Developing marketing messages – prevent this common pitfall…

DEVELOPING MARKETING MESSAGES

Recently, after a discussion with some fellow business owners, I have been thinking about how businesses develop their branding and messaging – specifically the effectiveness of branding workshops.

It seems that many branding and business development exercises run for small businesses include workshops at which groups of business owners share information about their businesses, the services or products they offer and the future development they hope for. The group members then analyse and critique each other’s current materials and offer constructive comments for improvement.

On the surface, this seems to be a positive exercise, and participants often leave with new ideas and an action plan to put those ideas into practice. However, on looking more into the outcomes that people come away with, I now have some concerns about the final effectiveness. My reason for this is that, in my experience (as I’ve mentioned in previous blogs) business owners have a tendency for certain thinking styles over others. For example, I see a high level of Towards motivation in the self-employed, along with high scores for Internal Locus of Control.

It doesn’t surprise me therefore, that many of the suggestions that come out of these workshops is about making the branding and messages more focussed on the outcome that services provide (Towards), rather than on the problem they solve. Similarly, the wording suggestions are often amended in such a way as to emphasise the control the client will have (Internal Locus of Control). Of course, if your clients mainly comprise other business owners and similar people, that’s great. However, what if your clients are often people who have a high External Locus of Control, or have a predominantly Away From thinking pattern in the context of your product? Your communications could miss them completely.

It has been my personal experience that many types of business workshops, including (but not only) those on marketing, often involve working with like-minded individuals. I now wonder if they carry the risk of resulting in ineffective strategies for those businesses for which the client group are quite a different group of people than those attending the workshops.

Perhaps this is another area in which we can utilise MindSonar profiles – encouraging business owners to use focus groups of actual clients to understand more about what they want in order to decide to develop their messaging, products and services. Or maybe MindSonar could be used within the current groups to highlight similarities and then lead to consideration of whether, from what they tell you, your client group are similar or very different?

It’s certainly something to be aware of whenever we are creating and further developing our own businesses. I’d love to hear your experiences of this or similar situations, so please leave comments in the box below.

 

 

The Manager who didn’t want to Live in the Now

By Jantina Wijtsma

I was coaching Bert, a manager who worked for a non-profit organization. Bert had a whole list of questions for me:

  • “How can I manage my team to be ready for the future?”
  • “How can I renew the values in the team asap?”
  • “How can I move us forward fast?”
  • “How can I quickly achieve the best results for the company with the people I manage?”
  • “How can I earn money for us in the future?”Continue reading

The knowledge that many entrepreneurs lack

You feel excited that your business plan is ready! Your niche, product or service is defined, you are prepared for your customers, your social networks are already activated, your website is ready and the desire to start your business is irresistible!

But do you know what motivates you as an entrepreneur? How these motivators may influence your decision making? Do you have self-knowledge? This is the part which many entrepreneurs don’t pay attention to when creating their business.

Imagine being able to understand how your motivators influence your decision making and your work style. Imagine being able to detect easily details you usually miss! These are just some advantages of having self-knowledge about yourself as an entrepreneur.

In my beginnings as an entrepreneur, I didn’t have the opportunity to develop this knowledge about myself and there were many learning experiences and economic losses. Back in 2008, I formed my first company; a recruitment and consulting agency and in 2013 my second company specialized in offering Coaching, Training and Brand Development. Neither of these two businesses generated the money I expected. They had good exposure; good opportunities always came, but, even so, the return on investment was very low.

One day, I learned the value of knowing myself as an entrepreneur and, from that day forward, I have put that knowledge into practice. How did I achieve it? Through the MindSonar assessment tool. This assessment integrates the theory of motivations of Dr. Graves where 7 motivators are evaluated: Security, Power, Order, Competition, Ideals, Learning and Completeness. Each of these motivators has a very important value when starting a business; from how we are as entrepreneurs to how we market our product and develop our brand.

My MindSonar results were a portrait of me as an entrepreneur. I could see the reason my company was not meeting its goals reflected in the analysis. What did I learn? In 2014, I learned that I was an entrepreneur who sought to maintain a good reputation (Power), that disciplined work (Order) and helping others (Ideals) were important to me.

It was difficult for me to face something within my analysis, and this was a score of zero for Competition. It turned out that I was not motivated to seek success by generating profit. This was hard for me since, due to my high motivation regarding Ideals, I gave good quality service, but at low prices or for free. So I could understand that my Achilles heel, at that time, was to put a value on my services and charge accordingly.

All entrepreneurs have something in common, we develop a business that we are passionate about and/or seek to succeed. But Napoleon Hill said it well, “anything that the mind can conceive and imagine can be achieved.” So, what if you invest in knowing yourself and conceive and achieve your goals with greater certainty?

Motivation: ‘What’ or ‘How’ or both?

MOTIVATION: ‘WHAT’ OR ‘HOW’ OR BOTH?

Content oriented theories and process oriented theories of motivation
MindSonar is a process oriented instrument. Many authors have distinguished between content oriented theories and process oriented theories of motivation (Graham and Weiner, 1996). 

Content theories
A content theory is a system of constructs that are linked logically together, explaining why people behave as they do in which conditions. They want to predict what happens if the conditions change (McAuley et al., 2007). Content theories of motivation concern themselves with what people want.

An example of a content theory is Maslow’s ‘Hierarchy of needs’ theory (Maslow 1943). Maslow defines 5 sets of goals (basic needs), arranged in a hierarchy. Each of these goals has a specific content: physiological needs, safety needs, belongingness and love needs, esteem needs and self-actualisation.

