Differentiation
The following quote from “The Power Of Intention – Learning To Co-Create Your World Your Way” Dr. Wayne W. Dyer is worth meditating on:
“falling in love with what you are offering, and then selling your love … to potential customers.”
Do you love what you do?
What do you love most about what you do?
Do you love your customers?
This Discovery Channel ID piece always makes me feel good.
And there is nothing in it that is in-your-face about the product (ie the Discovery Channel). The focus is primarily on the emotions and the positive message. It takes confidence to do something like this. And a clarity about the vision of the organisation, what it stands for, …
In a departure from the conservative norm, recent TV ads for the Honda Accord Euro showed almost no visuals of the car.
Instead it focused on the value proposition for the customer. The sense of freedom and joy of driving. Most of the ad showed a man with arms out-stretched flying across the rolling countryside.
Nice.
A saw a truck today belonging to a cosmetics company. The tagline painted under their logo was “The science and nature of keeping you young”.
The cosmetics industry appears to be divided into the science and all-natural camps. A tagline like this struck me as an attempt to cover all bases.
Consider this tagline: “Eat all you can and still lose weight.”
Not very believable is it?
Lipton in Australia has long run a very successful series of ads linking tea with antioxidants. The inculcated “choice” for consumers has been - tea is good (because it has antioxidants); and thus by inference coffee is less good.
In Singapore, Nescafe is currently running large bus stop ads championing the antioxidant benefits of instant coffee!
The interesting thing for me was how much I had bought in to the …
Many businesses still think of marketing as a separate exercise. The primary actions revolve around Saying, and not Being. That is why they cannot Be truly different.
Being is a process. (Conversations with God III, by Neale Donald Walsch.)
To Be different, a business’ processes have to Be different. they have to act differently. Merely saying they are different is pointless without the actions to back it up.
Saying we are …

I received this great thank you note from a client recently. the card and envelope was designed by her young son. How great is that! Talk about a personal touch.
Thank you Karen and Harrison!
In her article Leading Interactive Brands, Betty Southgate illustrates several great examples of how a brand can interact with its customers beyond selling to them or marketing to them. In particular, the transformation of a commodity product that is fizzy drinks into something emotive and personal.
Well worth a read.
(Hi Betty!)
I will be presenting a seminar on Business Blogging at The Western Sydney Business Centre on 28 May 2008.
For further information, please contact:
Mangala Srinivasan
Western Sydney Business Centre
T: 8843 1116
E: mangala.srinivasan@business.nsw.gov.au
I was sitting in a popular dumplings restaurant (under the Paragon shopping centre on Orchard Road) in Singapore. It is obviously popular because we had to get a number and wait to get in. And the place was packed from about 6pm when we arrive to 9:30pm when it shut.
Despite its popularity, several factors made a potentially chaotic and unpleasant situation painless and transparent.
When you ask for a …