Be Different or be dead

September 21, 2019

How to use colours to make your branding amazing

Psychology of colour in branding is more than just a sentence explanation of mere representation of each of the colours.

It is a fact the specific colours can create a powerful impact on the choices  made by the consumers.

As per a report published by WebpageFX, consumers make judgments subconsciously about a site within 90 seconds of its viewing. Between 62% to 90% of the judgment is made solely based on colours.

Colours transform the perception of the brands

So, there is always a reason why the topmost brands choose a colour scheme, publish certain guidelines related to brands and work hard for making sure that their designs remain consistent across all their channels of communication. As per Kissmetrics, colours increase the prospects of recognition of a brand by 80%. Well, that’s a huge figure!

The colour theory

All the shades of red, green and blue are considered as the primary colours and violet, yellow and orange are the secondary colours. The tertiary colours include all the mixed shades of these colours.

How do colours help in brand building?

The smallest change in colours impact the buying habits of the consumers and their desire to purchase a particular product.

Colours such as red denote energy, excitement, courage, passion and attention. It is used in industries like Food, Sports, Entertainment and children products whereas orange denotes independence, optimism, adventure, creativity and fun. It is used in industries like entertainment and transportation. According to various sources, as high as 85% of consumers say that colour is the main factor while selecting a product.

Colours play an important role in how people interpret the brands. They have the power to influence the emotions of your consumers.

And most importantly, you can skyrocket your conversion rates by carefully integrating the colour psychology.

— Geet Bagrodia is the owner and founder of Vowels Advertising Agency which has offices in Jaipur, Dubai and Melbourne. A designer by profession, Geet has played a critical role in building over 200 brands in the city from scratch. He and his team are actively involved in redefining brands across the globe. Having been in the industry for over 6 years, he has gained deep insights within the entire branding spectrum.

• Posted 9.21.19 at 05:51 am by Roy Osing
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September 16, 2019

Kill your ‘dumb rules’ to amaze your customers

Source: Unsplash

One of the most effective ways to create memories for your customers and earn their loyalty is to break your own rules to favour them when it makes absolute sense to do so. This opportunity normally arises when your rules clash with what the customer wants; they simply don’t want to play by your rules.

Dumb rules

‘Dumb rules’, are given birth usually by some control freak in the organization with a nonsensical purist view that a customer should behave in a certain way that serves the organizations purpose with little regard for whether or not a customer will react favourably to getting treated in the prescribed manner.

One of my favorite dumb rule stories took place at The Mirage Hotel Resort and Casino in Las Vegas. There is a wonderful deli in the casino that serves the best rueben sandwiches ever but the customer friendliness of their policies sucks.

My wife and I show up late one night and asked the hostess for a booth and were told flatly that our request was not possible since it was their policy to offer booths only for parties of 6 or more.
I get that management wanted to maximize the check value from these specific seats, but in this case the store was empty save my wife and me! Maximizing revenue beyond the two of us was an impossibility!

In my experience the fathers and mothers of dumb rules can be found in staff type jobs whose role is to develop and implement operating procedures to govern, among other things, customer transactions. In these circumstances the objective is to meet internal requirements like efficiency and productivity rather than ensuring rules enhanced the customer experience.

And, unfortunately where customers are not considered the prime target for the rule or policy they become collateral damage in the rule’s application; they are mistreated and tell hundreds of other people how crummy the organization’s service is.

But there is a way to both have your cake and eat it to. You can both realize efficiency gains by applying the rule to the masses and bending or breaking the rule for those few customers who don’t accept it and push back on you.

The apply-the-rule scenario gets you the productivity gains you want from the majority of your customers who are ok with it; the bend-or-break scenario avoids the pain of an unpleasant customer encounter and impresses them and makes them more loyal to your organization.

