77: The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out with Jamie Mustard

Do you ever feel as though your marketing messages are lost in a sea of digital overwhelm for your clients and customers? If you aren’t being heard, your message dies. This has significant implications for the health of your business. Learn how to harness the primordial laws of human perception to stand out as Dr. Sabrina interviews Jamie Mustard, author of The Iconist.

Jamie teaches the science of what causes anything to stand out in the modern world. Through his work, Jamie has observed the primal laws of BLOCKS™, which explain why anything stands out and endures in the mind or fails to. 

In his book, The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out, through pop stories and comprehensive research, he shows how BLOCKS™ solve the problem of us all being made invisible as we compete for less and less available attention in a messaging and media over-saturated world.

He teaches how BLOCKS™ allow anyone in any field to stand out at will based on the natural primordial laws of human perception.

As host of a popular RadioActive talk show on KXL101.1 FM in Portland, OR, Jamie interviewed hundreds of designers, innovators, artists, and agents for social change who are having an impact all over the world. 

An avid consumer of popular culture, Jamie is a graduate of the London School of Economics. He is obsessed with the economics of attention and has consulted for Intel, Cisco, and Symantec.

He breaks all this down into why we entrepreneurs need to have a simple way to get our message across in terms of marketing and branding, as well as why this is important for our teams and our overall quality of life as entrepreneurs.

Prepare for an eye-opening and fascinating conversation! The Profit by Design Podcast is a Tap the Potential production in collaboration with Small Business Consulting Group. 

Show Highlights:

• In 1950, a person would be exposed to approximately 250 advertising messages in their day-to-day life.
• By 1970, the number of advertising messages in a day increased to around 2,000.
• The last time this was studied was in the late 1990s, and 5,000 - 7,000 advertising messages a day is what a person was exposed to.
• This was all before the internet hit full stride and before social media.
• Today, the number of advertising messages we are exposed to on a daily basis is estimated to be 10,000 - 15,000.
• A person can’t process even 1,000 of these messages, so what this means is that anybody trying to communicate is just one of tens of thousands.
• Jamie’s book, The Iconist, offers a solution to this very real problem.
• “Continuous partial attention”, a term coined by Linda Stone, who did some research for Microsoft and Apple, means that we’re being bombarded by so much information that we’re only partially paying attention.
• As a business owner and entrepreneur, this is a huge thing when you’re trying to get your business noticed.
• To be iconic is to be the first choice.
• Anything busy in a world overloaded with content, no matter how good it is, instantly gets discarded.
• People have to have an idea of who you are and what you’re offering them before they have a chance to think in their lizard-brain.
• Jamie discusses a chapter in his book called, “Road Signs” and how warning labels work.
• The book teaches you how to turn some aspect of what you do into something that has the same power as a STOP sign so you get that instant fixation.
• As long as there’s something behind it that’s genuine and real, people will engage further and remember you.
• “What is the best thing about myself that intersects with what my customer most cares about?”
• The answer to that question is what you present in a bold way on your website.
• Then, they can learn about all of your other strong points that you have to offer.
• “Drag" is when you’re presenting all of the busy stuff but you haven’t self-identified the best of what you have to offer that your customer is wanting.
• Some psychological ramifications of too much choice include paralysis, anxiety, dissatisfaction, and depression.
• These same psychological ramifications happen to apply to feeling like you can’t get noticed because there’s too much content around you.
• Science and research show that when we present complicated things with big, bold, simple imagery, it changes the way we relate to complicated information. We retain more of the information and appreciate it more.
• Adults crave this elementary communication even more than children do.
• A BLOCK™ is the anatomy of what makes something iconic.
• Dr. Sabrina relates how in Mike Michalowicz’s book, Profit First, the Profit First Equation of Sales - Expenses = Profit is a great example of a BLOCK™ and the way it makes the Profit First concept iconic.
• BREEED - Blocks Repeated Exhaustively Everywhere Equals Demand. This is the snow-ball effect.
• Jamie shares his poignant backstory and how he came to be interested in the subject of his book.

Links and Resources:

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Connect with Jamie!

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Books:

How to Hire the Best - Contractors Edition by Sabrina Starling, PhD

How to Hire the Best: The Entrepreneur's Ultimate Guide to Attracting Top Performing Team Members by Sabrina Starling, PhD - Will be published Sep 15, 2020 The 4 Week Vacation: Work Supports Life Not the Other Way Around by Sabrina Starling, PhD - Will be published Dec 1, 2020

Profit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz

The Pumpkin Plan: A Simple Strategy to Grab a Remarkable Business in Any Field by Mike Michalowicz

The Iconist: The Art and Science of Standing Out by Jamie Mustard

The Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz