Category: Marketing & Branding

3rd Annual Building Creative Business Expo

I’m planning to present again at the 3rd Annual Building Creative Business Expo in Denver. The Event is Saturday, March 8th in downtown Denver.

I’ll probably be presenting a session on copyright law and a different session on naming your product, service, or business (No Lame Names). I might even get a chance to do a Strange Fire presentation.
From their page:

What is the BCBE?
The BCBE is a free, day-long event that provides creative individuals and businesses a “one-stop” opportunity to learn and gain awareness of the various services and programs that can help them to stabilize their creative businesses and plan for the future. Workshops are lead by experts in the fields of marketing, personal and business finance, media relations, music and film production, and public art.

The BCBE format includes:

  • Approx. 25 exhibitors in the atrium of the Webb Building
  • Workshops and panel discussions in 4th floor classrooms
  • 15-minute sales pitch in the atrium (organizations will be required to provide a giveaway item)
  • Special activities (i.e., fashion show, music performance, etc.)

www.changethis.com SUCCESS!

I just found out that my manifesto proposal for No Lame Names has been accepted by www.changethis.com!

Thanks to everyone that voted for it.

Now I just have to adapt my ebook of the same title for publication. It’ll take me a little time, and take them a couple months, but sometime soon that information about the interplay between branding and trademark law will be in a far more visible place than just my Web sites.

Since the email to friends and family worked so well for the No Lame Names proposal, I’m now asking you to do it again. I’ve submitted a proposal for Strange Fire: 5 Guiding Values.

Please do me another HUGE favor and click this link and vote for Strange Fire too!

http://www.changethis.com/proposals/1121

(yes, I see the “artists” typo in my bio on the page, but I can’t get back in to correct that… Oh well.)

Thanks everyone.

I’d love to see Strange Fire get some wider circulation. It’s already available for free at www.guidingvalue.com, but there are a lot more people that visit www.changethis.com. Here’s to a great start in 2008.

the business of creativity

I’ve had several conversations with friends and clients over the last few days specifically addressing how to frame the discussion of law, business/art, creativity and spirit in some understandable form. The phrase that keeps coming up and helping people understand what this is about seems to be “The Business of Creativity” where the law element is included in the business/art discussion and the spirit element is rolled into the creativity discussion. I don’t know yet if this really works for me yet because I don’t know if I want to down-play the spirit discussion at all. Maybe I won’t have to short-change the spirit, but I’m not seeing how “the business of creativity” captures everything I want to say. It definitely captures a sub-set VERY well. I pay the bill by helping people with the business of creativity, but there’s more to it.

I’ve been thinking about negative space – the space between objects and classifications. If you think about the numbers 1, 2, 3, etc a little bit, it’s easy to see that these numbers that we think of as “whole” are really an infintesimally small point along the number line. There is an individual infinity between 1 and 2, another between 2 and 3. So, when we think about the “whole” numbers, we’re missing a very great deal of good stuff in the spaces between. I don’t want to make that mistake when discussing spirit, creativity, business/art, and law.

I don’t want to get so focused on the labels or “poles” that the relationships between the poles are not given full attention. It’s the overlap that’s interesting. Perhaps it’s the overlap that gets closest to “real.”

In effect, these poles are only “real” when they are relating to each other, and relating to a whole host of other concepts that are outside of my focus. You could say they are in relation to each other, but maybe the “relation” should be spelled “realation” in this discussion. How about “inrealation” as a unifying label for the discussion? I like that. Inrealation.

What do you think?  Post a comment…

Magic Marketing Formula

At about 3:00am this morning, after the 2-year-old had climbed in bed and started staking his claim to “his” space by kicking me, my brain turned on. Most of the time, I hate it when this happens because I can’t get back to sleep. This morning I came up with something useful.

For a long time I’ve told marketing clients, especially in admissions marketing/higher education, that the goal was simple. We simply show the prospect other people who were happy with their decision to attend the institution in question. Specifically: “That person reminds me of me and they are obviously happy with their decision, so I think I’ll make the same decision and attend that school.”

What I realized this morning is that I’d hit on a simple formula for almost every marketing problem. It’s a syllogysm.

[Variable A: person, business type, situation, goal, etc.] is like me.

[Variable A] is [Variable B: happy, smart, sexy, rich, efficient, etc.] for having decided to [Variable C: buy the product, attend the school, invest in the company, hire the consultant, etc.].

Therefore, I should [Variable C], because then I will be/feel [Variable B].

The only hard part about this formula is filling in the three variables:

A: What NICHE are you targeting?

B: What EMOTION are you trying to connect with your product/service?

C: What RESULT are you promising?

Those three decisions are the most important decisions you’ll make in your marketing adventure.