Dear Reader, My friend Carrie Flynn of Virtual Simplicity has a phrase I’ve loved since the first time I heard her use it: Random acts of marketing. It’s how she describes all those disconnected marketing things businesses do without a larger strategy tying them together. And it’s perfect. Four words. Immediately understandable. Entirely Carrie. That’s the kind of language I listen for when I’m talking with someone about their business. Carrie wasn’t trying to come up with a clever tagline...

Dear Reader, Ask someone to describe their brand voice, and there’s a pretty good chance you’ll hear some combination of: Warm. Professional. Approachable. Well, sure. You’re surely not going to say you want to sound cold, unapproachable, and meaner than bull briar. Those words tell me how you want people to experience you. They don’t tell me what it sounds like to be in a room with you. That’s what I’m listening for. The phrase you keep coming back to. The story you tell when you’re trying...

Hi Reader, One of the challenges of running a business for a long time is that you stop noticing things. The language you use every day feels ordinary because you've been saying it for years. The problems you solve seem obvious because you've solved them hundreds of times. The questions clients ask over and over again begin to feel so familiar that it's hard to imagine someone not understanding the answer. I've come to think of that as living inside the bottle. You can't read the label from...