Reading in Fundamental

Over the past couple of months i’ve read the following books:

• Truth, Lies and Advertising : The Art of Account Planning (Jon Steel)
• Negotiation: Readings, Exercises, and Cases (Lewicki, Saunders, Minton and Barry)
• Career Warfare: 10 Rules for Building a Successful Personal Brand and Fighting to Keep It (David D’Alessandro)
• Path of Destruction: A Novel of the Old Republic (Star Wars: Darth Bane) (Drew Karpyshyn)
• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists (Neil Strauss)
• The Devil’s Banker (Christopher Reich)
• Who Moved My Cheese? An Amazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life (Johnson and Blanchard)

What’s interesting is that each of these books touch on some aspect of presenting one’s self to the public.

• The Game is about developing your personal brand to attract attention
• Truth and Lies is about reading other people’s brands because often what people say is not what they mean
• The Devil’s Banker is about concealing your personal brand to mask your underlying motive
• Who Moved My Cheese is about reinventing your personal brand and adapting to your surroundings
• Path of Destruction is about the process / discovery of understanding your brand and and creating niche for yourself
• Negotiations is about exercising your brand in various ways

As someone in the business of branding, the process of uncovering insights, developing a proposition and then presenting a brand to the world is not much different. At some point in time each of these books have given me a new perspective on launching a new brand or rethinking about how to present on old one.

Growing Up Online

WHO: PBS Frontline documentary series

WHAT: PBS attempts to answer that question, “What does it mean to be part of the1st generation coming of age steeped in a virtual world seemingly outside parental control?”

IMPACT: An 8th grader commits suicide after being bullied online.  An anorexic girl finds tips online how to starve herself and a boy admits he cannot recall ever reading a book

IMPORTANCE: As marketers we need to understand how these children access, use and transfer information. It is likely that the current social issues that they face today will very likely shape the types of brands that will influence their lives tomorrow

The show airs tonight at 9pm on PBS. Check your local listings.