The Brainzooming Group

Heading home from Denver on Sunday morning, I stopped for a to-go sandwich and wound up choosing an “Angus Beef and Cheddar Cheese” sandwich. Interestingly, back at home Sunday afternoon, I saw a Sonic ad for its new Angus bacon cheeseburgers.

It would have been just as easy to say “roast beef and cheese” and “bacon cheeseburger,” but in both cases the specificity of mentioning “Angus” beef made these two random messages much more memorable.

There’s your Friday marketing lesson – don’t overlook opportunities to provide even marginally more specificity in your customer communications to stand out and improve memorability.

And as a bonus, here’s your weekend nutrition lesson: If you’re watching your weight, stay away from the Angus bacon cheeseburgers – 760 calories? Eeeeeek!!!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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There are several posts here about looking at situations in different ways.

Another new way to look at things became evident while riding a backward roller coaster at Elitch Gardens. These coasters go out and then return you backwards along the same track. The Boomerang roller coaster provided a wonderful and surprising sensation since it was impossible to match up the forward and backward experiences as mere opposites. Going through the ride backward created completely different sensations.

We likely all have processes that we’ve run in a particular direction time after time. Take a cue from the new sensations created by the Boomerang and step through a familiar process backwards. Starting from the end and working your way to the beginning of a process can yield truly new insights to help make the forward process even stronger.

Valerie

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Last Saturday, my niece Valerie treated us to roller coaster riding at Elitch Gardens amusement park in Denver. The afternoon provided great branding lessons on aligning naming and customer experience implementation.

A ticket booth sign promoted Rapid Ride passes – $14.99 add-ons permitting, as the materials stated, time savings by moving to the front of the line for rides. It was touted as improving your customer experience by providing more family time together at the Elitch Gardens as you enjoyed the park.

We decided to get three Rapid Ride passes. When Valerie bought the tickets, she received a receipt for one pass, but nothing we could actually use. The ticket taker told us to check with Guest Relations. The Guest Relations worker said the receipt was an internal stub, and that although she could sell the Rapid Ride passes, none had been delivered to Guest Relations yet. She sent Valerie back to the ticket booth to wait in line. After redoing the transaction for three Rapid Ride passes, they didn’t have the passes either. By the time a manager brought them over, we’d blown thirty minutes getting passes to speed up our park experience. Needless to say, we were seeing a disconnect in the Rapid Ride pass naming and customer experience we were enduring.

So think about these three branding lessons related to defects in aligning naming and customer experience:

• A brand really is more than the name; it’s a customer’s experience with a product or service. When something’s called “Rapid,” everything about the customer experience better be “rapid.” It shouldn’t take thirty minutes for anything whose promise is based on rapidity.
• Don’t get focused on narrow brand attributes during naming. While Elitch Gardens emphasizes speed in the name, we also got to select our seats before anyone else. For roller coaster lovers, riding at the front or back every time is nearly as good as cutting in line. But the name obscured this attractive customer experience feature.
• Provide honest information about the customer experience people are purchasing. At the first coaster, it was unclear how to use the passes – there were no signs. Turns out there wasn’t a special line Saturday; we had to walk up a ride’s exit line. And only after checking the passes did we learn they were good only five times and only on certain rides at Elitch Gardens.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Experts are everywhere so in unfamiliar situations look for them to help you perform better. How to spot them?

• Focus on people displaying multi-dimensional talents or responsibilities
• Observe who others go to with questions – irrespective of formal title or position
• Watch for people who look as if they know what they’re doing
• Pick out those who appear to informally take charge

Setting up wedding reception music the night before my niece’s wedding ceremony in Denver, Chris was clearly the expert. Though never sure of his official title, he was a wealth of information about the hotel sound system, the reception set up, and how long the event would last and wind down. He predicted that after 4 hours there would be 15 people left; the next day, 3 hours and 50 minutes into the reception, there 16 people remaining. Chris knew what he was talking about!

Another advantage of finding experts is that it’s fun to push them to tap their knowledge to devise innovative approaches.

