Last night our Fox River Ad Club brought in Karen Post, the branding diva, as our monthly speaker. As a speaker myself, I'm always keen to go see others speak to get ideas, judge their style and so on. Karen was dynamite. She did the one thing that so few speakers fail to do - tell a compelling story.

Of course, I bought her book, Brain Tattoos: Creating Unique Brands That Stick In Your Customer's Minds, which is about 'tatooing your brand on the brain of your cusotmers.' I'm really looking forward to digging into it, actually. It's one of those 'hands on' books where there's worksheets and all kinds of fun 'exercise' type stuff. She's got the practical execution thing down to a science, at least from what I can tell from my first few leaf throughs of the book.

Her presentation was wonderful, and she laid out some excellent action items & bullet points on 'brain tattoo' branding, which I'll get to, but I couldn't help but think how much her presentation read like Purple Cow and The Big Moo. Bottom line of Karen's presentation and the aforementioned books is to be remarkable at something and do it consistently. No offense to the group of 33 who wrote The Big Moo, which is a very worthy read, but at the end of book, just like at the end of Karen's presentation, all you have in your head is "man, we need to take more risks, try to be remarkable, and do a way better job of telling our story."

According to Karen, these are her 7 key points for Brain Tattooing your brand:

1) Tattoo test regularly - research, ride along and all out get the sentiments that your customers have about your brand. Rinse, repeat.
2) Define your essence. Be able to boil it down to a bumper sticker - blah blah elevator pitch from sales training 101 blah blah if you don't have this you're screwed, call Karen for help
3) Take more chances. No risk. No brand. Period - Karen told a story about getting on an airplane in a halloween costume. Very funny. People bought her lots of drinks on the plane. Hell, thats enough reward for me.
4) Be a great storyteller
5) Be hugely different - ala purple cow
6) Make every experience count
7) Timing is as important as research. Stick with it. Start today. - No time like the present to do something different.

Karen's obviously bought into the 'napsterize your knowledge' philosophy; her website is FULL of great articles & such. Check it out.

There was one disappointing element in an otherwise perfect evening. The event was held at St. Norbert College, so the Ad Club graciously allowed students to participate in the presentation for free. While I did see a handful of students, I saw no faculty from the marketing, comm, business or art departments. What the hell people? This is a freebie. A great chance for your students to see a national speaker and for you to bring those lessons back to the classroom. I'm sure there's a perfectly logical reason why the entire SNC marketing student body didn't show up en masse, but I sure as hell don't know what that reason is. Bottom line - as a college student, you need all the good input you can get. This was a missed opportunity for those students who were not at Karen's presentation.