How to own your excellence: messaging strategically for competitive advantage

Integrity Engineering (www.integrity-eds.com) already had the name, but they needed the strategic messaging to pay it off. And no, a dictionary-like definition of integrity wasn’t going to cut it. Definitions of this kind imply an ownership that simply doesn’t exist. Integrity Engineering is an excellent aerospace engineering firm, but nobody owns integrity, not even these[…]

Innovators: identify your audience, ignore everyone else

Broad based appeal isn’t always the answer, especially for innovators. A marketing agency I’ve written for for several years started including me in their own positioning discussions to help with their messaging strategy. Their owner is a serial innovator. He loves integrating new technology into marketing. He’s got a gift for it. As a result,[…]

Collaboration: honesty is the accelerator

I was recently in a meeting with a financial services company to help them develop strategic messaging. One member of their marketing team kept making absurd suggestions. Either he wasn’t paying attention, or he was stoned, or he was simply obsessed with playing out metaphors — birds, wings, flight, horizons – related to the company[…]

Two stories within one: ghost writing that reveals both sides

Good book writing reveals that a story is never just about one thing. Ted Turner’s autobiography Call Me Ted tells a lot about Turner’s expansive business career. But the writing is personal enough to also convey the restlessness born out of aleniation from his hard-driving, alcoholic father. So while Amazon lists it as a business[…]