Alina Wheeler, author of this beautifully made and highly interesting book, aspires to

• provide fundamentals and best practices
• delight customers and attract prospects and
• make it easy to build brand equity.

On an average day we are exposed to thousands of advertisments and even more new products. Brand helps us to make wise choices.

First of all this book describes and explains the basics. Makes aware of the numerous functions and affects brands offer.

“Image and perception help drive value;
without an image there is no perception.”

Scott M. Davis, Brand Asset Manager

There is a difference between brand and brand identiy.

“A brand is a person’s gut feeling about a product, service or company.”

Marly Neumeier, The Brand Gap

What is a brand?

“As competition creates infinite choices, companies look for ways to connect emotionally with customers, become irreplaceable, and create lifelong relationships. A strong brand stands out in a densely crowded marketplace. People fall in love with brands, trust them and believe in their superiority. How a brand is perceived affects its success, regardless of whether it’s a start-up, a nonprofit, or a product.”

“The best brands marry intelligence and insight with imagination and craft.”

Brand touchpoints

Each touchpoint is an opportunity to increase awareness and build customer loyalty. There are numerous touchpoints:

• Advertising
• Environments
• Experiences
• Websites
• Newsletters
• Business Forms
• Signage
• Packaging
• Exhibits
• Proposals
• Voicemails
• Web Banners
• Letterheads
• Business Cards
• Billboards
• Vehicles
• Services
• Products
• Employees
• Speeches
• Presentations
• Networking
• Telephone
• Words of Mouth
• Trade Shows
• Direct Mail
• Public Relations
• Blogs
• Social Media
• Sales Promotion

What is brand identy?

Brand identity is an asset relying on design.
“Design plays an essential role in creating and building brands. Design differentiates and embodies the intangibles – emotion, context, and essence – that matter most to consumers.”

Moira Cullen, The Hershey Company

Source:
Wheeler, Alina (2009). Designing Brand Identity. Third edition. John Wiley & Sons. New Jersey.

Studies showed that students in the successful intelligence condition (analyst, operational and practical) outperformed the other students in the performance assessment – even in the multiple choice memory test.
“It allows children to capitalize on their strengths and to correct or compensate for their weaknesses, and it allows children to encode material in a variety of interesting ways”. (Sternberg, p 64)

Improving Abilities

Practical intelligence is also “an important antecendent ” of life success. (Sternberg, p 66)

The level of intelligence causes a social dilemma. Many able persons will be disenfranchised, because the kinds of abilities they have, although important for job performance, are not important for test performance – e.g. the kinds of creative and practical skills.

Sternberg outlines the development of theories of intelligence, summarizing the findings of Galton, Binet, Spearman, Thurston, Guilford, etc.

His approach is to find a synthesis of intelligenc, creativity and wisdom, starting with his theory of Successful Intelligence.

Here is an excerpt taken from the pages 42 – 46.

Definitions

1. Intelligence is defined in terms of the ability to achieve success in life in terms of one’s personal standards, within one’s sociocultural context.
2. One’s ability to achieve success depends on capitalizing on one’s strenths and correcting or compensating for one’s weaknesses.
3. Balancing abilities is achieved in order to adapt to, shape and select environments.
4. Success is attained through a balance of analytical, creative and practical abilities.

Information processing components underlying successful intelligence

The need to define problems and generate strategies to solve these problems exists in any culture.
Sternberg outlines the following components:

Metacomponents
Plan, monitor and evaluate the solution.

Performance components
Comparison of stimuli, justification if a response is adequate – and making the response.

Knowledge acquistion components
Learn how to solve problems, decide which information is relevant in the context of one’s learning

Sternberg’s theory of successful intelligence is referred to as triarchic. It comprises three subtheories:

• A componental subtheory dealing with the components of intelligence
• An experimental subtheory dealing with the importance of coping with relatve novelty and of automation of information processing, and
• A contextual subtheory dealing with processes of adaption, shaping and selection.

