Each day on my way to work, I walk by the big glassy windows of Darshana Yoga.  What’s unusual about Darshana is that the yogis and yoginis do their practice in an airy room just behind these windows.

Most yoga studios that I know of are kind of like massage parlors — there’s the shingle out front, but the activities within happen behind closed doors.  I can understand this need for privacy; were I doing a downward-facing dog pose, I wouldn’t want everyone on the street ogling my rump. 

But by being mindful of theirr appearance to the street, Darshana turns these windows into a wonderful marketing opportunity.  Just as the white earbuds on an iPod signal to the world that you’re a Jobsian rip-mix-burner, Darshana’s window makes private yoga consumption a public act.  When I see other Silicon Valley technogeeks doing Virabhadrasana behind those panes, I start to believe that I could be a yogi, too. 

The icing on the cake is the fact that glass is translucent to kindness.  Walk by Darshana, and if you catch the eye of owner Catherine De Los Santos, she’ll give you a nice, warm smile.

The folks at MBDC are marketing a baby blanket that’s fully compliant with their cradle-to-cradle environmental design guidelines.  Designed for the cradle, this blanket’s value proposition also has everything to do with cradle-to-cradle design thinking:

… using only the highest quality and healthiest available materials and chemicals… It’s safe enough to eat (if you need the roughage) and can be safely composted after use, to build healthy soil.

And though MBDC is not doing a good job of marketing it (no reach, zero awareness!), the blanket itself is rather compelling from a marketing point of view.  Yes, the graphic design they chose is hard ugly, but there’s some beauty underneath, to wit:

First, the value proposition is awesome.  Think about it: a blanket that’s safe enough to eat, safe enough to plant as fertilizer in case…. er, em… in case it ever becomes so impregnated with fertilizer of the baby kind as to become unwashable.  Which makes it something you’d feel very comfortable putting next to your new baby’s skin.  No weird, endocrine-disrupting chemicals.  No worries at all.

Second, this blanket demonstrates the value of storytelling as a way to market environmentally sound products, be they "sustainable" or "cradle-to-cradle" or whatever.  Why?  It isn’t making the mistake of trying to change the worldview of a parent who drives a Suburban.  Instead, it tells a story of total ecological integrity perfectly tailored to an audience of Prius-driving parents worried about a world where you can’t eat the fish, can’t play in the grass, and can’t wear chemically-grown cotton.  With that ugly MBDC logo woven into the blanket, it’s a rolling advertisement for cradle-to-cradle thinking, and it will trigger storytelling wherever it goes.  It’s a story these parents are ready to hear and transmit, and that’s all that matters.

That’s great marketing.

"If someone preaches profit-maximizing as a company’s highest goal, then that’s simply wrong. Hell, it’s criminal."
— Dietrich Mateschitz

Last month Scoble said "You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."

I propose a stronger wording: "You should be fired if you conceive of your marketing site as being anything other than an RSS link to and from your audience." 

Why go through all the bother of creating a slick online "brochure" when everyone else can create the same thing by spending cubic dollars?  Flash tours, splashy graphics — they’re all so commonplace, so boring.  And how many times do I visit a non-transactional marketing site?  Once, maybe twice?

Instead, create a site around what’s unique: you and your offering.  Speak with a real voice.  And listen and learn.  Use RSS, and not a glossy brochure, to strike up a relationship with a potential or current customer. 

Here’s a great example.

Most business magazines would have you believe that a big, nasty monster called "commodification" really does live under the bed.  Or perhaps in the closet. This view of world believes that dwindling margins, shrinking revenues, outsourcing to China, and the great sucking sound of WalMart are all inevitable parts of doing business circa 2005.  The monster is going to get you…

Hogwash.  Creating cool stuff that matters is the best way to avoid the commodification trap, and cultivating the ability to create that cool stuff in a cool way makes things even sweeter.  To illustrate this point, I’d like to point you to economist Virginia Postrel’s recent NYT article on American Leather, a furniture manufacturer using lean manufacturing, enlightened employment practices, and a modular design philosophy to create (and claim) real value in the marketplace.  In an industry rife with cost and price pressures, American Leather’s sales are growing 17% per year year.  And their products are pretty nifty.

