Spark Joy. Be Less Busy. Belong Anywhere. Do any of these phrases resonate with you? Invoke a feeling or inspire action? Do any specific brands to mind? Language is powerful in brand storytelling. The most successful brands don’t use words as a way to package their end product. Instead, they use their consumer’s transformation story as what their striving to achieve. They use...

You can skip this ad in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1… Skip Ad. The first chance we get to hit that “skip” button we do. Advertising has always been something we don’t want but rather something that gets in the way of what we want. But, while nine out of ten people who can skip an ad do, new studies show that pre-roll ads are among the most effective forms of digital marketing. Geico’s Skip...

Keep Customers by Keeping it Simple. A few years back I attended a start-up funding competition as an exhibitor with my company TheStoryArchitect.com. A young, passionate founder of a tech startup caught sight of my booth, walked over, asked what I did and then exasperatingly went into great detail about his ongoing struggle for attention from his target audience. He was...

I had a meeting with a client who was having quite a difficult time pulling together a simple way of saying all of the things she does.  This is a person who consults with other businesses and works with them on a wide range of people issues and there isn’t one specific problem that she deals with. They all relate to the concept of “culture” and “leadership”.   In short, she works...

There’s a taxi company in my town that I refer to as Rabid Taxi.  They earned that name after one really bad experience with one of their drivers.  I had a work trip to present our virtualization strategy to customers in Ottawa and I was taking the train.  I called for a cab, and when the driver picked me up, he offered me a flat rate to the station and we agreed on $25. I told him...

With the Pan Am Games just beginning Toronto should be on edge with excitement. Instead what is making the news is a man who was charged for driving with two mannequins in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane and when Twitter exploded with news of a terrorist attack on the CN Tower that turned out to be a surprise fireworks demonstration. So how did Ontario stray so far from the...

Hint – it’s not to sell $17,000 watches. The reviews are in and the Apple Watch is predictably getting a wide range of reviews typical of Apple products from both fan boys and haters alike. But most curious is the Apple Watch Edition. A number of reviews I’ve read have panned the watch as too expensive for a device that will be obsolete in a year(HBR gives it a D for pricing...