Is Yours a Brand or a Bland?
Procedural Memory is the key to your brand being automatically remembered.
Accomplish this through Relevance x Repetition.
Symbolic Thought is how to make a brand meaningful.
Access this by linking the unknown to the known.
Particle Conflict is the way to make a brand interesting.
Achieve this by adding an element that doesn’t belong, but fits.
There’s a trend in marketing today to make brands “fully integrated” and “seamless.” In other words, to eliminate all incongruity and surprise.
Shallow blands are fully integrated and seamless. To be deep and attractive, a brand must have incongruent characteristics that make it interesting.
Just like a person.
Francis Bacon said it 400 years ago: “There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion.”
The most boring person in your life is the one “fully integrated and seamless.” Such people are painfully predictable.
Delight is built on surprise. Comedy requires it. Predictability is death to the imagination, strangulation to the soul, a suffocation of the spirit.
What is interestingly incongruent in your ads, your sermons, your sales pitches, your songs?
Don’t listen to your friends and neighbors. They can tell you only what kinds of ads, sermons, pitches and songs they prefer to see and hear. They cannot tell you what will actually work.
Young people in advertising have enthusiasm, theories, and fresh ideas. Old coots have experience and answers. It takes years of experiments and mountains of money to discover what will and will not work.
Do you want to spend your own years and mountains? Or would you prefer to listen to a coot?
Roy H. Williams
This week I wrote and produced a couple of radio ads that contain surprising and interesting statements. Chock full of cootness. Would you like to hear them?
Family Matters: Wizard Academy's own Michele Miller appeared on CNBC and the TODAY show last week! Home Depot is opening two experimental stores targeting women and the network wanted expert commentary in a story about it. Guess who they recognized as the top expert in America when it comes to selling to women? You guessed it. They sent a camera crew to Michele's home in Scottsdale where they spent two hours rolling the cameras. Michele's next 2-day class at the academy is October 30-31. Come to the class and stay in Engelbrecht House! Get details at WizardAcademy.org
My oldest son needs a full-time person to respond to inquiries about hiring his services. Yes, I'm proud of him. No, I'm not willing to share my staff with him. Are you a people-person willing to answer email inquiries and talk on the phone all day? Are you willing to move to Austin, Texas to do it? If so, invest some time prowling around his website at www.Sunpop.com then tell him about yourself in an email. I wouldn't recommend calling him to chat about the job. He has a staff of three people right now and the reason he needs you is because they're up to their eyebrows creating the world's most interesting online corporate videos. He spends his days videotaping and editing, much like I spend my days writing. Neither of us is any good on the phone. The base-pay-plus-commission job guarantees you'll make nearly 30k, but my projection is that you'll make closer to 40 if you're any good. Is this the job for you?