I know that I jump around a lot on this newsletter. In my psychedelic mind, of course, it all interconnects seamlessly and makes perfect sense. But I can see how it seems like I’m all over the place to readers.
But there’s a central theme: be different or be forgotten
Now that isn’t a new idea, a unique idea, or even useful advice, at least not by itself. It’s too much at the surface, even if I qualify it as: be meaningfully different. You could say it’s reductionist, too.
But I don’t really care about any of that.
I care about uniting everything under a theme, to provide context and focus. And I care that pretty much anybody can understand it, even a young child or someone who knows nothing at all about my business.
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The problem is how to be meaningfully different or be forgotten? How to not drown in the ocean of the infinite alternatives to you?
This is an especially keen problem for my core client base – tech entrepreneurs who leverage some kind of emerging technology or innovation to create products and services. Not only is their solution complex but they’re often flirting with some new category of business that they find difficult to explain.
The common result is a brand identity that is either too complex, too vague, too unoriginal, or too boring. Or more often some blend of those traits. Most indie consultants and agencies similarly lack clarity.
In response to problems like that, I write about specific ways to “be different or be forgotten”:
- Positioning your business as distinct from alternatives in the minds of people who matter to it
- Finding Messaging that makes it crystal clear what your value is and isn’t
- Thinking about what you offer as a brand and polishing and repolishing brand identity
- Productizing and pricing your solutions so they become a structured system for creating value and profit
- Publishing your perspective to gain visibility and trust… and better perspective
- Selling through thoughtful, researched, and curiosity-driven conversation, be it real-time or asynchronous
- Uniting your business insights and solutions with your personal life experience and philosophical/spiritual beliefs
- Redefining the concepts that matter to your business and creating a unique business vocabulary
Lots of stuff, I know! But each of these “professional competencies” helps remember you to your audience, your prospects, your partners, future employees, and people who connect you to others. So we explore them here.
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But this isn’t just a “how it works” article for the newsletter. There’s also a really important messaging question I now want to ask you: what’s your central theme?
Remember, it doesn’t have to be an original idea or useful advice. It just has to connect all that you do and talk about. And make sense to any stranger, even a child.
If you answer this question will, you may get some effective messaging out of it.
Have a great week ahead (:
Rowan