Not that it’s been an easy ride for the firm.  Its co-founder Bob Duncan came from an engineering background, which enabled him to implement the innovative manufacturing culture that defines American Leather, but that training didn’t prepare him for what it really took to get something to market.  Says Duncan:

At the end of the day, you have to sell the stuff.  You can have the coolest products. You can build it in 20 minutes and
deliver anything you want. But if nobody buys it, it’s irrelevant. As
an engineer, the biggest thing I’ve learned in the whole process is how
hard it is to sell things.

I love what American Leather has done and what they stand for.  Designing your venture to create the products people want in the way they want them is the best way to beat the commodification monster.

Today Robert Scoble said something terribly trenchant about marketing: 

"You should be fired if you do a marketing site without an RSS feed."

He’s right. 

Really Simple Syndication (RSS) isn’t about blogs.  It isn’t about geeking out and being a blogger, either.  Forget blogs.  RSS is about giving your customers the ability to say "Yes, I’d like to continue to hear what you’ve got to say."  You’d have to be a total coward of a marketer not to try using a RSS feed (whether you call it a blog or not) to have a conversation with your customers.  It’ll take a bit of work, and you’re going to have to put some writing and thoughts and feelings out into the public domain and maybe take a risk or two, but that’s life. 

Good marketing takes guts.

As a design thinker, I wouldn’t dream of embarking on a development project without first establishing my point of view (POV).  Establishing and growing a POV is an integral part of my design process.  Think of a POV as your take on why whatever you’re creating merits a place in the universe.  What makes it remarkable? 

As it turns out, establishing a strong POV has everything to do with good storytelling.  For help in illustrating this idea, I direct you to the writing of Scott Rayburn, who is growing a tasty new blog around teaching great public speaking, and to some extent, storytelling.  He insists that to create a good story, you need to understand your Big Idea:

First, wade through all the fact and figures and themes of a subject
and distill everything down to an idea that can be expressed in fewer
than 10 words.

Next, shape your message around those 10 words… When your audience hears your presentation, what is it you want them to remember above all else?

So the concept of the Big Idea is to storytelling what POV is to design: don’t leave home without it.  Now, I believe that to make your designs take hold in the world, you need to be a good storyteller.   So it’s delightful to think that perhaps design thinkers already know the right process for designing — and telling — good stories. 

For a whole host of reasons, I’ve become obsessed with the idea that most of process of bringing cool stuff to life is about telling great stories.  Great stories are a way to communicate a complex value proposition, evoke emotions, relate a new offering back to its brand, or to shape the Reflective elements of a design that create "brand" in the first place.  And storytelling is a wonderful way — perhaps the only way — for innovators to convince key stakeholders, partners, and collaborators of the worth of their quest.

Storytelling holds the potential to take business thinking from the cold, dry left-brain world of 4P’s and 5C’s and 6 sigma to a warm, rich world of ethos and pathos.  It’s about being human. 

Example:  when I was marketing QuickBooks Online, I had a helluva job on my hands:  how do I convince really busy, really technology wary, really penny-wise small business people to adopt a non-sexy accounting software solution that requires the use of a scary new technology platform (the Internet) and a strange business/transaction model (software as service)?  I spent months iterating my way to what, in retrospect, is an obvious solution: tell stories.  And not just any stories, but stories told by users themselves, telling them in a "keep it real" kind of way.  As you can see here, I created stories using raw, basic photos, and didn’t do anything to edit the verbatim words of my customers.  Zilch, nada, nothing.  In turn, these stories are compelling to prospective customers because they ring true, plain and simple.  They’re good stories in a way that a traditional software industry white paper could never be.

This is why I can’t wait to start reading John Winsor’s book Beyond the Brand.  On his blog he provides a nice excerpt which explains the key elements of compelling storytelling:

• Context
• Simplicity
• Interest
• Trust
• Meaning
• Connectedness
• Magic
• Relevance
• Immediacy

See the rest of his blog post here.  I, for one, look forward to using his wisdom to enhance my ability to tell good stories.

Why you should really focus on creating net promoters (not net detractors):

Untied

“Brand management is fake." — Carlos Ghosn