All You Have to Do Is One Thing
They say that practice makes perfect.
Screw perfect.
Practice transforms.
Practice revolutionizes.
Practice makes things happen.
Over and over again.
Good and bad.
Stop perfecting. Start practicing.
Take one step toward transformation, one step toward revolution.
One step toward making something happen
(or stopping something already in motion).
All it takes is one step. What’s stopping you?
Image by iStockPhoto
What if your days could be filled with peace and magic instead of stress and hassle? And what if you didn't need to find extra time to make that happen? Everyday Awareness isn't about making time. It's not about finding something new. It's about the magic in what's already there. Click to learn more
Spanking Whipple: How Toilet Paper Makes Us Feel Shitty About Sales
If you’re a person of a certain age, you probably remember the Whipple commercials: an epic—and universally annoying—ad campaign that rode the wave of television’s rise until the mid-80s (and again in the late 90s!), when Whipple retired to wherever grocers retire to.
This campaign, this grocer, is so much a part of our cultural landscape that an entire book centers around it. That book, Hey Whipple, Squeeze This*, is my favorite advertising read, hands down (because yeah, I’m that kind of geek.) This book, which I’m currently re-reading, opens with a pretty simple premise: Whipple did shitty things (pardon the pun) for advertising—and, by extension, marketing and sales.
To quote the author, Luke Sullivan:
[Whipple] may have been an effective salesman. (Billions of rolls.) He may have been a strong brand image. (He knocked Scott Tissue out of the number one spot.) But it all comes down to this: if I had created Mr. Whipple, I don’t think I could tell my son with a straight face what I did at the office.
It might not be the fear-based advertising we’re familiar with today (think about political campaigns for a shining example of that one), but Whipple was bad advertising, from a consumer perspective, because people were so annoyed by him.
Annoying, pushy, slimy, shitty—bad advertising is bad advertising.
Bad advertising is rampant—in Whipple’s heyday and today.
And it drastically colors the way we feel about being sold to—and the way we feel about selling.
We don’t like being sold to.
The avalanche of information products, one on one services, digital workshops, and teleconferences that pours down on us on a regular basis offers, more often than not, a sea of slimy sales pages, clashing “buy now” buttons, pushy newsletters, and fear-based marketing. These are the things that we, as a collective group of internet businesses and web-based entrepreneurs, do because we think that’s how it works, even though it makes us feel icky and slimy. It’s what advertising legend Norman Berry, quoted in Hey Whipple, calls “intellectual garbage” (emphasis mine):
Of course, advertising must sell. By any definition it is lousy advertising if it doesn’t. But if sales are achieved with work which is in bad taste or is intellectual garbage, it shouldn’t be applauded no matter how much it sells. Offensive, dull, abrasive, stupid advertising is bad for the entire industry and bad for business as a whole. It is why the public perception of advertising is going down in this country.
Bad advertising makes us *feel* sold to
When we take in advertising that makes us feel icky and slimy, we feel, well, sold to. We lose trust in that person or company, lose faith in their brand. But often, for so many reasons, we buy anyway. And we learn, through our own actions, and through external reinforcements, that this sort of “intellectual garbage”, whether it’s a scolding grocer or a single-column, vertical, white-backgrounded pushy sales page, works, on one level or another. And so we replicate it in our own business—because what else is there to do?—even though we feel icky about it.
In other words, we feel shitty about selling because we feel shitty about being sold to.
So what can we do to step outside that story and break the cycle?
#1: Be the change
Start by breaking free from your own cycle, and be the change you wish to see. Stop relying on sales tactics that don’t feel good to you (or don’t feel pressured to start using them!). When you commit to not using slimy sales tactics, like fear-based marketing, you become a non-slimy salesperson.
#2: Trust
Know that, while you can expect your Right People to be receptive to your marketing messages (by definition!), you cannot control how people react to the stories that influence their decisions, or what actions they will take. You can, however, provide the best information possible so that they can make the right decision for them.
#3 Know your Elephants
Recognize, acknowledge, and accept that not everyone carries the same story. Every action, every word, every message, carries different meanings for different people. At the end of the day, doing what feels good and right for you, sales-wise, will help you stand tall in your business.
What are your stories?
What stories do you struggle with around your advertising, marketing, and business development efforts? Notice how you react to the marketing of others – do the things that make you wince, or put up fences, influence your own efforts?
Image by J.M. Griffin via stock.xchng
*I have the third edition of Hey, Whipple; a newer edition, updated with more internetty, digital goodness, came out earlier this year.
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Tiny Plastic Elephants
When you learned “E is for Elephant”, you probably envisioned huge, grey mammals with soft, blinking eyes. Gentle, perhaps, but scary. So big. An elephant could trample a human, knock it over.
So when you read or hear the word “elephant”, what do you see in your mind’s eye? A big, grey, wrinkly animal, right? You don’t see, say, a two-inch plastic animal. Because, even though they exist, your experience tells you that elephant = large.
