Be Impressive
But first, take a look at the worst office art you've never seen
Read this quote inspiring the busy office men. Want to annoy someone? Preach this quote. It’s not wise but it is clever, it's pithy. You have to pause and give it a little think before admitting begrudgingly yeah well, technically that's true.
I had an interview with IBM one summer. I was excited. Didn't own a suit, didn't own a tie so I went with the best I had - a polo. Hey it had a collar! I was summarily dismissed - suit man kicked me to the curb. Told me I was disrespectful coming in wearing a polo shirt.
What’s that other saying - don’t judge a book by its cover? IBM really bummed me out that day and I decided big blue1 could kiss my @$$.
Microsoft-ies wearing polo shirts went on to become symbolic of the upstart toppling IBM, the goliath, the dominant power in computing. I might have taken an early hit, but I helped win that battle.2
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression” isn’t the only clever aphorism you’ll find slapped up on an office wall. Oh no.
After the Polo incident, but before I went to work for Microsoft, I took a job as a systems analyst for Alameda County Social Services. An unwilling recruit to a zombie IT horde, I took up residence in a soul sucking cubicle farm. We lived in the basement, minions to the resident IBM mainframe3.
It was popular to pin clever quote posters up on your dingy burlap cube walls. A small, colorful cry for help floating in a sea of grey that sent a signal to any fool who might approach your cubicle begging favor:
Poor planning on your part, doesn't necessitate an emergency on mine.
Or the pithier: Fail to plan, plan to Fail.
How about some in-your-face KISS? Keep It Simple Stupid.
I quickly tired of the cubicle game and moved on to consulting, working out of my customer’s offices. I escaped cubicle art, however motivational art had now become the rage, and Mona Lisa’s like this one lurked about every corner burning your eyeballs:
Then I found a set of brilliantly snarky de-motivators for my screen saver. I loved them so much. If you’ve got an extra minute, hit despair.com, they still make me giggle.
Let’s get to work and talk about a different kind of impression - marketing ones. These impressions count every time someone’s eyeballs see your message. Hopefully it’s a pleasant message that doesn’t burn your eyeballs but that’s a different story for another day.
Earlier this month I helped a local nonprofit put on Sonoma County’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Day or Yom HaShoa. My mom is a Holocaust survivor.
This year was the first in person event since the pandemic and we also had security issues to consider. So for the first time, we required event registration. This introduced a fair bit of friction. Also consider our demographic - age skewed by definition (my mom is 98 next month!).
We needed to get the word out.
Here's our campaign - can you count the number of potential impressions?
T-3 months: Post goes up on community site announcing event, signups open. Naming, visuals, fonts, etc. designed and reused in all subsequent impressions
T-2 months: Print materials distributed to every synagogue in the Sonoma County (six) along with communication to Rabbis
T-1 month: Mailer (snail-mail) goes out to ~1,000+ JCC mailing list announcing the event with registration link as well as paper signup form
T-2 weeks: press release and follow-up to local/community papers including spotlight piece in the Santa Rosa Press Democrat from one of the event chairs who is also a survivor
T-1 week: email campaign reminding people to register - goes out twice
T-1 day: email with zoom link to everyone who registered including last call to register
Final numbers: about 250 in person (40 registered in person day of), 50 on Zoom. Exceeded expectations. Really nice event.
Registrations by time:
How do you make your impressions count? Humans have two kinds of memory: Short Term and Long Term.4
Humans can keep 7 things +/- 2 in our short-term memory. Good luck remembering that take out order if it's got 10 items. Chunking or grouping helps extend our short term memory so, for example, you remember a phone number as 3 groups even though it's 10 numbers.
Long term memory gets more complicated and here's where we need our impressions to create an entry, because short term memory is fleeting and measured in minutes.
There are three ways you can get something into a humans long term memory:
Urgency - stressful situations can imprint into long term memory based on strong emotion
Association - an impression that aligns with something you already know
Repetition - seeing the same or similar messaging repeatedly moves something to long term memory that becomes more vivid with more impressions
Fear marketing sucks and association isn't a lock so repetition has to be our jam. It get's a little squirrely here because no one really knows how many times you have to see something for it to make a mark in your long term memory. Many variables, but conventional wisdom is 8 times.
For Sonoma County's Yom HaShoa event someone could've easily hit 8 for the 2024 campaign, and of course we had the benefit of this being a recurring known event in the community over the past 20 years.
Correlation isn’t causation, but registrations increased over time along with the build up of impressions. Over half of the registrations rolled in the last two weeks.
Impressions are real-er and true-er and wiser than our inspirational opening quote.
You need to make more than a first impression to be impressive.
If you want people to remember you, your brand, your product, your event - consider how your customers will get your impressions and how many times? Unless you're an impulse buy, you want to get into that long term memory to drive an action relevant to your business.
Did you guys ever watch Vikings? Late pandemic binge for me, good show. This poster is 🔥
best, Andrew
IBM got the Big Blue moniker in the 80’s’; seems to be tied to the Blue in their Logo and their forever position as the Blue-chip stock.
IBM was the most valuable company in the world throughout the 70s and 80s. Microsoft surpassed IBM in market value in 1993. For a great storytelling of that period, and how that happened check out Acquired’s most recent episode on Microsoft. It took me multiple driving trips to Davis and bike rides to get through all 4 hours of it but it’s fascinating especially if you were there for it. This is only Part I of Acquired’s deconstruction of Microsoft going through Windows 95/NT. I think part II comes out next month.
IBM Mainframe business was super sticky and this is a lesson in inertia - while IBMs core business was on the decline from the 90’s on, their revenue continued to grow for 30 more years, peaking in 2011 at $107 Billion.
Is it weird that this is just like computers where active or working set memory is stored for easy access and longer term is stored on disk or more latent tech for retrieval on demand?