The wedding was on the hotel’s patio, and that morning Nate (my nephew) and I were still determining how to get enough volume through our small speakers. There were, however, four speakers outside playing house music. While Chris wasn’t available, Warren, who had cleared our table at breakfast (see the bullet about multi-dimensional responsibilities), was. I explained what we hoped to accomplish, showed him a hidden audio jack on the wall, and within 15 minutes, we were playing the ceremony music through the speakers. The hotel had never done this before, but now plans to make this available for future events.

The key was being open, willing to learn, and allowing ourselves to be seen as knowledgeable but uncertain. That’s when an expert will almost always go out of his or her way to come up with an ingenious solution. So remember, look for telltale signs of expertise to help you get smarter when you need it most.

Valerie

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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We were in Denver this past weekend for my niece’s wedding. Travel always spurs blog ideas, so this week touches on ones from the trip.

Living an unconventional life isn’t something to which I’m inclined. My life tends to fall within some fairly standard bounds, allowing for the uncontrollable events that life always holds.

As I pointed out in the toast at the wedding reception, my niece, in stark contrast, had an unconventional life thrust upon her almost from birth.

Growing up amid a care group that depended on her extended family and close friends, she’s an interesting blend – a very loving young woman with certain traditional views surrounded by some very different experiences and twists on life. At several crucial junctures though, she has made incredible decisions that I view with tremendous respect and pride in her judgment. And among traditional aspects of the ceremony and reception, there were multiple unconventional elements for those that wanted to look for them. It was quintessential Valerie!

The whole trip was a reminder that it’s important to be open to and learn from life perspectives and behaviors that are very different from your own. Try to look for points of agreement where you may share views. And maybe wait a few minutes (or a few days, or even until the next trip) to provide your wisdom on life and how to live it. In so doing, you may get to learn all kinds of new things about tattoos, snowboarding, and what it means to be a polite graffiti artist!

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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“If you invent your own instrument, you’re automatically one of the top three musicians in the world on that instrument.” – Matt Goldman, Co-Founder of the Blue Man Group (August 2008 “Inc.”)

That quote is how we started the week working through creating a personal category to set yourself apart. And if you’ve been playing along at home all week, you should have a wide variety of potential possibilities as input into your category.

So what are some steps to dramatically narrow the list of ideas? Here’s a flashback to some previous posts you can use to narrow your possibilities:

• Prioritizing for dramatic input
• Forcing consideration of ideas that seem uncomfortable (but may hold the potential for a big direction change)
• Narrowing ideas by comparing them directly

Try to narrow to 10-15% of your original ideas, and then begin looking for elements that you can put together to create a new category with which to describe your talents. Ideally the category should be distinctive and defined in a way that you become the only answer to, “Who are the best people who can do this?”

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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Yet another way to ideate on a strong “personal” category is to use your current personal strengths and deliberately transform them to identify new and distinctive possibilities. Here’s a relatively quick approach:

1. State your objective as “Building a distinct personal category to define and differentiate my value to others.”
2. List 8-10 of your distinctive talents (Tuesday) and areas of incredible value (Wednesday) as Attributes in the left column in the grid below.
3. Using the objective from Step 1, take each talent and value area in Step 2 and transform them in the various ways suggested below, always asking: “To create a new personal category how can I (INSERT TRANSFORMER FROM BELOW) to / of (INSERT STRENGTH OR TALENT)?

Potential Transformers include Make It Bigger / Do More of It, Make It Smaller / Do Less of It, Replace It, Turn It Around, Remove It, Standardize It, Customize It, Make It More Complex, Simplify It, Eliminate It

Run through as many combinations as you can, trying to generate 2 or 3 new ideas form each pairing. Don’t settle for fewer than 60 possibilities that could fit into the category definition we’ve been working on all week.
Next, we’ll narrow all the possibilities to get close to defining your category.

Mike Brown

Founder of The Brainzooming Group, and a huge fan of strategy, creativity, and innovation. Mike is a frequent speaker on innovation, strategic thinking, and social media.

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