I’m probably not the most typical CEO. One of my business partners got truly angry at me the other week: “You’re a goddamn CEO and you can’t create a fucking chart from excel…”
Thank god I’ve got you Jani…and all of the others in our team to compensate and compliment my weaknesses.
(Obviously not just for the mad excel skills…) 😉
Business for me is creativity. It’s not “art” per say, but for me it’s the closest thing to art there is…
Art is personal. Art has a meaning. Business is personal for me. Business is meaningful to me.
Meaningful things create the emotions life is all about!
I had the privilege of presenting my principles in marketing, sales and life – “emotions & meaning” at Print&Media’s Sales morning 8.5.2019.
Here are my short notes from the presentation, as going through the whole presentation would probably take 7-10 pages of writing. I’ll skip the details and examples, and instead concentrate on facts and my key thoughts:
95% of purchasing decisions are made subconscious. (Gerald Zaltman, Harvard University)
Up to 90 % of the purchasing decisions are made with emotion.
You still need facts, but only to support the decision you’ve already made on the emotional level. The funny thing is; it doesn’t matter if some facts don’t support your decision, as long as you find one or two that will…
So no surprise here – too often we forget the studies & facts that talk about emotion 😉 and tend to concentrate on our product, our sales channels or our sales processes.
So before any of those, there should always come the underlying meaning for your existence:
- The challenges & the needs in the markets
- The meaning to yourself.
Only after those have been figured out, you can start thinking of marketing & sales. Which in my world, go hand in hand.
And when it comes to marketing:
In 1950s an ordinary person was faced with 3 000 brand impressions in a lifetime.
Today the number is well over 10 000 brand impressions – in a day!
Meaning: You truly have to be extraordinary to stand out from the crowd – to stand out from the good companies.
And if you want to affect a human being, you’ll achieve the best result if you can affect all the senses – sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch.
More importantly, you have to be real, authentic in your communication. Don’t fake it. You need to be and feel it yourself first. It has to be truly real and meaningful to yourself first, only then can it be meaningful to others.
Figuring that out for my own part has been a long road to travel, with deep potholes in the way every now and then. But I wouldn’t change it, because it’s also been a rewarding road to travel.
I stand for real emotions, and I believe only doing something meaningful can create real emotions!
This is business! This is personal to me!
