If you can swap your slogan with a competitor’s without changing the meaning of either brand, then your slogan is meaningless.
For example, “You belong here” is not a positioning statement for a college seeking new students. It’s just noise.
It also doesn’t help to mix weasel words with more weasel words and then add specifics. On charity’s pitch: “Your contribution can help up to 35 people.”
“Up to” covers a lot of ground, doesn’t it?
It’s true that the copy we use can be noisy decoration, not often read or fully understood. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t put in the effort to make it useful and powerful.
One of the nicest thing you can do for someone you care about is point them to an idea, a book, a talk or a tool that will amplify their work and help them get to where they’re going.
It’s not easy. It means you understand their goals, see them for who they are and care enough about their work to amplify it.
That’s why filling in the missing piece with a complement is worth much more than an empty platitude or compliment.
They keep getting fancier. But you would benefit from investing in better lighting instead.
It’s tempting to upgrade your computer processor, your frying pan or your sneakers as well.
The thing is, once the foundational tools are good enough, technique and training outperform hardware. New snow tires are often more effective than a new car at getting to work, because traction matters more than horsepower.
Sharpening your saw or building resilience might be the best way to improve.
Look around the room you’re in. There are dozens of electrically powered devices, each waiting for you to request their assistance. A toaster, six lights, an oven, the ice maker, stereo, TV, microwave… It’s a very long list. Silent and ubiquitous.
Of course, electricity didn’t start this way. Using a washing machine to do your laundry required unscrewing a lightbulb and then screwing in the Edison mount cord.
When the web arrived, we treated it as one more appliance, an electronic library. When you wanted something, you went to your browser (the name gives it away) and found what you needed. A billion web pages, all on standby, waiting for your arrival.
AI presents itself to us in this way, at least for now. When you have something you need, the chatbot’s ready, the LLMs are built, and the data center is powered up, all waiting for you to ask.
This is changing. Right here and right now. It’s not something we’re expecting or ready for, but it’s an inevitable consequence of our reliance on tech and the detailed cocoon of data we’re weaving.
The systems will notice and intervene before we ask them to. In matters large and small. This will be unsettling until it’s not only normal, but something we depend on.
If you had experts in health, productivity, leadership, efficiency and community action following you around all day, speaking up when it would be helpful, offering tools and insight when you needed them, often before you knew you needed them, what would your day be like?
It won’t always be delightful, and we don’t get much of a say in whether it happens, but that’s the path we’re on.
Two opportunities, then:
We’re headed to a divide between amplifying agency and becoming a cog. Where do you want to go?
Focus groups and informal feedback offer a trap: Asking someone in the target audience if they like something might get you useful feedback.
But most of the time, the people you’re asking aren’t actually in the group of early adopters that are going to make your rollout work. They’re not the people who buy work from artists before they’re famous, or wait in line to get an iPhone on the first day. They’re part of the crowd, not the lonely early adopters.
And people who are part of the crowd generally don’t have a lot of empathy for the nerds who go first. Since they have trouble imagining what drives those folks, they’re going to do a terrible job of giving you feedback.
“I don’t like this (yet),” is not the same as “the people you hope to serve won’t like this.”
You don’t have to be a toddler to work at Fisher-Price. Professionals work hard to imagine what others might want. But your friends and neighbors might not have put in the work needed to have this professional skill.
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