A recipe with 8 essential ingredients. 

The concept of the  Elevator Pitch comes from Hollywood, where aspiring scriptwriters would jump into the elevator with a producer and pitch their new script idea in the time it took for the elevator to reach the penthouse suite. If you think that’s a tough task, MGM boss Louis B. Mayer used to ask scriptwriters to write their synopsis on the back of his business cards. By comparison, the 30-45 seconds you have in an elevator seem luxurious.  Read more

The good news is your competitors are far from perfect. 

Despite the many new ways to deliver your message, words are still the main currency of our communications. Mastering words is more crucial now because everybody is a writer and publisher: everyone has a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter page and everyone writes emails.  Read more

Small glitches with grammar that cause big problems. 

Whatever you write or speak about and whoever your audience, the fastest ways to lose credibility is to make silly grammatical errors. Sure, you might say that content is far more important than a minor grammar slip, but you'd be wrong: little slips can turn into almighty clangers.  Read more

And 8 rules for making them work. 

Strong branding can make your company stand out in a crowded market from competitors. As in real estate, position is everything in marketing. Your tagline is part of your brand and, without one, your audience will be left in the dark. Taglines should work to define your brand, in the same way that clothes define a women: they reveal more about her character.To be effective, taglines must follow a few simple rules:  Read more

The bigger they are, the bigger their mistakes. 

We all see brand names or logos that make us shake our heads and ask: what were they thinking? Or smoking? Some make us cringe: Nissan Tiida and BenQ Joybook. Some make us laugh: Wii. Some make us frown and ask: they spent how many million on a that new logo and brand? A case in question was the  London 2012 Olympic logo. It looked like smashed pottery and the supporting mascots Wenlock and Mandeville were attracted deserved ridicule.  Read more

The most under-rated resource. 

Nothing is more convincing than a customer who’s happy to tell the world that your product solved a major problem in his business. You might say that case studies are a pain to create – especially with the often tedious, multi-layered, time consuming approval process – but we’d say the pain is more than worth the gain. Case studies (or success stories if you like) have multiple uses throughout the sales cycle and elsewhere:  Read more

Rise and plummet. 

The ABC ran a documentary this week that charted the rise and fall of Australian wine exports to the UK. ‘Chateau Chunder‘ was made by local production company Electric Pictures, in co-production with Brook Lapping, for the ABC and BBC. The title comes from the early days, when Aussie wine in the UK was called Chateau Chunder from Down Under.  Read more

A philosophy lesson to change your life. 

A professor stood before his philosophy class, with some strange items in front of him on the desk. When the class began, he picked up a very large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf balls. He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it was.  Read more

They don't 'read' anymore. 

The digital world's information glut have caused people to stop reading. There just isn’t time, so visitors to your website or blog will skip-read or just check the headlines. They'll look for things that stand out and grab attention. They want to ‘cut to the chase’ and make snap decisions about what to read, keep, share or delete.  Read more

‘God save us from vague generalizations.’ So said Anton Chekhov. 

Great writers like him know the importance of using words that exactly convey their message. I hadn’t seen the word ‘specificity’ outside of bio-chemistry until I read Sol Stein’s Stein on Writing, the best bible for real writers - bar none. Particularity is another key element in Stein’s book, but that will wait for another post.  Read more