According to Sternberg people who score high in conventional intelligence but low in successful intelligence are committing four fallacies in their thinking:

1. stable-trait fallacy: belief that once smart, always smart, neglect life-long learning, lose their edge
2. general ability fallacy: smart in one thing – smart in everthing; high levels of performance in school domains don’t mean they are explerts in any domain
3. life-success fallacy: success in tests – rest is guaranteed. IQ alone does not guarantee success in life
4. moral-equivalence fallacy: smart does not eqate good

Source: Sternberg, Robert, J. (2003).Wisdom, Intelligence, and Creativity Synthesized. Cambridge University Press. US

I am looking forward to reading and studying the following pages on the application of successful intelligence theory to practical teaching as well as on creativity and the relations among intelligence, creativity and wisdom.

There were lots of faults I accused myself

weight
the structure of my body
face
hands
feet
eating habits
language knowledge
time management
self esteem
spending habits
saving
behaviour
relationships
communication
job
sports
dancing
singing
cooking
house keeping
loving
fashion
style etc.

I read all ‘How to do anything better’- guides that came into my way.
“When can I stop proving myself to everyone?” is the question I have to ask myself.
Why don’t embrace my imperfections, cultivate authenticity, and look the world in the eye and say ‘I am enough’?
That question makes me reflect and change my opinion about myself. “I am enough”.

PS.: That does not mean I’m not trying to give commitment and love to everything I do.

Source:
Brown, Brené (2010). The gifts of imperfection. Hazelden. Minnesota

B: Technically competent, with a lapse here and there. The thesis is clear, properly limited, and reasonable, and the prose is generally effective without rising to sustained distinction.

C: A competent piece of work but not yet good. C papers are more or less adequately organized along obvious lines, and the thesis tends to be oversimple or imprudent without being wildly implausible.
Monotony of sentence structure is apparent, and errors are sprinkled throughout. In some C papers, excellent ideas are marred by poor presentation – either development, organization, or technical errors. In other C papers, the organization, structure and grammar are not flawed, but the ideas and how they are developed need work. In yet other C papers, there are only a few technical errors and the organization and ideas are adequate but not noteworthy.

D: A piece of work that demonstrates some effort on the author’s part but that is to marred by technical problems or flaws in thinking and development of ideas to be considered competence work.

E: This is a failing grade, usually reserved for pieces of work that demonstrate minimal effort on the author’s part. The writer has drastically misinterpreted the assignment and written half as many words as requested. Paragraph breaks are random; subjects and verbs, pronouns and antecedents turn against one another in wild discord.”
Gross Davis, Barbara: Tools for Teaching. Jossey-Basse. San Francisco. p. 224-225

Though this book was written for university and college classes, some content may be useful for teaching high school classes too.

• Explaining clearly
• Give your students the
• context
• structure
• terminology
• they will need to understand the new concepts and to relate to what they already know.

General strategies

• Place the concept in the larger context of the subject.
• How does today’s topic relate do earlier material?
• Give a brief summary of the new concept.
• Give students a road map
• At the beginning of class, put a brief outline on the board or provide a handout. Handout can also include new terms, formulas and PowerPoint slides shown in class.Give students a list of questions.

Avoid telling students everything you know. Students may become confused, anxious or bored when faced with an information overflow.Set an appropriate pace.
Speak more slowly when students are taking notes, when you are explaining new material, complex topics, and abstract issues. Pick up pace when telling stories, summarizing a previous lesson or presenting examples.

This article is based on

Gross Davis, Barbara: Tools for Teaching. Jossey-Basse. San Francisco. p 120

Here are a few example ideas from the book:

“Learning from mistakes is overrated.”

It is seen as a misconception. Much more important is what you should do. Focus on your successes, they show you what worked – and how nature works – evolution is always building upon what worked.

“Planning is guessing”

Long-term planning is a fantasy because there are so many things out of your hand and writing a plan makes you feel in control of things you can’t control – market conditions, competition, customers, the economy, etc. Business plans, financial plans, strategic plans are all guesses.