When apply-the-rule is winning

You’re in loyalty do-do when apply-the-rule is winning. If your frontline employees spend a great deal of their time enforcing the rules, policies and procedures of your organization and, as a result, are constantly saying ‘no’ to your customers nothing good comes of it — loyalty is threatened — and employee engagement is in jeopardy because being a rule enforcer is not a rewarding role to play in any job.
Job frustration can eventually lead to employees finding another organization where day to day existence isn’t so painful.

Employees can’t create delightful moments for customers when they are constantly trying to get someone to tow the line on something they don’t agree with — empower your frontline to ‘say yes’

I’m not suggesting that a frontline person should break a rule that would violate the law, but they should have permission to bend-or-break an internal policy that has no significant negative long term consequences for the organization.

When you test your policies

Rules and policies impact people differently; each person will react to an enforce-the-rule encounter in a different way: some will be ok with having to comply with the rule while others will go postal.

One way to anticipate how your customers will likely respond to one of your rules is to ask them before it is implemented. Unfortunately I’ve never witnessed a process where detailed due diligence is done to brainstorm the negative reactions that customers may have to a particular rule or policy that is being considered, but there should be.

Given that customers are likely to respond to a rule in ways we never imagined, the only solution (if you want to protect and grow customer loyalty) is empower your frontline people to bend one of your standardized rules, policies or procedures when the customer needs a different treatment; when their needs are quite reasonable but out-of-bounds to what the policy manual says.

To those who think that empowering frontline folks will result in them giving away the shop, stop worrying. They won’t.

In my experience, empowering them to use their judgment and determine when and how a rule should be bent-or-broken actually produces a greater degree of rule enforcement as they typically reserve flexible treatment for those customers who truly need it.

Once given the latitude to apply flexibility to policy enforcement, they actually take a more active role in advocating the company’s position behind the policy.

When frontline people are allowed to control the bend-or-break process, the organization is rewarded by a customer who is blown away by how they are being treated and how humane the organization is. And they tell others how truly great you are.

The solution: the Dumb Rule Committee

How do you go about identifying and killing these ugly loyalty threateners?

Go ask your frontline what dumb rules they are constantly having to deal with. They know them but do you have the courage to listen and do something about them?

I created dumb rules committees in the operations areas of my organization and appointed a dumb rules leader for each committee whose responsibility it was to seek out and destroy (or otherwise modify) rules that made no sense to customers and drove them crazy.

Fun was had by all over this concept. Everyone, particularly the frontline, welcomed this initiative; they all were passionate about the purpose; we made real progress.

We had contests among the committees to see who could come up with the most dumb rules to kill, and we celebrated the winners. The committees were expected to not only identify rules, policies and procedures that annoyed customers, they were also charged with the responsibility of eradicating them by taking whatever action was necessary to get it done.

My role and that of my senior leaders was to remove any roadblocks preventing the committees from getting a rule dealt with.

Customer-friendly dumb rules

Certain rules are required by law or regulatory governance.
First of all do your due diligence to make sure that the claim is real and not the posturing of a champion who doesn’t want their rule or policy removed. If the rule is necessary, however, then at least look for ways to make it customer friendly.

And reconsider how the rule is enforced with a customer; what communications strategy is used. Is it friendly and helpful or is it demanding and intimidating?
Take the time to design the customer communications content to minimize an adverse reaction; it’s not always possible but it is worth considered doing nevertheless.

If you are able to expunge even 20% of the dumb rules you have in your organization, your customers will reward you with their loyalty and your reputation will soon attract new customers as well.

Cheers
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.16.19 at 04:20 am by Roy Osing
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September 7, 2019

10 effective strategies to promote your new podcast guest post

Source: Pexels

Podcast, a modern version of radio, has provided access to everyone the opportunity to host own show. Those who are familiar with podcasts and the usual content that is on these audio shows realize that they have quite a similar theme to blog posts. Therefore, many podcast channels that are covering a wide range of topics and issues, from sports and politics to history and entertainment.

