What assumptions do your prospects likely make about your company, your product, your service, or you?
How can you take advantage of their positive assumptions?
What can you do to overcome their negative assumptions?
Is there a risk that you appear too big for some of your prospects, leading them to fear being treated as unimportant?
Similarly, can you reposition your larger competitors as being a risk for your prospects?
If you are a small company, are you leveraging the advantages of the underdog: an eagerness to serve and the tendency of underdogs to be more innovative?
Do your website, promotions, and other marketing elements exploit the opportunities for offering viewers play—quizzes, contests, puzzles?
Do your products and services appropriately address our love of play?
Are you too serious?
Do you have a $180,000 diamond in your marketing arsenal?
Are you surprising your customers and prospects?
Is your website surprising? Your storefront, office, and/or lobby?
Do your messages have an element of surprise that engages a reader?
Have you discovered your best stories?
Are your presentations story-based?
Are you telling your stories well?
Are your stories authentic and honest?
Do they resonate emotionally?
Do they develop dramatic tension, then surprise the reader with the outcome?
Are your customers convinced that your offerings and prices are fair?
Are they convinced that you and all your services are, too?
When you introduce something new, are you careful to make sure it is just familiar enough?
Are you making your brands and product names familiar to your most important prospects?
Have you “NikeiD-ed” your offering: Are your customers able to modify and customize your offering?
Do you have your own Harley Owners Group: Have you considered ways of bringing customers into a community of users—of making them “a part”?
Do you address your prospects as individuals in all of your messages, or are your messages about your company and product instead?
Are you certain you are doing what you must to make sure your valued clients and customers feel truly important to you?
What tools and services can you create to make your most important and profitable customers feel special?
Are you hiring for your key customer-contact positions people who make others feel important? Are you particularly careful to hire good listeners?
Are your products and services just new enough, or are they like the Twinkies package, which had gotten too old?
Are you regularly updating your website?
Is what you are offering easy to understand, choose, order, and buy?
How can every step of the buying process be made faster?
Is your design simple and beautiful? (Buckminster Fuller once said he never thought about beauty as designing something, but that if his solution was not beautiful, he knew it was wrong.)
Does every element of the product or design matter?
Is it utterly clear how it works? (Note to makers of shower faucets: Could you agree on this somehow, so we don’t waste minutes a year in hotel showers trying to figure out how to make the water warmer or cooler?)
Are your name, message, customer interface, website, system, process, and instructions cognitively fluent—remarkably easy to understand, pronounce, access, and use?
Is it not just understandable but incapable of being misunderstood?
Are you certain that the shapes and colors you use convey the right message and mood? (For guidance, we recommend Color Image Scale by Shigenobu Kobayashi as a useful color guide.)
What do your colors convey?
What do they fail to convey?
Does your message appeal strongly to the emotions, or is it merely rational?
Have you identified the emotional forces that drive people to your products and those that might drive them away?
Do you know the emotional forces that drive people to choose your competitors?
How can you address and counter them?
Is your message presented optimistically?
Is it focused on achieving good outcomes rather than on avoiding bad ones?
Are you communicating so vividly that even people talking on their cell phones will notice, or are you too easy to overlook when other stimuli reach your prospective purchasers?
Are you making sure you get not just attention but the sustained attention that makes you familiar to prospects so they are comfortable with choosing you?
Are you getting attention in an honest and authentic way?