Respect Your Time in 2009

I just completed a telling experiment.

I subscribe to a number of e-newsletters, digests, updates and the like. For a one-week period, instead of reading them as they arrived in my email in-box, I moved them to a separate folder without opening them. At the end of the seven days, I reviewed them all in a single sitting. I learned the following:

1) In this one-week period, I received nearly 80 newsletters. I had no idea it was anywhere near that number.

2) Of these 80, very few resulted in any kind of immediate action or use.

In other words, I have been wasting an incalculable amount of time on this material. Though my intentions were good (stay up-to-speed on the world of branding and business, seek information from which my clients and contacts might benefit, find tidbits that might turn into a speech or article), at some point, I went over a cliff of mindless accumulation.

And there will be a tendency for this problem to get worse, not better. In this connected age, we all run the risk of becoming bloated at the buffet of information.

The above experiment was one outcome of reading "The Four-Hour Workweek," by Timothy Ferriss. This book is celebrated in some circles as the new way to work, and maligned in others as one man's personal Fantasyland. But I'm recommending it to nearly everyone based on its time-saving principles alone.

For example, Ferriss calls email "the greatest single interruption in the modern world." He recommends checking email twice a day, at noon and 4 p.m. (I've tried this, and he's right – the number of emails that truly require a response in a time window shorter than four hours is nearly zero.) Eventually, Ferriss recommends checking email only once a day, and then, if you can pull it off, once a week. He's not kidding.

He also recommends batching menial tasks and going on a one-week media fast, which is where the above experiment had its birth. He notes:

Doing something unimportant well does not make it important… Requiring a lot of time does not make a task important.

Our culture tends to reward personal sacrifice instead of personal productivity… Focus on being productive instead of busy.

Being busy is a form of laziness – lazy thinking and indiscriminate action. Being selective – doing less – is the path of the productive. Focus on the important few and ignore the rest.

There are few resources more precious than your time. For many of us in this business, our time is our only inventory, and it needs to be managed accordingly. Doing that effectively, however, requires constant mindfulness and the elimination of some bad habits. Some of what you are doing may not be getting you to where you want to be.

Whatever your goals and choices, I recommend you develop a healthy intolerance for people and things that waste your time. Learn how to say "no" in order to achieve a bigger "yes." Life is too short.

Here's hoping that 2009 is your most productive year yet, and that you get closer to your goals and dreams because of it.

Elegant Fare launches new logo and website

It's my pleasure to announce the new website of Three Deuce clients Elegant Fare catering. Please visit: http://www.elegantfare.com/.

I've been working with Elegant Fare for several months now, and they certainly earn their reputation as Cincinnati's finest caterers. Anne Lisbin, Elegant Fare's CEO, has assembled a dedicated and professional team that truly believes in delivering nothing less than their very best.

The branding process was led by Three Deuce Branding (http://www.threedeuce.com/). It began with discovery, including customer interviews, a competitive audit and an internal visioning session. A new brand positioning was then created, including overall equity, benefits, points of difference, brand character and key building blocks.


Once positioning was in place, Linserpelle Creative (http://www.linserpelle.com/) brought it to life with a sophisticated new logomark and a beautiful website. Many thanks to Dino Pelle, Becky Linser and their entire team for such an elegant translation of the brand positioning into visual media.

I invite you to visit the new site and to consider Elegant Fare for your next corporate or social catering event in Greater Cincinnati.

Three Deuce on WNKU

On Monday-Wednesday of this week (Dec. 29-31), I'll be joining Crystal Faulkner and Tom Cooney on their "BusinessWise" radio show between 5-5:30 on Greater Cincinnati's WNKU/89.7-FM.

Monday and Tuesday we'll discuss "Branding When Times Are Tough," with advice for steering your brand through choppy economic waters. On New Year's Eve, the topic is "Resolutions for a Brand New Year" - five things to keep in mind as you build your brand in 2009.

You can listen live or check the podcasts at www.WNKU.org.

A Better Brand in 2009

A new year is just around the corner, and that inevitably means a list of resolutions. For a better brand in 2009, make (and keep!) these five resolutions:

I will live the brand throughout the organization. It's time to dispel the prehistoric notion that branding is something the marketing folks do. Branding affects, and is affected by, your culture, management and operations. In short, branding is everything you do. You won't succeed if you stick branding in some functional silo.