You can find anything on the podcasts these days. In recent years, a lot of podcast channels have come upon the scene. Just like all the other content on the internet, podcasts also need to be promoted in the right way to reach their target audience.

If you wish to be heard, known and recognized, then you need to put in some work to promote your new podcast. Let’s explore how you can go about improving your podcast.

1. Get on iTunes

iTunes is now recognized as the single most effective medium in promoting the podcast. Therefore, it makes perfect sense to get on iTunes to be known and heard. It has been claimed by a journalist club that out of all the listened podcasts, 70 percent of them are reached via iTunes.

Make sure that when you are launching your podcast channel, it gets there on iTunes as well. You need to have a greater outreach when it comes to audience and being on this platform will help you be heard, literally and figuratively!

2. Create show notes

Whenever you start recording for your podcast episode, you don’t start recording out of the blue. You should have a plan or an idea like designrr.io that you take along when you are recording. In many cases, you may even make notes on what to cover and how to go about it. When it comes to promoting your podcast, these notes can come in pretty handy.

Spend a little time and effort in creating show notes for your podcast. When you are developing the content of your podcast on different media, these notes can adequately describe what the episode contains in the form of a concise and neat summary. It will turn up your podcast in Google searches, especially if you have put to include SEO specific keywords in your notes.

3. Increase your audience through your guest’s audience

One of the best ways to promote your podcast is to feature a popular guest in any of your episodes. If your guest already has a huge following, there are high chances that you will be able to retain some of them when they come to your channel.

One thing you must ensure is that the guests you feature on your podcast make a mention of their appearance either on their podcast or in any place where they are known and heard. It could be their social media channels or through their email campaigns. A popular guest on your nascent podcast will help you gain traction in the podcast industry.

4. Promote on social media

It goes without saying that you need to promote your channel on social media. In this age of increased reliance on social media by every industry, the podcast is no different. A podcast does stand apart because of its audio-only feature, so it may not be for everyone. People who rely on or prefer visuals while learning something new will not prefer podcasts and social media will help you tremendously in filtering out that audience.

You only have to analyze the audience that is engaging with your content on some social media and then reach out to them. This audience can be your target and loyal audience. Be out there on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. If you release a new episode, make it a pinned post on your account. The audience on all the platforms is varied, and you will be finding your target audience everywhere, so, make sure you are all around.

5. Submit episodes to podcatchers and aggregators

Podcatchers and aggregators, as the name implies, aggregates similar content in a specific place. So if you are in the podcast business, you should make an effort to get your content to a podcatcher. iTunes is the most prominent podcatcher, and as mentioned earlier, if you are on iTunes, you highly increase your chances of being heard. MediaGo and Banshee are other examples of podcatchers.

6. Transcribe the audio into text

Another thing you can do to promote your new podcast is to transcribe its audio into text and publish on various platforms that can further increase the outreach of your channel. Sometimes it is far more comfortable or convenient to read than to listen.

If some of the content of your podcast is available in text format, it can pique the interest of a reader, and there are chances that the reader will be directed towards your podcast to learn more about the content of the podcast.

7. Convert the podcast into video format

Converting podcast into a video may seem like an odd promotional strategy. However, if a few of your exceptional podcast episodes are available in a video format on a platform such as YouTube, it dramatically enhances the chances of increasing your audience. A podcast in video format has the possibility of being shared more than if it had been in an audio format.

You can put up famous and focal quotes from the podcast into a visual form and use that as the slideshow images in the podcast video. It is observed that videos get far more reception than any other kind. If it is a podcast of sports, like football podcast, you can add visuals from a previous match or just stills of various famous players.

8. Enhance ranking with reviews

If your podcast channel is high-ranked, it will reach far more people. Apart from having a considerable following, another way to be highly ranked is to get a lot of positive reviews from your audience. You can request your listeners to leave a comment at the end of every episode.

