A slogan that accurately conveys the essence of your Purple Cow is a script. A script for the sneezer to use when she talks with her friends. The slogan reminds the user, “Here’s why it’s worth recommending us; here’s why your friends and colleagues will be glad you told them about us.” And best of all, the script guarantees that the word of mouth is passed on properly – that the prospect is coming to you for the right reason.
Tiffany’s blue box is a slogan without words. It stands for elegance and packaging and quality and “price is no object.
We need original thinkers, provocateurs, and people who care. We need marketers who can lead, salespeople able to risk making a human connection, passionate change makers willing to be shunned if it is necessary for them to make a point. Every organization needs a linchpin, the one person who can bring it together and make a difference.
Trying to appeal to everyone is almost sure to fail, for the simple reason that everyone wants something different!
Quitting the projects that don’t go anywhere is essential if you want to stick out the right ones. You don’t have the time or the passion or the resources to be the best in the world at both. Quitting.
If you seek to become indispensable, a similar question is worth asking: “Where do you put the fear?” What separates a linchpin from an ordinary person is the answer to this question.
I can do this forever. It’s like adjusting a pair.
If you’re able to look at what’s happening in your world and say, “There’s the pattern,” or “Wow, that’s interesting, I wonder why,” then you’re far more likely to respond productively than if your reaction is “How dare he!
College started as universitas magistrorum et scholarium – a community of masters and scholars. It was a refuge; it was a place you went to get lost in ideas, to discover and wander, and to plot a course as an academic. Today it’s a place you go to exchange a lifetime of debt for credit hours, a degree, and maybe a good job.
In the linchpin economy, the winners are once again the artists who give gifts. Giving a gift makes you indispensable. Inventing a gift, creating art – that is what the market seeks out, and the givers are the ones who earn our respect and attention.
Emotional labor is the task of doing important work, even when it isn’t easy. Emotional.
Make it easy to believe.
Average Is for Losers.
It doesn’t matter if anyone reads it, buys it, sponsors it or shares it. It matters that you show up.
It’s human nature to be weird, but also human to be lonely. This conflict between fitting in and standing out is at the core of who we are.
Generous and authentic leadership will always defeat the selfish efforts of someone doing it just because she can.
Expertise gives you enough insight to reinvent what everyone else assumes is the truth. Sure, it’s possible to randomly challenge the conventions of your field and luckily find a breakthrough. It’s far more likely, though, that you will design a great Web site or direct a powerful movie or lead a breakthrough product development if you understand the status quo better than anyone else. Beginner’s luck is dramatically overrated. Emotional.
Because frequency is free in an online permission program, and much more effective offline, the marketer has the luxury of riding the impact curve up without a matching cost curve.
Before a marketer can build trust, it must breed familiarity. But there’s no familiarity without awareness. And awareness – the science of letting people know you exist and getting them to understand your message – can’t happen effectively in today’s environment without advertising.
Managers manage a process they’ve seen before, and they react to the outside world, striving to make that process as fast and as cheap as possible. Leadership, on the other hand, is about creating change that you believe in.