Reading: POP! Stand Out in Any Crowd

POP! Stand Out in Any Crowd, by Sam Horn, is a general marketing book that caught my attention while browsing the racks at the library. Easy, light read on making your ideas and words stand out that I kicked through in a couple of hours. POP stands for making your message:

• Purposeful
• Original
• Pithy

Horn suggests asking and answering the following nine questions (she calls them W9) to help formulate your POP message:

• What I am offering?
• What problem does my idea or offering solve?
• Why is it worth trying and buying?
• Who is my target audience?
• Who am I and what are my credentials?
• Who are my competitors and how am I different from them?
• What resistance or objections will people have to this?
• What is the purpose of my pitch?
• When, where and how do I want people to take action?

Bonus question – What core words do I use to describe my business or brand?

I heard Susan Packard, co-founder of HGTV, call the above a “brand lens” at the 2008 Credit Union National Association's America's Credit Union Conference and Expo in New York. She described it as words you use to talk about, describe and give meaning and value to your brand.. CU Magazine (a web site CU Village re-developed for CUNA in late-2008) has an article entitled Cable Conqueror: Transform your CU on Packard that describes the brand lens further.

Getting back to and wrapping up on POP, it is filled with lots of great quotations (the ones that I liked best I posted to my personal Twitter account) and gives good all around marketing and writing advice. It is not going to satisfy the super sophisticated marketer, but provides good reminders, tools, examples and reinforcements we all need from time to time regardless of experience level.

If you are vague in "asking for the sell," people won't know what the are supposed to do.-Sam Horn