Another way to urge the listeners to leave a review is by organizing a giveaway. If you are low on a budget it could be some coupon code or invitation on the podcast as a guest speaker. Only those will enter for the giveaway who will leave a review. Giveaways have proven to be highly effective in promoting your content.

9. Be a guest on popular podcasts

It is the opposite of inviting a popular guest on your channel. You can team up with someone who already has a considerable following. In a lot of cases, this is better for your promotion that the previous situation. A podcast already being heard far and wide will have more listeners.

You will not have to promote your appearance extensively, and neither will you have to request your host to publicize your presence repeatedly. The higher audience on the popular channel will get you the promotion you needed.

10. Release multiple episodes on same day

If you are covering the same issue/topic in multiple episodes, then work towards releasing all the events on the same day. It will hook your audience, and they will know the content is there, and they can come back at any time. Some want to listen to all in one go.

It is an effective strategy in retaining and making an audience for your podcast.

— Sohail Rupani is a senior SEO strategist at PNC Digital, a digital marketing agency based in Orlando. He specializes in SEO and SEM techniques. He is passionate about technology and loves to analyze the tech industry in his spare time and stay in touch with the latest happenings. He also writes technical articles about SEO and digital marketing. Follow @sohailrupani for more updates. 

• Posted 9.7.19 at 06:36 am by Roy Osing
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September 2, 2019

10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed

Source: Unsplash

10 enormous barriers to progress that must be removed to succeed.

Every organization would like to build a high performance culture, but these non-strategic — CRAP — activities are in the way of making serious progress, and the leader needs to take ownership of eradicating them.

They consume precious time and suck up emotional energy.

Committee work

How many committees do you have working on various projects? What would happen if you reduced the number by 50% and empowered folks to make decisions and get on with executing on the strategic intent of the organization?

Committees are generally charged with the responsibility of coming up with recommendations that satisfy everyone; consensus building is their holy grail. Often these decisions take a long time to reach, they are watered-down and produce forgettable results. And sometimes they don’t make any decisions at all, only serving to assemble people who talk about a lot but do very little.

If you want to be a standout leader, take the axe to most committee work.

They should allow committees to be formed sparingly; engaging them for a serious strategic purpose, affecting the entire organization.
They should be stopped and never started again for less important activities that could be handled by individual managers or operating teams who must be prepared to make decisions and accept accountability.

Hyper-analysis

Analysis can paralyze an organization and is a symptom of people being reluctant to make a decision. It’s a comfortable position for people to be in; as long as they’re studying an issue they don’t have to take on the risk of driving a stake in the ground and pursuing a specific course of action.

Leaders should be encouraging less analysis not more.

Paralysis by analysis prevents progress. Do the amount of study that is consistent with the decision to be made. A $10 million decision will need more work than a $100K one.

And in the end, it’s crazy to believe that more analysis will make the final decision more accurate, more perfect. I don’t recall any decision I made that turned out the way the analysis suggested it would. Something unexpected and uncontrollable always happened that required the decision to be modified to some degree. So the return on investing more analysis time to get the decision perfect was ZERO.

COVID-19 is a classic example of an unforeseeable spear that killed most business plans beginning March 12, 2020; any analysis costs that were invested for any business plan prior to that time were wasted — a sobering thought the next time someone in your organization suggests that another 6 months of study is needed to reach the right decision.

The most appropriate way forward: make the call —> start executing —> learn from what you do —> adjust the plan —> keep executing —> repeat the above.

Coordination

What value is there in this function? Coordinators fill the gaps between functions in an organization; their purpose is to ensure two or more units work harmoniously together and deliver the outcome expected.

It’s apparent to me that organizations that use coordinators don’t trust that the operating entities can execute the required handoffs on their own;
they require someone to ensure that the process is done flawlessly and that the ball doesn’t get dropped.

When teamwork fails or systems are deficient, they need to be fixed rather than insert an intermediary as the solution

Not only does coordination merely address the symptom of the teamwork problem and not the problem itself, it adds unnecessary cost to the organization.

