I like to think about pirates when I think about branding.
Branding is an abstract concept and I find hard to understand or explain. So when I’m thinking about branding, I think about pirates.
As I see it, pirates are one of the oldest and most effective brands.
Just imagine that you were sailing on a big, wooden ship in the middle of some cold, lonely waterway and you saw a ship appear in the distance. As it heads towards you, you see that it flies a flag… and as it gets even closer to you, you see what’s on the flag… GULP… a skull and crossbones. Seeing this logo, you immediately form an idea of what kind of experience is in store for you, courtesy of the pirate brand.
The pirates also had a brand promise – YOU ARE F*$KED – and they consistently delivered on it, client experience after client experience.
with Christine Dionese and Me!
After much discussion and a bit of ass dragging by me, Christine and I have decided to explore the topic of peer-to-peer mentoring together. Beginning this month, we will begin mentoring each other through a monthly Q&A column on her blog and mine, where we will publicly share our challenges and pains, and support each other in working through those issues.
Christine and I have never met in person. Nor have we ever communicated outside of email. Our relationship and the trust we have built has developed strictly through the written word. As Christine pointed out in an email, “People wrote to one another in the old days and had to learn about one another in that way. Travel was either scarce or financially prohibitive, so writing letters was the mode.” Perhaps one day we will meet but for now we believe the power of the written word will be enough to facilitate a strong and effective mentor relationship.
As a practitioner of Pay-What-It’s-Worth pricing, in my mind, there are big differences in asking a client to pay-what-they-can, and asking a client to pay-what-it’s-worth. They communicate very different things about your brand.
Care to explore them with me?
Exploring Pay-What-You-Can Pricing and What it Communicates
As a business owner, communicating that others are free to Pay-What-They-Can for your work positions you as willing to sell your work in charity. (You may want to consider at this point whether your business, or your clients, are, in fact, a charity.) In most cases neither party is a charity, so what you are truly communicating is that it’s okay for a client to pay whatever they *think* they can, and that you are open and lenient to allowing others to value your work at less than it’s worth, so long as the person deems they need it.
Now this is only my opinion, but I feel if you are responsible enough to identify a need and seek a solution for it, than you are also responsible enough to find the means for fulfilling that need – i.e., if you want it, you need to find a way to get it.
Do You Know the Difference between Marketing? vs. Advertising? vs. Branding? vs. Public Relations?
I often find it very hard to clearly differentiate the various forms of strategic communications that a person, a business and/or a brand can use.
A while back I shared an analogy explaining the differences between marketing, advertising and public relations. Today, I’ve expanded on the analogy with visual comics.
Getting a Date Using Strategic Communication
Why is it a good thing to pay less than something is worth?
Why do we buy the story that happiness results from underpaying for something?
Often we can be so far removed from a product’s creation that it’s hard for us to understand the value of the thing we are buying. But, when we have first-hand evidence of the love, time and energy put into creating something, why would it feel good for us to undervalue it?
How do you feel when your time, energy or love is undervalued?
It’s generosity.
Cooperation.
Want to change the economy?
Examine your ideas around the act of exchanging. When you are buying or selling, what are you thinking about?
What can I get?
What can I give?
What if you approached the exchange of goods and services as a generous act?
You have a choice in the kind of market economy you participate in.
The type of economy you inhabit, as a customer and/or as a business, is yours to define. If you imagine a different kind of market society, and a different way of valuing the world, you have the opportunity to shape it. You are contributing to an integrity-driven economy each time you allow your values to drive your decisions.
Too often though, we betray our values when we find ourselves overcome by money pressures. In these moments, we see our integrity as a cost. But the true cost is acting on our price/profit-motivations, as we can make short-sighted choices that prove far more costly in the long-term.
