Imposter Syndrome and the Dunning–Kruger Effect seem to be two sides of the same coin. With imposter syndrome, brilliant people don’t believe they are and live in fear of being exposed as frauds. Dunning-Kruger on the other hand is a cognitive bias where people lack awareness of their skills and the less skilled they are…
Ten percent does not equal ten percent. Let’s look at two marketing offers: 10% Off a Purchase of $100 In this scenario, a person will purchase $100 worth of goods. When it comes time to pay, the 10 percent discount will be applied and the person will pay $90. 10% Bonus on a Purchase of…
One day Goldilocks was walking through an office when she came to three desks that had projects on them. The first plan was too messy. There wasn’t enough thought put into potential pitfalls and resources required. The second plan was too rigid. and would never get off the ground. The person working on it is…
I believe there are two skills EVERYBODY should work on regardless of their title or role: writing and sales. Writing I think writing is the ultimate self challenge. It is a way for you to argue with yourself and work out your ideas so that other people can understand them. When you sit there looking…
I think when marketers look at dashboards and reports, they make a lot of assumptions. We assign either good or bad values without understanding how the data fits into the bigger picture. This causes us to get very excited or freak out about one piece of data in a complex puzzle. We see trees but…
Self promotion has a bad reputation, but why? I used to think it was a bad thing too until I realized I could help a lot more people by letting them know what I do and which areas I have expertise in. In fact, if you’re great at what you do, you owe it to…
I’m a fan of marketing and I watch what brands do very closely. What I’ve come to realize is that many marketing teams aren’t actually needed. Too many teams either just copy what others are doing or follow a best practices playbook. Their marketing is indistinguishable from their competitors which puts them in the safe…
I wish I was bored more often. Sometimes I make time just to be bored. It is getting harder and harder in our connected world to be bored though and I think it is detrimental to our creativity. When our brains are constantly being stimulated, there is no break to digest the information. As soon…
My kids went to my mother-in-law’s house and they had ice cream while they were there. They couldn’t stop talking about how good the ice cream was. As a special treat, I surprised my kids with the same ice cream. Same brand. Same flavor. Same container. Same size. My kids claimed it wasn’t as good…
Do you know your competitors? I don’t mean a list of other companies in the same market as you, I mean your competitors. I don’t think it may be as obvious as it seems. I didn’t think about it much until I read this quote from Netflix CEO Reed Hastings where he said, “We compete…
Here’s the plot for a movie that never gets made: The main character has a great childhood. They do well in school and get into a great university. This leads to a successful job where they climb the corporate ladder quickly and retire comfortably. We love underdogs. Yet in our social media world, there is…
I believe a great question is more valuable than a great idea. Questions open up discussions while ideas constrain them. Ideas certainly have their place but they also tend to use heuristics based on what has been done before and what is possible. Questions don’t care about any of that. Questions let us dream. A…
Sir Ken Robinson passed away last month at age 70. He still has the most popular Ted Talk of all time, Do Schools Kill Creativity? and has written numerous books on creativity. As someone who struggled in school I often felt like I was broken. His speeches and books are a great inspiration to me…
There are two ways to look at change; you can try to fight it or you can say “what an opportunity”. Blockbuster fought to keep late fees and physical stores because that is who they were. What if they would have saw the competition from Netflix and said “what an opportunity to reduce overhead and…
I know this is sacrilege but I hate webinars. I hate that they start five minutes after their scheduled start time. I hate that we have to sit through ten minutes of “housekeeping” slides. I hate that they save the only interactivity until the last ten minutes. I hate that they are used selfishly by…