Thoughts & Essays

What makes brands so powerful (and so frightening) is that we pay too little attention to the manipulative forces at play.

Behavior change can come about from many motivators, including negative ones. However, as motivation wanes, the behavior change will go with it. If you’re interested in true, long-lasting behavior change, the key is in identity.

The way we imagine our personal and national identities makes us liable to act and think in certain ways and, just as importantly, makes us liable to interpret other people’s actions through the prism of our own imagined identity – not through theirs.

From dieting to drug prevention, there is much talk around behaviour change. But the problem with behaviour change is that, on its own, it doesn't mean that the person has changed. And so recidivism is high.

Analyzing, interpreting and mapping data and evidence are extremely important tools to both inform and direct conversations, but if they are not used in conjunction with human dynamics and a love for your audience, you risk sowing seeds onto concrete; nothing good will grow there.

How we see the world influences how we interact with it. But most people never think about what influences how we see the world, will never draw a line between far past experiences and current behaviors, or examine their learned behaviors and habits.

When people get combative in communications it is often as a “response” to perceived slights and opinion. These unspoken, unchallenged, and too-often inaccurate self-generated “truths” dictate way more of our interactions than most of us are aware. Which is why we always keep a keen eye on steering clear of conversations about “right and wrong” and towards creating messaging that is not an inadvertent catalyst for prejudice, stigma, or reflexive opposition.

The decision to be “funny” or “provocative” in an ad should only come from the pursuit of the most effective message. When this priority is flipped in social marketing campaigns, the under-represented party ends up paying the price because the focus ends up in the wrong place.

I always saw branding and strategic communications as being protected against outsourcing or automation. But, a couple of years ago, while basking in the knowledge of my irreplaceability, it occurred to me that my obdurate certainty was based on a fast-disappearing future: that people would get to make up their own minds.

For the average person, no matter the words that come out of their mouth, there is an awkward inherent stigma attached to the way we think and talk about mental health. An urge to talk quietly or use euphemisms, but by doing so, the inadvertent effect is to promulgate the stigma.

The biggest problem with the tech giants is not their monopolistic control of the market, it is their unrestrained and growing control of Americans’ behavior. The power that the large social media companies wield over our lives and the level to which they are controlling us is frightening.

Imagine if we used our current experience to reinvent schools and redesign cities. If we had a mixture of learning online with “playing” on-site; if we gave less real estate to our cars and more to housing. The beauty about going through such a time of fracture is that the opportunity cost for deploying bold ideas seems low.

How will it affect our society when we stop telling people that they have already lost the game of life if they don’t have a degree? What will be the destigmatizing effect when people without degrees can still be “smart”?

Recognizing that we all have a tendency to hold positions that are not as clear-cut as our indignance might tell us, is a first step toward taking a giant and well-needed societal deep breath.

Love and like are two very different emotions. They feel very different and they come about in very different ways. And we rarely ever think about the difference between them. We should.

I have noticed a number of public health sites around the country running what I have been calling a “stock ticker of doom” across the top of their websites. It lists the number of people infected, hospitalized, under quarantine, etc. I know it is there for a singular honest purpose: to keep citizens informed. But let’s take a step back and look at how this might play out.

The two ads from Super Bowl Sunday I found most interesting were those from Facebook and Google. Both of these companies are feeling a lot of heat around the subject of data and privacy, but they took very different routes to tackling the privacy tsunami that each is facing.

I was meeting with a long-time client today who wanted to chat with me about a specific East Coast higher-education institution that is doing highly-important and relevant work and yet is on almost no-one’s radar screen. We talked about the dean of the institution and how he did not place much importance on “marketing.” My response was, “Sure he does; he is just working from a very closed definition of marketing.”

Stigma comes in many forms and while most people easily understand the stigma that is essentially tied to judgment from others (imagined or real), what’s often not thought about are the kinds of very powerful stigmas we create and place upon ourselves — or how powerful (and often unconscious) is the drive to avoid doing so.

Soon after Steve Jobs died, I wrote a post that posited that we would “now get to find out if Steve Jobs was a great man, or if Apple is a great company.” My bet was on Jobs. And, although Apple still sits on piles of money, I’d say that I won that bet.

Any time an emotion is labelled a fact, it is an opportunity for conflict. It is an opportunity to see difference instead of similarities. True facts are cold. But emotions, or emotions dressed up as facts, get people, well... emotional.

A few years back, I gave one of my talks at a Ladies America conference in Washington, DC. Once I was offstage, a small line of people formed to ask me questions. One woman had in her hands a marketing mailer she had put together. She was planning on starting an executive coaching business and intended to send out the mailer to drum up business. Sadly, her mailer was not destined for success.