Dan Waldschmidt

Giving buyers more value than they pay for is the most effective way to create a delightfully memorable buying experience.

To illustrate this point more clearly, think about the opposite of this. Think about the last time you felt ripped off.

No one wants to be taken advantage of.

It’s a bad feeling. Even if you might be wrong about what is going on.

Chance are you might have received a perfectly logical explanation from the person you were doing business with about why you shouldn’t be unhappy.

Heck, even the fine print might show that you got everything you paid for — and more. But you aren’t feeling happy. You aren’t delighted.

You feel cheated. And that feeling– regardless of how logical it might not be — is how you will remember doing business with that company.

The exact opposite is also true.

When you deliver more value than people pay for it seems to defy logic. Especially for the consumer.

It can be...

It is pretty common knowledge that people interpret what you say paying little attention to the actual words that you use.

And while all the scientists don’t agree on how much impact feelings have on interpreting a conversation, they all agree that what you say is significantly less important than how you say it.

The words themselves just aren’t that important.

What is important is how people feel when they hear the words.

This mirrors a lot of what we currently know about how the brain works. You might think your brain is unbiased in how it selects, stores, categorizes, and retrieves memories, but quite the opposite is true.

Your brain actively stores and more quickly retrieves memories that match how you feel about a specific instance. Nobody is lying. It’s how the brain plays tricks on you– hiding memories that don’t match your feelings about the experience.

For example, getting engaged is a powerful memory that most couples never...

The last decade of business has been a rapidly changing chronology of growth, struggle, confusion, and depression.

The cornerstones of enterprise stability and growth have crumbled into an elusively expensive hodgepodge of misguided effort and bi-polar strategy.

The business of growth has changed.

Fundamentally, sales and marketing behaviors are no longer the same.  If you look closely enough you’ll notice three specific transitions happening all at the same time.  Overlapping transitions in technology, economics, and social dynamics are together driving this decade-long business fragmentation.

Technology changes have made accurate access to complex answers easier than ever.  Data systems are faster and more people have smarter phones with faster access to the Internet.  What used to make us...

Much of what we know about the brain is only 4 to 5 years old.

Recent advancements in science and technology show us how the brain actually operates. Using functional magnetic reasonance imaging, we can see how the brain develops, what threatens it, and how simple every-day decisions effect complex processing.

But it doesn’t always work as it should.

Along with an increased understanding of how the brain operates, doctors have become more astute at diagnosing and treating diseases of the brain. Over the last decade, a disturbing rise in autism among children has sparked intense attention and focus from the medical community.

Using highly developed technical equipment, scientists can actually pinpoint specific sections of the brain that seemed to be unwired. Quite literally, for autism patients it’s as if the brain cannot communicate to certain sections of the brain.

One of the key areas of that disfunction is limited access and control to their...