Execs, I'm calling you on the carpet. Since branding concerns every area of your company, the entire C-suite has to understand, embrace and champion it. There's simply no other way to ingrain branding into your corporate DNA. And once you get it, make sure your people get it too.

I will serve. If you're serious about true branding, here's the first lesson: It's all about service. If your brand isn't improving lives in some way, big or small, your long-term chances of success are nil.

So stop looking at your consumers as data points or as means to reaching your sales quotas. They're the reason you're in business, and if you want to stay in business, you'll never stop searching for ways to make their lives better. Do this, and sales will take care of themselves.

I will be courageous. To paraphrase the old saying, one definition of insanity is doing the same things as your competitors and expecting a better result.

Too often, we make decisions based on "how things are done in this business." And so we miss the point that the name of the game is to play it differently. No great brand was ever built by marching in lock-step with its competitors.

Consumers don't want more of the same. They want new experiences, new solutions, new ideas. If you want to win in 2009, start with the courage to blaze a new trail where it matters.

I will see the future. The ancient proverb is true: "If you don't know where you're going, any road will get you there."

If you haven't defined your numeric measures of success, make that a priority. And most brands fall short in another goal-setting area: Positioning. Positioning is a clear statement of how you will be perceived by those you seek to motivate. It's a perceptual objective that complements your numeric ones.

Defining your positioning is your first act of courage, because it forces you to establish how you will be different, how you will serve, and what you will stand for. It is thus an invaluable guide for deploying resources and living the brand within your organization.

You can't build a brand without positioning. If you haven't defined yours, make 2009 the year that you do. If you have, evaluate it in the coming 12 months to ensure that it's optimized.

I will get smarter. It's easy to get stuck on auto-pilot, treating our assumptions as truths. But those assumptions could be quietly crippling our brands.

So, a challenge: In the next two weeks, define three questions that, if answered, would help you to better manage your brand. These could be things like evaluating return on marketing investments, defining key customer segments, or understanding the buying process.

Once you've defined your three most critical information outages, establish the plan by which you will close the knowledge gaps in 2009. Find a way to make it happen.

"Getting smarter" is also about mindset. It means listening more and talking less. It means gathering the right brains around you and leveraging them, including outside counsel when needed

Keeping even one of these resolutions will result in a stronger brand. Keeping them all should make it a year to remember.

A version of this post appeared in the Business Courier of Cincinnati column "That Branding Thing" on November 14, 2008.

To find out more about our services that ensure your brand is doing the right things in the New Year, please visit www.ThreeDeuce.com.

BrandSniper: Whopper Virgins

Here we go again: More big marketing without a big idea.

By now you've probably seen the TV ads for the "Whopper Virgins" concept. The premise: In a taste test with indigenous people from the most remote corners of the globe - people with, ostensibly, no prior knowledge of the existence of the fast-food giants - who wins, Burger King or McDonald's?The TV spots attempt to drive visits to the WhopperVirgins.com website. Once there, you'll find copy like this:

"To find out about America's favorite burger, we had to leave America."

Cue Ron Burgundy: "That doesn't make sense."

Think about it: Are you likely to be convinced to switch your burger preference based on the palate of a Thai villager who has never had a burger before? I didn't think so. But Burger King apparently thinks so. Or they don't think so at all, and they're looking for PR value as opposed to real behavioral change.

WhopperVirgins.com also offers this nugget: "See what people think, when no one has told them what to think." And there's a countdown clock: "The world's purest taste test results in X days..."

Note the logic: Burger King suggests that we consumers have been told "what to think," no doubt by advertising. But if we could eliminate those advertising-impregnated preconceived notions, we would have "purity." And how does Burger King make this case? With advertising.

It's an interesting position for one of the world's largest advertisers to take. And by "interesting position," I mean "slippery slope." Burger King, you are not a victim of the perceptions that advertising creates, you are a benefactor. Attempting to cast yourself as anything but is wildly disingenuous.

"Whopper Virgins" is not an inexpensive campaign, once you factor in the costs of traveling to all those remote areas with a film crew in tow. Yep, the campaign also includes a documentary, which will soon "reveal" the results of the taste test. (Gee, I wonder who wins? The suspense!)

This is stunt marketing gone mad. The intent is to create buzz, and nothing more. But creating buzz is very different from creating behavioral change. Let Burger King burn its money however it wishes - you should hold your own advertising to a higher standard.

Want to keep your brand from making mistakes like these? Find out more about our services at www.ThreeDeuce.com.