Plans let the past drive the future, and plans are inconsistent with improvisation. You have to be able to improvise. You have to pick up opportunities that come along. We are going in a new direction because that’s what makes sense today.

You have the most information when you are doing something, not before you have done it.

Decide what you are going to do this week and not this year.

Figure out the next important thing and do that.

“Workaholism”

Workaholics try to make up for intellectual laziness with brute force. This results in inelegant solutions.

They don’t look for ways to be more efficient because they actually like working.

They make the people who don’t stay late feel inadequate for merely working reasonable hours. People stay late out of obligation, even if they are not really productive.

No one makes sharp decisions when tired.

Workaholics aren’t heroes. The real hero is already home because she figured out a faster way to get things done.”

The content of this article is taken from:

 Jason Fried & David Heinemeier Hansson: Rework. Crown Business New York. 2010

The reviews of this book differ significantly – from great to hate. Therefore – have a try and form your own opinion.

http://37signals.com/rework/

“Each level adds more customer value, and the five constitute a customer value hierarchy. The most fundamental level is the core benefit: the fundamental service or benefit that the customer is really buying. A hotel guest is buying ‘rest and sleep.’ The purchaser of a drill is buying ‘holes.’ Marketers must see themselves as benefit providers.

At the second level the marketer has to turn the core benefit into a basic product. Thus a hotel room includes a bed, bathroom, towels, desk, dresser, and closet.

At the third level, the marketer prepares an expected product, a set of attributes and conditions buyers normally expect when they purchase this product. Hotel guests expect a clean bed, fresh towels, working lamps, and a relative degree of quiet. Because most hotels can meet this minimum expectation, the traveler normally will settle for whichever is most convenient or least expensive.

At the fourth level, the marketer prepares an augmented product that exceeds customer expectation. A hotel can include a remote-control television set, fresh flowers, rapid check-in, express checkout, and fine dining and room service…”

“Today’s competition essentially takes place at the product-augmentation level…Product augmentation leads the marketer to look at the user’s total consumption system: the way the user performs the tasks of getting, using, fixing, and disposing of the product. According to Levitt:

The new competition is not between what companies produce in their factories, but between what they add to their factory output in the form of packaging, services, advertising, customer advice, financing, delivery arrangements, warehousing, and other things that people value…

At the fifth level stands the potential product, which encompasses all the possible augmentations and transformations the product might undergo in the future. ..

Successful companies add benefits to their offering that not only satisfy customers, but also surprise and delight them. Delighting is a matter of exceeding expectations.”

Source: Kotler, Philip: Marketing Management. The Millenium Edition. Prentice Hall. New Jersey. p 394-395

Benjamin Franklin said, ‘I haven’t failed. I’ve had 10,000 ideas that didn’t work…

…Theatre director Joan Littlewood said, ‘If we don’t get lost, we’ll never find a new route.’

All of them understood that failures and false starts are a precondition of success.”

“There is nothing that is a more certain sign of insanity than to do the same thing over and over and expect the results to be different.”

Einstein

Source: Arden, Paul. It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be. Phaidon. 2003. p 50-51

You-Tube era students have to see something before they believe it. Science-lab experiments operate on the principle: See for yourself.

Another technology for making ideas credible is to use statistics in a different way, e.g. You are more likely to be struck by lightning than to win the lottery – instead of saying the probability is one in millions.

5. Emotion

Emotion makes people care, makes them feel something. Emotion transforms the idea from something theoretical and makes it hit the students in the heart. This idea is illustrated by an example of the Civil War. Students had to play the role of a battle-field surgeon and earned unforgettable memories about the brutal realities of war.

6. Story

Stories can be even useful for teaching discipline and appropriate behavior in class. The example tells about a person sticking to a diet irregularly. That made this person gain weight instead of losing it. Good behavior shown during a couple of days does not make a well behaving person. The diet story helped the students capture the message.

Source: The content of this article is taken from

Chip Heath & Dan Heath: Made to stick. Random House. New York 2007, 2008. pp 270-278

See also: http://www.madetostick.com/teachers/