“If your brand is a cliché, your brand is losing sales and growth. Why? If your brand is using clichés to promote itself, you’re promoting your “category,” not your unique, individual brand. Painful? Yes. Solvable? Absolutely.”
“Profit is not the legitimate purpose of business. The legitimate purpose of business is to provide a product or service that people need and do it so well that it s profitable.”
“Business is like a game and you play the game only in two ways. Either you play to Win or Play not to Lose”
“Pastor Face Your Business” When people say this they mean that I must just stay behind the pulpit and preach”
“When he is dissected after his death, a disrespectful interpreter said of a foreign dignitary, a million predicates will be found in his stomach: those he swallowed in the past decades without saying them.”
“Life is made up of dots”
“And while a brand is so much more than a company’s logo, the logo is one of the key ambassadors to any brand.”
“Your brand exists to differentiate. “Same crap, different day” won’t do it. A day that goes by without breaking some sacred branding rule is a day a brand has lost to rise above the status quo. By breaking those rules with insight, intelligent and innovation, your brand can get heard in a world that’s simply too busy to listen.”
“We ve all seen it. A #startup begins with a #dream, a #passion to do something others have missed or overlooked.”
“We know there are thousands of ways to solve any branding problem a company faces, yet the only valuable solutions are the effective ones. Doing something ineffective in half the time–or “more efficiently” or “more economically”–isn’t progress, but is instead bad business. Very bad business.”
“History is filled with inferior brands outselling superior ones thanks to better branding. Only superior branding has the power to overcome and reverse this (and superior products and services deserve superior branding).”
“Customers have a first moment when they discover your brand. If you were to look at it today with a fresh pair of eyes, in fact only through a pair of fresh customer eyes and witness your brand for the very first time, what would you see? What impression would make? Or fail to make? Would your brand blend in? Would it stand out? Would it be memorable, or the leading cause of amnesia amongst shoppers everywhere? Facing the truth of this and fixing it as needed will determine whether your brand thrives or merely stumbles along.”
“Intentions do not insulate us from the consequences of our actions.”
“The moment I entered the bright, buzzing lobby of Men’s House I was overcome by a sense of alienation and hostility … The lobby was the meeting place for various groups still caught up in the illusions that had just been boomeranged out of my head: college boys working to return to school down South; older advocates of racial progress with utopian schemes for building black business empires; preachers ordained by no authority except their own, without church or congregation, without bread or wine, body or blood; the community “leaders” without followers; old men of sixty or more still caught up in post-Civil War dreams of freedom within segregation; the pathetic ones who possessed noting beyond their dreams of being gentlemen, who held small jobs or drew small pensions, and all pretending to be engaged in some vast, though obscure, enterprise, who affected the pseudo-courtly manners of certain southern congressmen and bowed and nodded as they passed like senile old roosters in a barnyard; they younger crowd for whom I now felt a contempt such as only a disillusioned dreamer feels for those still unaware that they dream—the business students from southern colleges, for whom business was a vague, abstract game with rules as obsolete as Noah’s Ark but who yet were drunk on finance.”
“Sometimes, as in a game of chess, we must strategically regress so that we might progress toward our ultimate objective.”
“The Highest Reward for men and women s devotion and dedication to excellence is not what one gets from it but what one he or she becomes through it.”
“Catch a customer with emotion and you will have a customer for a day; but, capture a customer with value and you will keep a customer for a lifetime. I truly believe in good, old-fashioned values when it comes to business. That is what timelessness is made of! At the end of the day, the question is, “Do you want to build a good hut for a day or do you want to build a good fortress for a lifetime?” Quality, value, understanding the needs of your clientele— that’s how you build a legacy. Connect with people, because you can never underestimate just how many people out there are yearning for any form of good interpersonal connection that they can find and when you can provide that as a brand name, you can allow the person behind your business to shine through. That’s how timelessness is created. It’s not created by luring people into a myth; it’s created by making connections, by remembering people’s names, by being genuinely interested in everybody.”