What Can I Do For You?

Introduction

I’ve been asked by several potential project partners to describe precisely what I can do for them. So here is my response, based on a successful track record that includes a number of award-winning and innovative projects, some of which are depicted in this website’s Portfolio pages.

How I Can Help You

• I’ll thoroughly investigate corporations, brands, products and talent assets and stories, and customers beliefs and feelings about them – then formulate creative concepts based on my discoveries about what makes them unique, and alluring. The marketing greats I’ve learned the most from have seen themselves as detectives, as investigators, as reporters, who uncover the facts and then dare to reveal them in altogether new ways.

• I’ll lead creative teams, from the centre and not from on high, in executing those concepts with brilliance – with all of us growing together in knowledge, confidence and experience in the process. Creativity and communication are, at their best, group exercises and not solo ones, mutual and not competitive.

• We’ll create innovations in communications methods – and apply them in collaboration with others inside and outside your organisation, talent-scouting as needed, being futurists who help shape the future.

• We’ll be successful whatever size the budgets are – great ideas work whether we have a little or a lot of money to work with – it’s the brainpower that we apply and not the size of the pocketbook. That’s a lesson I learned as a student in WA, and from working in advertising in the UK, where the biggest ideas often come from the smallest of budgets.

• We’ll work across all media and communications channels – audible, visual, verbal, experiential, multisensory, textual, analog and digital – to use all means possible in expressing the essence of organisations, to market brands, to communicate effectively with customers, and to sell products brilliantly.

• I’ll apply whatever other skills I have – writing, editing, training, inspiring, as well as investigating and conceptualising – in support of this effort, as needed, though I know that aiding all my colleagues in being themselves, only more so, and thus becoming the best they can be, is the path with the greatest rewards.

Only More So

“Please, just be yourself, only more so.“

That’s a phrase I often use, in a number of circumstances…

• When talent scouting – if someone tries persuading me to choose them instead of another. “I can do what they do, so hire me too!” Sorry, but I can hire the original if I want to, because being themselves is what made them that way and my client wants to be seen as the real thing too. So, for you to be real, to truly be yourself, know yourself and then be yourself with gusto.

• When searching for anything to buy and to experience – because what I crave is authenticity – not knock-offs, and real experiences – not stand-ins. Life is too short, and funds too precious, to throw time and money away on fakes.

• When looking for project partners and employers - because I want to work with people who share my values, and who already know who they are, or at least know they need to know that and then live it.

The Case Against Me Too

• Me-Too is a poor way of standing out from the crowd and selling your own uniqueness. The world is full of Me-Toos, if you want them, but working with Me-Toos only makes you look like a Me-Too, too.

• Being a Me-Too does little to ensure your financial viability. In a world of economic stress, Me-Toos are the first to go. They’re interchangeable, and loyalty is low. That’s far less likely with those who’ve established their uniqueness early on, cultivating it and communicating it with elan. My advice to be yourself, but in an intensified way, is step one in being unique and creating loyalties that will sustain you through the hard times.