Circles of Change: Conversations with Dr. Zara Larsen
on Change Leadership and Career Fulfillment
December 7, 2008
“The Right Brain Way”
Guest: Charlie Kenny, The Right Brain People
Anchoring Points:
- Brand is the most powerful tool that any business has available to it. When understood properly it is THE lever to produce profit.
- While we may think everyone in business would know all there is to know about branding, they know almost nothing about it! The myths:
· It is under our control and can be made it into anything we want it to be
· We can plaster a name onto new products, magically transferring equity
· We can sell it to anyone and everyone – how frustrating for people who want to sell their brand to people who don’t know about it, don’t care about it and don’t want to know or care about it!
- Right Brain Research is a liberating process, refreshing and rejuvenating, using metaphors and similes to analyze the brand and the competition. It cuts loose and spells out intuitive, not tacit, knowledge.
- It is one thing to listen to the language of the brand, but it is another to figure out what that means for what you should be doing in the business.
- Listening is so important, not taking what people say at face value, but suspending beliefs and disbeliefs, foregoing assumptions of having it all figured out to be able to hear what they are saying.
- Perception is reality. How ironic when companies want to argue with consumers and tell them they are wrong, or discount what is said because it is not in alignment with the way companies see their brands.
- Today in business people don’t spend enough time thinking strategically and reflecting, spending most of their time on tactics, with spreadsheets and cross tabs and media plans and business cases. We get so close to the bark on the trees that they cannot see the forest. We must get outside-in vantage points.
- If you understand what people are really, really buying and not just the literal product that they seem to be paying for, then you have discovered the keys to unlocking the success of your business. You will be delivering the exact benefits that people are looking for without being distracted by the product.
- We are all brands — how we are known and what we are known for in our full life, not just our work. So, our personal brands have a life of their own and need to be nudged and cajoled, not controlled. Be humble enough to listen carefully to others.
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