Diego Rodriguez over at metacool has a nice post about his observations of Toyota Prius drivers. The key message is that there is certain behaviour of your customers regarding your product that you can’t control. But exactly this behaviour can have a serious impact on your brand and the related image.

These are chapters in building your brand (and spreading your idea) that can not be written ahead, but in a follow-up post, he comes up with a solution: rewarding brand-building behaviour.

In order to ensure that your customer are using your product in the right way or that the correct brand message gets delivered all you have to do is come up with incentives for rewarding brand-building behaviour. Diego comes up with a few examples for the Prius case and this exercise can be done for any product, service or brand.

Now the question is, how we can create ideas for rewarding brand-building behaviour? Let’s try it with these steps:

1. Identify “good” and “bad” brand-building behaviour situations
2. Identify situations, that would increase the status of your customers
3. Now mix them up and reward “good” brand-building behaviour and provide an incentive for not pursuing “bad”

The result would be a guideline (of course you don’t call it like that ), how to use the product or service and how to “life” the brand. The result is an “army of brand ambassadors” - which would open up countless new opportunities.

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Seth Godin points out correctly how the requirements in companies are changing (Who should you hire?). When moving from manual-based work style (following certain pre-defined steps to reach a goal) to project-based work style (defining a goal and working towards it with only partly defined steps) a different type of skills is needed.

It a project-based work style it is necessary to be able to visualize the outcome and the possible way to get there. Nevertheless it is even more important to be able to know the necessary skills that help you get there - the skills to get things done).

This also reminds me of my economics professor that I met while studying in Asia. He always strenghtened the importance for students to be able to ask the right questions and be able to visualize future states and not focus too much on beeing the fastest in performing a repetitive task.

So this means we should think big, act small and always keep in mind to get things done.

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We have all been in situations when we are preparing for a presentation and we already know that it’s gonna be a tough one. There might be times when you are not fully prepared, when the audience is demanding or when you simply don’t have a good day.

Most of the times (at least that’s my experience) the presentations still run very smooth and afterwards you probably think “wow, why have I been worrying so much about it”.

One great example of this is the a presentation of Apple’s Steve Jobs from 1997 announcing they Microsoft bought a big share in Apple stock and that the both companies will be working together more closely in the future.

Just imagine beeing Steve Jobs, lying in bed the night before and already knowing that the audience will not be cheering with this announcement. And if that’s not enough imagine Bill Gates the night before already thinking about the reaction of the audience when he appears on the main screen talking to a fanatic Apple crowd. I think I would not be able to sleep the night before…

But after the initial boo of this hostile crowd and after hearing the crowd laughing when Bill Gates appears on the screen, Steve Jobs manages to get them back in the boat and convices them, that this is the right move.

And after his presentation, what does he get? Standing ovations and he was probably thinking: “Wow, that was actually better than I expected”.

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There has been some buzz on the internet recently about some pretty funny Apple advertisements comparing a PC vs. a Mac. In case you haven’t seen it, click on the movie below for an example or find all movies on Apple’s website.

Bill Gates doesn’t like at all. Actually his response to these ads could come straight from the guy in the movie. Here is what he said:

msnbc.com: How about the implication that you need surgery to upgrade?
Bill Gates: Well, certainly we’ve done a better job letting you upgrade on the hardware than our competitors have done. You can choose to buy a new machine, or you can choose to do an upgrade. And I don’t know why [Apple is] acting like it’s superior. I don’t even get it. What are they trying to say? Does honesty matter in these things, or if you’re really cool, that means you get to be a lying person whenever you feel like it? There’s not even the slightest shred of truth to it.You see, that’s what you call advertising. It’s not about facts, it’s about emotions. And arguing that there is “not even the slightest shred of truth to it” completely misses the point. It’s about role-models in this ad, and not about facts. Some people at Microsoft *kind of* understood what the idea with role models is. But more about this later….

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Twitter is the latest hype in the world of Web 2.0 and even though some people are highly sceptical about it (even the MIT advertising lab) this service is highly interesting - because it brings blogging to your mobile phone and creates at the same time the chance for an extension of the mobile phone business model.

Twitter is a “A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!”. Sounds complicated - but it’s actually pretty straightforward.

Here is how it works:

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