Our experiences make us who we are. They flesh out our personalities as we grow, make us different from everyone else. And so they color our own vision of the world. The world is full of elephants.
Your elephants are different from mine, from the person next to you, from the person next to them.
So when you’re talking, explaining, debating, discussing, listening…remember the elephants.
When you’re selling, offering, marketing, empire-building…remember the elephants.
Pretty much always remember the elephants.
Image by Sideshowmom (MF Free License) via Morguefile
What if your days could be filled with peace and magic instead of stress and hassle? And what if you didn't need to find extra time to make that happen? Everyday Awareness isn't about making time. It's not about finding something new. It's about the magic in what's already there. Click to learn more
How Much is Too Much?
Marketing tolerance is a funny thing. You can go along in your life, enjoying the marketing actions and methods of a person or business, feeling good and right and comfortable with it…and then boom! Something changes, and you feel downright icky. Sold to. Treated like a buyer instead of a tribe member.
This has happened to me twice in recent weeks, and to other folks I’ve spoken with as well: that people we follow, businesses we admire, have suddenly crossed some invisible line from awesome to barely tolerable due to a change in marketing message, frequency, or tone.
And those of us who are business owners (and therefore marketers)? We have a bit of a panic and scramble to see what we can do to never, ever cross that line.
But it’s not quite that simple, is it?
The Invisible, Ever-Changing, Always-Murky, Never-Obvious Line
Imagine that I am an intergalactic traveling salesman, and I appear on the barstool next to you. Poof! I’m ready to sell you the answer to all your problems, the thing that every business owner around would be envious of. The item costs a couple of grand, and will cost 1/4 of your income to maintain for all time. You can’t see it, feel it, taste it, or hear it, and its purpose and form changes by the second.
Would you buy it?
Probably not, right? But that’s pretty much what this line is. We put time and energy, and sometimes money, into trying to decipher the details of something that is invisible, intangible, different for everyone we meet, and constantly changing. It’s something over which we have absolutely no control.
So what do you do?
You can’t control where that line is, and you can’t control how people react to what you put out there. Ever. So the first step is to absolutely make peace with that. Relax into the fact that you have not a whit of control over, and therefore don’t need to spend any time on, that thing. Feels better already, right?
The next step is to realize that you do have control over something, and that’s what you’re putting out there, and how you feel about it. If you’re happy with, and comfortable with, the level of marketing you’re putting out there, that’s a rockin’ solid thing. That’s not to say you should become complacent – make sure to push your boundaries up and down every once in a while – but being okay with your actions is the best thing you can do.
Another area where the “how much is too much?” question comes up a lot is in personal authenticity and sharing online – a topic I covered in this week’s Wicked Wisdom and Inspiration. If you’re interested in topics like that (I put my favorite stuff in WW&I), go here to check it out - and use the big black button in the upper left corner to sign up.
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I would love to hear from you, both as producers and as consumers: has there ever been a time when you feel like you’ve crossed the line, or you feel like someone you follow has crossed your personal line? Please don’t name names. This is a space for exploration and curiosity, not strategy-bashing.
Image by Adrian Clark (CC BY-ND) via Flickr
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A Celebration of Conscious Action
On many ancient (and some modern) calendars, today is the festival of Beltane: a celebration of love, of fertility, and of rebirth.
And fire. Lots of fire. And some boffing, too.
In some traditions, Beltane, like Samhain (or Halloween) is a time when the veils are the thinnest, a liminal point where the whole world and its people stand at the threshold of something new. A day when anything is possible.
Imagine that: a day when anything is possible. A day to be free from expectations and our own limitations, a day where there’s no such thing as “I can’t”. A day to see our way clear to making things happen.
This is the gift I’d like to share with you today: a celebration of conscious action.
You can’t get somewhere by standing still.
It’s easy to stand at the mouth of something breathtakingly beautiful and admire it, but go no further. It’s easier to mistake that hitch in your breath for danger and walk away. The hardest thing to do is to take action, to walk toward the burning beauty and embrace it.
This is why we stand still.
But this is a celebration, right? There’s no standing still, no wallflowers here. It’s time to dance.
Dance with me.
Consider your goals, your dreams, your visions, and watch them swirl around you like dancing stars. Reach out and grab one, and trust that in this moment, it is achievable.
Sit with your vision, breathe with it. Consider not just the nuts and bolts of that vision, but how it feels. Do you feel fulfilled? Helpful? Wealthy? Relaxed? Challenged?
Set aside your overall vision and choose just one of those nuts, bolts, or feelings to hold and contemplate. What is one thing you can do, one small, conscious action that you can take right now to move one step closer to that goal?
This is your drumbeat. Dance to it. Run with it. Take one step, one action.
Because today, anything is possible.
Image by Lauren Treece (CC BY-ND) via Flickr
What if your days could be filled with peace and magic instead of stress and hassle? And what if you didn't need to find extra time to make that happen? Everyday Awareness isn't about making time. It's not about finding something new. It's about the magic in what's already there. Click to learn more