Process theories
Process theories, on the other hand, attempt to provide a generalised explanation of processes and the behaviors these processes lead to, describing the major conditions necessary for explaining the process. They want to describe how people think, what the processes are in their minds that induce their behaviour (Kispál-Vuitai, 2016). They contain constructs (Binning, 2016) that are not necessarily linked together in a coherent theory, but explain behaviour and allow for prediction of future behaviour. Proces theories of motivation concern themselves with how people arrive at wanting something.

An example of a process theory is Bandura’s ‘Social learning theory’: the individual learns behaviours through observation, repeats behaviour if it is rewarded and ceases it when it is not rewarded (Bandura 1977). Bandura does not define the content of either the behaviour or the rewards.

These two types of theory spring from different traditions in psychology. Process theories stem from experimental studies as well as from qualitative experiential findings, systematically modeled by practitioners. The latter is the case with the meta programs and cognitive criteria measured by MindSonar. These constructs were formalised based on personal change work (Cameron et al, 1985). Content theories, on the other hand, have grown mostly out of personality studies and qualitative clinical-differential studies.

Eclectic
We propose an eclectic approach in which the findings in one type of theory are used to enrich understanding and exploration of the other type. For example, Bateman and Crant (1999) identify a general behavioural factor they call ‘proactive’, defining it by its specific behavioural elements as: ‘to intentionally and directly change things in an intended direction’. This content-oriented approach can be meaningfully complemented by a process-oriented one, explaining the critical cognitive meta programs, such as ‘proactive’, ‘towards’, ‘options’ and ‘change’, the are underlying this Bateman and Crant’s ‘proactive’ behaviour.

Atoms and molecules
We can take concepts from different psychological theories, compare them with the related meta programs and demonstrate how they can be clarified with their possible underlying process (meta program) elements. We like to use molecules and atoms as a metaphor. If we look, for instance, at the chemical structure of caffeine, we see that is is made up of four atoms (H3C, O, N and CH3) linked together in a certain configuration. Likewise, many constructs from content oriented theories can be described as configurations of meta programs.

Do You Follow a Set Path?

Are you driven to create new, unique ways of doing things? Or, do you prefer to follow an already established procedure? The Thinking Style distinction that we will be exploring this week will have a dramatic impact on how effective you are at motivating someone or yourself toward a goal. Continue reading

Jobcraft Your Job with MindSonar

At the moment there is a lot of attention for job crafting. In the survey ‘Purpose and meaning in the workplace’ (by Dik, Byrne, Steger 2013) jobcrafting is defined as ‘the process of employees redefining and re-imagining their jobs designs in meaningful ways.’

That sounds interesting, doesn’t it? Nowadays a lot employees decide to keepworking for their current company. Finding a new job is often hard and might feel as taking risks in terms of the loss of financial security. So, perhaps you’d better decide to stay for a while and make your own adaptations to the job you already have.

What do you need for that, Thinking Style-wise?

First, you need the belief that you can have influence on the way your job is being done. So, if you don’t have this belief yet or you lost it somewhere, find a career coach who can help you to put on internal reference and self control. You have more impact on your work environment and your employer than you think, really!

Then, analyze what element of job crafting you are going to work on. According to the theories, there are 3 ways to do this:

  • Changing tasks,
  • Changing relationships and
  • Changing perceptions.

So, a lot of options for the people who like to have several possibilities! When you prefer the metaprogram procedures, you can choose either one of the opportunities and make your own strategy.

Changing tasks

Look at the things you actually do in your day. Just put on use and write down everything you do. After that, analyse what the essence is of all those tasks, and how they fit in the structure  of the company. For example: which tasks are for clients, for collegues, for your own talentmanagement?

Put on your options glasses and look for tasks you can add. Perhaps put on the metaprogram external reference and ask collegues to think it over with you.

You can also emphasize tasks. What is your core business? And how can you make this more visible and get more attention for it? How does it feel when your customers are going to ask for you because you are the expert in it? Having the latest information about the product, knowing specific details, and so on?

Changing relationships

When you use people, external reference, and kinestetic senses you might become astonished what you can reach. What is your goal in relationship to your customers, colleagues, managers? And what would you like to avoid? Do you want to be known as friendly and helpful, of more result driven and focused on doing business? Do you like working alone, or in a team, or in proximity, depending on the task?

You might as well consider building new relationships. Go out networking, put on your external reference and activities and give it a go! Use LinkedIn to register your new contacts and to keep in touch with them on line.

Or perhaps it is possible to reframe a certain relationship and look at the roles you have. In a meeting you can ask to be the chairman, so to be able to develop internal reference and towards. As well as procedures and perhaps past, present ànd future, depending on the subjects of the meeting.

Changing perceptions

In NLP this is a huge one. Because you can always change the way you look at your job, how you feel about it, and what you are saying to yourself on your way home. Remember the cleaning man of the space shuttle who said to himself while cleaning the environment at NASA: “I’m helping to get that man on the moon!” Wow, this has lots to do with your past, present and future ideas of how you want to do your job. What is the pattern you work in? Where are you standing nowadays in the team, and where do you want to be in the next year? Put on change as a Thinking Style, structure to look for the patterns and decide (selfcontrol) to expand the way you look at your job. What other options are possible? Are there general things you overlook? Are their details to discover you never thought about?

Enough ideas to get you craft your job! As the survey mentioned before says: ‘In a world where meaningfulness may be in short supply, job crafting can be an important process through which employees cultivate meaningfulness and, in so doing, create valuable outcomes for themselves and their organizations.’

Good luck!