MODERN ENTREPRENEUR
Branding - Panacea of
Greatness. Are you a Jeep or
a Ferrari?
By Dr. Gene Landrum
Personal packaging – we are not
all equal.
Image pervades all we do and
become.
Public relations pays!
Some historical examples of
utilizing publicity to open doors and
make sales.
“A brand for a company is like a
reputation for a person. You earn
reputation by trying to do hard things
well” - Jeff Bezos, Amazon founder.
In selling products – or yourself
16 ModernBusiness
June 2016
- image is everything. Why? It is
a fact that perception is reality to
most people. This is confirmed by
the research that shows the average
person’s thoughts and actions are
95% unconscious and thus we
personalize information. It has been
found that only 20 percent of people
are introspective – those capable of
looking within to find the cause of
their thoughts and reasoning. This
underlies the issues around use
of Focus Groups to decide on the
viability of products. Not good! Many
sophisticated firms still use focus
groups despite the studies that show
them to be problematical at best.
New Coke was a multi-million dollar
fiasco precisely because of taste
tests that caused Coke executives to
follow the lead in decision making.
Harvard’s Zaltman studied the Coke
debacle and wrote:
“People can’t tell you what they think
because they just don’t know. Their
deepest thoughts, the ones that
account for their behavior in the
marketplace, are unconscious”
In the words of Stanford’s medical
researcher Robert Ornstein, “We
cannot consciously control our
actions and still function at peak.”