as possible

Your answer must be an unequivocal “yes”, because if you don’t believe in it, how can you believe in the work you do for this company? Many people even when saying “no” take that work on, and ultimately, this leads to generic output, which ultimately leads to a boring career doing work that has no emotional value.

For your work to be authentic and meaningful (great) you must be a believer.

Find companies and products you believe in, and offer your help, you’ll be amazed at how much value you can bring to a mission you’re embedded in personally.

With this understanding I thought I’d take some of the strategic thinking typically reserved for businesses and map a quick process for people to use for their professional selves. I’ll keep this extremely simple since I’d like this to be something people can run with and not a long dragged out analysis/paralysis process. I’ve translated the following concepts from the business to the individual, and seeing it this way makes me see the process a little differently. It’s actually eerie how people-brands and business-brands can be so similar.

The 4 Human Experiences Your Brand Should Affect:

1. Perception: What do you want people to think of you? Be this person.

2. Reason: Are you who you say/act like? Authenticity is critical, look for your deeper truth, what’s beneath the surface you may be afraid to expose?

3. Emotion: Are you connecting with people on a deeper level? What do you believe deeply in that you can advocate/evangelize?

4. Resonance: Do you connect with people in a way that’s meaningful to them? Are you reading other’s needs or are you acting on your own?

The Building Blocks of Your Experience:

1. Where do you have the most credibility?

2. Where do you have the most experience?

3. What are you passionate about?

4. What causes are you aligned with personally?

5. How do you define success for yourself? Money, achievement, freedom?

6. What do you stand for?

7. Who are you competing with?

8. How are you different from them?

9. Who would you be excited to collaborate with?

10. Is there a social context to your desires?

11. Choosing only adjectives, how would you describe your best qualities?

I’m really just winging this but in looking back at this post this is some powerful stuff for any person to do for themselves. If you’re like me and you’ve had a difficulty in the past describing what you do to strangers, this would be a fantastic immersive process to take on, even if it were just for 30 minutes.

Conversations have two sides, with both willing to hear each other. Otherwise it’s an attack, which is all to easy from behind a keyboard.

Let’s challenge ourselves to have more conversations, and listen to the other side with an open mind. I’m constantly surprised by how my mistaken perspective led me to believe something that turned out not to be true, but by being open when you’re wrong it’s easier to admit it.

Here’s why it’s important to have a brand strategy before kicking off your marketing strategy:

1. Without a brand strategy you will have no aligned single “deeper truth” driving your marketing efforts beyond profitability or increasing shareholder value. This encourages short term thinking that diminishes the individuality of your business and makes you generic. The marketing strategy will be based more on the “now” and therefore the brand strategy should be rooted in the “always”.

2. You need a sounding board to validate constantly changing marketing efforts. When developing creative ideas and concepts, how do you validate these? By having a solid brand strategy you can weigh everything you do against that. Is this idea really us? See if it speaks to your brand. It will help you know whether your agency “gets you” and whether your sales teams are all saying the same thing. Put a stake in the ground and live by it.

2. Without a stake in the ground on your brand you are at constant risk of saying the wrong thing and therefore being the wrong thing to your customers, then you’ll need to triage, which is expensive. Do this enough no one will believe you. Choose your story and stick with it for the long run.

3. You need to find your “True North” for your business/brand. Once you understand how to articulate this, it will inspire fantastic creative execution, because everyone on your team will be working towards the same clear goal or destination. It will also make it easier and less costly to engage new team members/agencies, etc. By being able to articulate your unique value and position over and over, it becomes easier and easier to onboard team members and takes less time to get them onboard. Many companies stay with bad agencies simply because the time to onboard a new team is too costly and there never seems to be a good time for it.

What’s your true north?

Many people, myself included, self-loathingly praise themselves for perfectionism. But really it’s a procrastination tool of the highest level–An excuse to never get anything done, because it’s never, ever, quite good enough. If only I had realized this ten years ago! This is definitely a symptom of corporate management, where incremental safe steps are made in an environment where experimentation is translated into “risk of public failure and embarrassment”. The reality is you must risk failure at some point to get something done fast enough for it to move forward at a speed that you can afford. The faster you get it done, the less financial risk and the more opportunity you have to test in a live environment.

I think the concept of “Good to Great” is a little flawed. Not in the process but the outcome. Here’s the reality: The person who gets to market with their new brand/service/product is generally at a huge advantage. She’s got the turf on her side, and over time as everyone is catching up to her she’s also suddenly got the advantage of experience as well. While the other 5 people who had the same idea are “perfecting” their offering, the person who got it to “good” launched, built a community, developed a following, and got stuff done.

Plan it out, be sure the idea is sound, do your research and then get it done. Maybe skip the venture funding you think you need and self fund. Get it to market and get people using it, then test and improve as you go. I guarantee you can perfect it later, but be sure perfecting it now isn’t preventing you from even getting it done at all.