Organizations don’t need coordination functions; they need demanding leaders who take action to ensure departments work seamlessly together across the organization to deliver expected results.

They need people responsible for delivering results, not managing processes.

Consensus building

Standout leaders know that consensus building is a wasted exercise; it consumes energy cycles of the people in the organization and typically never results in everyone being on the same page.

The process is severely flawed; it asks what people think about a proposed way forward rationalized by study and analysis, and results in a broad range of responses depending on how each individual interprets the findings.

The expectation is that people will respond objectively and will see the merits in the proposal so that everyone will support it.

But that rarely happens. Individuals almost never see things rationally; they have their own personal lens through which they evaluate what is being presented to them. Their lens tells them if the plan benefits them and they respond accordingly.

Consensus solutions are nothing more than a blend of mediocrity build by everyone that satisfy no one.

And since everyone has a different lens, arriving at a consensus is impossible unless changes to the original proposal are made to reflect everyone’s feedback.

And so the watering down process begins. Because a multitude of modifications are needed to make the proposal acceptable to everyone, the proposal essentially looses its original identity and shape — it ends up having rounded corners built by everyone but satisfying no one.

So make the call, try and sell it to others but do what’s right. Forget about the consensus building process.

Following rules

Being constrained by rules stultifies creativity and innovation. Some rules are necessary, but others have outlived their usefulness, conceived in a different time when circumstances were different.

All rules outlive their usefulness eventually and standout leaders know this. They monitor current rules and policies to decide their relevance; the gutsy ones decide that a cleansing purge is required to eliminate the ones that are barriers rather than enablers to high performance.

For your leader to-do list: develop a plan to reduce the number of rules and policies you currently have in your control kit bag by 25% over the next six months or so.

There are a number of potential positive outcomes from your audacious act: employee engagement could increase, customer service could improve, decision making could be more effective and innovation could increase. Definitely worth a shot, right?

Benchmarking

I believe benchmarking is an egregious practice that virtually every organization follows in some way or another. It sucks the motivation to create something new and different from people because it’s so easy to find a best practise (whoever defines what that is) and try to copy it.

Copying best practises under the guise of innovation is intellectual dishonesty.

A standout leader should be expunging this notion — mandate that it can’t be used — as a valid problem solving tool and, instead, nurture a value set among employees that encourages the discovery of new, unique, special, imaginative, far out, newfangled and avant-garde solutions to the problems they encounter.

Tell everyone that copycat solutions will no longer be tolerated and that uniqueness will be the barometer to judge the worth of what people do.

Following the job description

The job description is a concept — backed up on paper — intended to contain what people do.
Metaphorically it’s a box constructed for employees to run around in. It has limits in terms of what’s in the box (ok behaviour; allowed) and what’s outside the box — not ok behaviour; disallowed.

The benefit of having the job description is to avoid ‘leakage’ of work performed among the variety of positions in an organization and if duplication and overlap is prevented then efficiently and productivity is increased.

And it’s true. The JD does compartmentalize and separate work; work is distributed throughout the organization by using it.

But there is a downside that standout leaders recognize, and that is, if taken to the extreme, it encourages doing what the JD says and not what is appropriate in the moment. ‘It’s not my job!’, for example, could influence the action an individual takes in the middle of a customer service crisis, rather than fixing the customer issue regardless of what the job description says.

The great leader knows that they can get the best of both worlds — the efficient use of resources as well as the flexibility and nimbleness required to take advantage of new opportunities — by using the job description as the foundation to govern the basic activities of what people do but also by allowing people to deviate from it when necessary to do the right thing to satisfy the needs of the overall organization.

We need people to step out and do amazing things not be bridled by a straight jacket.

This work — eliminating dysfunction — should define the priorities of the standout leader.

Cheers,
Roy
Check out my BE DiFFERENT or be dead Book Series

• Posted 9.2.19 at 04:00 am by Roy Osing
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