By Jennifer Lawhead When I was 16-years-old, I gave a friend a piece of advice that I don’t remember. How do I know it actually happened, you may ask, since I can’t recall it? I know because, 20 years later, sitting at brunch, the same friend told me something I said in a fleeting moment, for me, was something she’s carried with her, for years. At the time, my outgoing and ...
Doers v. Thinkers
By Cat Weise Freshmen year in college, I lived on the same floor with a bunch a young, smart women. One decided she had a new theory about the world as many young people do when they first exercise their independence muscle. Her theory was that the world could be divided into doers and thinkers. She rattled with authority who she believed was in each category. It was presumptuous, ...
Your audience is practicing attention curation. Are you?
Unless you intentionally live in a self-created bubble, everyone and everything is trying to get your attention at all times. Therefore, we don’t give our attention for any length of time to just anything. Our attention must be earned. It’s something we call attention curation, and it works two ways. For individuals, attention curation is the disciplined practice of consciously ...
This is who we are
Injustice in our country must be addressed. It begins, as all deep work does, by looking inward. This is precisely what Michelle Obama highlighted in her public statement May 30, “It's up to all of us—Black, white, everyone—no matter how well-meaning we think we might be, to do the honest, uncomfortable work of rooting it out. It starts with self-examination and listening to those whose ...
How Branding Led to a $8M Revenue Increase
By Jennifer Lawhead We always say, “a strong brand solves a thousand business problems.” When a business moves away from obsessing about bottom lines, profitability and ROI, and instead adopts a brand-centric mindset, it fundamentally changes the fabric of the business. Suddenly, financial milestones are reached; not because a CEO fixated on them, but because the quality of the brand became ...
Why should we come back to you?
Soon, people will be making decisions. The decisions will be about what work they choose to do, what schools they will send their children back to, what places they want to eat at and shop at and gather at. They will be deciding how to re-engage with the world. Will they be re-engaging with you and your brand? The decision-making filter that existed before the pandemic, which would have ...
Why Branding Matters in the Face of the Unthinkable
By Jennifer Lawhead It wasn’t their first rodeo, but in terms of cancelling, it was definitely their first rodeo. In the first weeks of March 2020, as the nation was just beginning to consider shutting down, Rodeo Austin faced a seemingly impossible decision: cancel its entire lineup filled with live music acts, a popular livestock show, a carnival and more, or try to press on, even though other ...
Humans of Marketing: Stop the Madness
In the best of times being a director of marketing and communication is kind of like holding your ground in the center of a tornado. You must watch carefully where you step. And while it is relatively calm in the eye, every other thing is hurtling, very near, at dangerous speeds. A misplaced step might pick you and your day or week up, sending you swirling along with all that is whipping ...
Will Marketing Still Matter?
No. And yes. Crisis reveals pretense. So the days of hardcore, tone-deaf, insistent and interruptive marketing are over. That kind of marketing does not matter now. It doesn’t matter to the extent that marketing with old ways in this new world will do more harm to a brand than not marketing at all. By harm we mean: if you market with pretense, with disregard for human beings, with a ...
Don’t Go Dark
In times like these, there is a tendency to hunker down and wait for it to blow over, to get mired in fear over what to say and say nothing. We beg you, please don’t do that. The world needs your voice and spirit. The ability to communicate is a great gift, one of the most profound ever unwrapped by humankind. The ability to communicate in a crisis connects the gap between great gain and ...