Frankly, we’ve been telling clients not to put anything into snail mail at all, but that’s not an absolute rule.

I just retrieved an envelope from the garbage to prove the point. It was plain, with only a logo from a high-end appliance retailer (which I won’t name, as that might be apt to hurt someone’s feelings). Inside was an sales catalog, with some attractive pricing on hundreds of items. One could envision blanking out part of an outside panel to make it into a self-mailer with a wafer seal, letting it arrive minus the trash-me-now envelope. Would it be a wonderful piece? Maybe or maybe not, but drawing immediate attention to the 80-inch plasma tvs or Weber gas grills or KitchenAid doodads would be an inducement to break the seal and read further. The ROI of unopened deathvelopes is dismal.

Do you know a company (or non-profit, for that matter) who still use envelopes? Send them a link to this blog post, along with a polite note to remind them that the 1980s were a long time ago….

Our emphasis on cover letters is not at all misplaced. It’s the one chance a jobseeker has to stand out from the herd. Since one’s résumé, as noted in a recent WSJ article, is routinely screened by robots, it must now be composed by robots in an escalating duel of software gamesmanship. The resulting document is a vanilla collection of facts designed for OCR, studded with keywords culled from the job description. Useful, yes, but not differentiating.

Relevant question for your brand: can search engine robots find original content on your website?

It’s not a trivial matter, since truly original content is the single biggest factor you can control to become more visible on Search Engine Results Pages (SERP). Unfortunately, there are hundreds of thousands of cookie-cutter sites, especially smaller businesses victimized by the lowball sales pitch of “specialists” in their category. The price seems like a bargain, but the buyer never realizes that the copy they publish in Waukegan gets recycled in Wilmington and Walla-Walla. Human site visitors never notice, but the search engines downgrade the unsuspecting realtor/orthodontist/financial guru who wonders why his competitor is kicking his butt on Google.

Hey. If you’ve got your hands full being a doctor/restaurant/shopping mall, blogging and tweeting original content may not be a core competency, or even interesting to you. But it’s fascinating to robots, so you should stongly consider outsourcing. Content curation is a very hot discipline, and often a great investment. Ask us about it.

I ask about your prospects, you describe your customers.

Perfectly understandable. Brand stakeholders, from assistant brand managers up to the CEO, know customers. Survey them. Talk to them. Play golf with them. From there, it’s often an easy (lazy?) assumption that prospects are the same sort of folks, just unaware.Unenlightened. As a result, communications get focused on the identical demographics, psychographics and geography. It’s another example of MBWT, Marketing By Wishful Thinking.

But prospects must be different from customers (duh!) and knowing what it is that keeps them from choosing you is essential. Why? You can grow your business incrementally (say, 6%) by satisfying customers, but the only way to grow your business exponentially (say, 200%) is by capturing new customers. We can show you how to identify new market segments, focus on the needs of prospects in your messaging, while allowing product satisfaction to retain customers. Is it time to rethink assumptions, perhaps beginning with some actionable research?

C = 100%/a

where C is credibility, and a is the number of attributes that define your brand, such as low price, selection, service, unique functionality, high quality, and so on. Make yourself a list.

Thus, Volvo, who is all about safety has street cred = 100%. L’Oreal, all about high quality, 100%. Sears, which is about selection and price and appliances and tools and history = 100%/5, thus 20% believable.

There’s a local car dealer on tv in your (or any given) market who claims to be about selection, price, service, dependability, convenient hours and location, cash back, free coffee, monster tent events, and a maniacal toothy grin. He’ll give you ten reasons why you should visit, and the cred % shrinks with every message.

Can you discipline your brand to about one important attribute?

The simple secret to branding success, of course, does not exist. Nor, may I add, is there a “trick” to elections, religion, weight loss, home buying, marriage, public policy, child raising, mental health, investing, budgeting, radioactive waste, conflict resolution or wine pairings.

No human problem more complex than which way to tighten or loosen a light bulb can be solved with a pithy formula. There are, of course, no shortage of buy-my-book soothsayers willing to persuade us otherwise – there is marketing gold there. One way to sell stuff or create converts or solicit votes is to appeal to the allure of sweet simplicity, delivered without hesitation or doubt.

The implications for branding are clear enough. Life is messy, and decisions are often complex and nuanced. To begin the dialog, however, a brand should offer one kind of simplicity: it has to stand for something. One thing.

MBWT strikes brands large and small, old and new. You see the symptoms everywhere: the urge to stand for more than one thing, the assumption that if you say it they will hear it, the stupider assumption that if they hear it they will believe it. Wishful thinking fuels the belief that old media choices still work today … and on and on.

We want to believe what we want to believe. Natural as breathing.

What’s needed is a dose of salts, as they used to say. A healthy skepticism about what the brand really means, who the prospects really are, what they really need, what the competitive environment is today – a kind of zero-based reboot of assumptions about goals, processes, channels, messaging, capabilities.

MBWT is easy, but that re-examination is hard. Deal with it.

Some one thing, ideally. It’s perfectly clear what Tiffany’s, Volvo, Will Ferrell movies and Las Vegas stand for – you have obvious expectations of any consistent brand. There are audience segments perfectly attuned to respond to their messages.

The logical corollary is that there are market segments that must be ignored. You should identify them as clearly as you do your sweet spot. That is to say, you must fiercely resist the temptation to “round out” your offerings to appeal to a broader and broader audience, fuzzing the edges until nobody understands what you stand for. Rolls-Royce does not go on sale. WalMart does not have valet parking. Renzo Piano does not design bungalows.

Having “something for everyone” is a symptom of MBWT, Marketing By Wishful Thinking.