‘Chancellor’s Corner’ Archives
The New Targeting
Persona-based writing is the new Targeting. According to what we've seen so far, ads that employ persona-based writing are outperforming yesterday's demo-targeted ads by an average of 81 percent. Website copy, direct mail letters, radio scripts and magazine ads that use persona-based language are pulling buckets of gold from the dwindling [...]
Voices of the Great Ones
"World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. The best thing is to work in [...]
We Are Sancho Panza
A Happy Message from the Gospel of Don Who can explain our four-century attraction to Don Quixote? The book is hard reading and dull, full of inconsistencies, and confusing. A little like the Bible. And yet Don Quixote is the second most widely-read book on earth; second only to, yes, the Bible. But look closely and you may see Jesus in Don [...]
It Ain’t Always the Ads that Do It
We Americans enjoy intensely romantic dates and wonderfully lavish weddings, don't we? It's the American way - hot and breathless, dripping with anticipation. And we have the world's highest divorce rate. This, too, seems to be the American way. We value the chasing more than the having, the journey more than the destination, the imagined more [...]
Creating Memorable Business Signs
Make your business signs stand out with these proven attention-grabbing tips. The purpose of advertising is to increase the public's awareness of you. What better way than through good signage? Most business signs are well-proportioned, carefully balanced, tastefully drawn and perfectly color-coordinated. In other words, utterly predictable [...]
Singularity
The Prequel to "fEinstein's Assertion" In last month's Chancellor's Corner we spoke of the duality of the universe, otherwise known as The Law of Two. Likewise, this week's memo could easily be titled, The Law of One. This Law of Singularity was powerfully communicated in the movie City Slickers when Curly, the character played by Jack [...]
fEinstein’s Assertion
A Bold Attempt to Crawl Out to the Fruit on the Skinny Part of the Branch "David Sklansky and Mason Malmuth are a pair of authors whose poker books revolutionized the game. They are, far and away, the best theorists and writers about poker ever. Yet reading Sklansky and Malmuth will not make you a winning poker player in tougher games. [...]
So What’s the Next Move?
When a businessperson asks, "Here's where I am right now; so what's the next step?" they expect me to be able to answer them. But I've never been able to do it. Questions about "the next step" invariably make me ask, "Where are you trying to go?" Why do so few people realize that the correct "next step" depends entirely on their choice of [...]
Might Isaac Newton Have Been Wrong?
You've long been told, "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction." But it isn't true. When a person expresses love, where is the necessary "equal and opposite reaction" then? Newton's oft-quoted third law of motion is usually true in physics, but it rarely is in business. Businesspeople who use the principles of Newtonian [...]
Have You Been Kicking the Box?
There's really no such thing as "thinking outside the box." But we can select a different box to think in. Your box is your business model, your world-view, your paradigm. It is the framework of the metaphor that you use to make sense of the world around you. A situation is uncertain when you cannot identify an appropriate paradigm or [...]
