Practical Genius (26 page)

A year after resigning from PR Newswire, I had breakfast with my former CEO, Charles Gregson, an amazing man with a big heart, who asked me, “Gina, why didn’t you let anyone know you had a passion for writing? We could easily have put that passion and obvious talent to better use.” “I was waiting for the right time,” I replied, acutely aware of how lame that sounded. I worked for PR Newswire for eight years and never once marketed my true self. Instead I did what many of us do: I marketed to them what I thought they wanted me to be.

Today, I am a marketing machine, a genius evangelist who spreads her message with every breath, every step, every gesture. I do it in boardrooms, at tot lots, on planes, and on many a stage without hesitation. It took only a giant leap and some serious thought about what this marketer really knows about marketing genius.

Since the 1960s, we’ve heard about the “Four Ps” of marketing,
the four ingredients of the traditional marketing mix: product, price, place, and promotion. When a company considers launching a product or service, they account for these Ps in order to convince themselves that the launch will succeed. They take them into account after the launch, too, tweaking this P and fine-tuning that one as the market for the product or service grows, matures, and finally declines. This model, or some variation on it, has been the means by which traditional marketers have measured, strategized, and executed for a long, long time—not that there’s anything wrong with that!

Here’s where we veer wildly off the road, to places that only geniuses can find on routes that only geniuses can use to get to their extraordinary destination. The traditional marketing matrix doesn’t work for us. That’s because we see things differently.

The truth is that you can forget the traditional Four Ps of marketing and focus on just one, a whole other P:
PARADOX.
One of the all-time best words (and not just because it has an
x
in it), a paradox is generally defined as a seemingly absurd or self-contradictory statement or proposition that actually contains a truth. A paradox is also often an opinion or statement that is contrary to generally accepted ideas, causing one to consider something in a new light.

So a paradox, by definition, defies conventional wisdom. For the genius, it means that when you decide to integrate and exude the opposing forces within yourself and market the whole, original, fully realized you instead of just piecing out and sharing the parts of you you
think
will matter most to a given audience, well, the whole world opens up for you. By boldly representing the elegant contradictions within yourself, you will actually attract, engage, and grow beyond measure.

Imagine what happens when you market the scholar alongside
the fool. The entrepreneur alongside the philosopher. The conservationist alongside the game designer. The CEO alongside the acoustic guitar player. The break dancer alongside the chess master. The award-winning photographer alongside the “deal closer.” You know this rare magic when you see it because it’s refreshing and inspiring and speaks to your own contradictions in a loud way. When a genius meets or sits in the audience of another genius who is able to own, project, and employ all his contradictions at once in this way, her spider sense tingles.

That’s what I adore about Richard Branson and everything he stands for. Love him or hate him, he accepts and leverages his contradictions without apology. He is a master of paradox and surprises his audience regularly with his seamless authenticity. Without any visible effort, he is who he is with a vengeance, working with his natural design from both heart and mind. When you bring together all the parts of your personal orchestra—the strings, the brass, the woodwinds, the percussion—projecting a singing-in-the-shower
real
you, you make original music for the person on the receiving end. Branson does that in spades—and see where it got him!

This is what you need to understand about why you don’t need the Four Ps of marketing and all you need is the One P: the One P, the paradox of you,
is
the product, it
is
the price, it
is
the place, and it
is
the promotion of your product, all of it, it’s you, it’s your genius.

Here’s the deal. The paradox of you—your other G-spot, where the whole of you is realized—also activates your potential from a transactional standpoint. Obviously it’s what you have to sell (product); it boldly and unconventionally presents itself to establish its value in the marketplace (price); it makes itself available in venues real and virtual in an eclectic, organic, and highly commercial way (place); and it represents a whole world of opportunity for promotion, including some, all, or none of the standard elements of
promotion (advertising, public relations, personal selling, and sales promotion).

Generally a company does a massive analysis of the Four Ps before deciding to introduce a product or service into the marketplace. You, on the other hand, need only strategize how to engage with your audience authentically on the basis of your paradox.

Contrast this to the popular concept of personal branding. Rooted in Al Ries and Jack Trout’s 1981 book,
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind,
and later brought into widespread discussion by Tom Peters, the idea that one could position and package oneself like a bar of soap was compelling. You’re not just the accountant, you’re the accountant who never makes a mistake. You’re not just a sales rep, you’re the closer. Add to that a makeover to your whole “look”—how you dress, your materials, and so on—and you’re
the
bar of soap, baby.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to be a bar of soap. I don’t even want to be
the
bar of soap. I don’t want to be one of many in my field scratching and scrambling to distinguish myself, marketing myself madly in the traditional ways most folks know how to turn down and tune out. I don’t want to be in a constant state of striving to “be somebody,” when who I am right now, where I am right now, is my greatest asset.

Here is the wonderful, free-fall, put-yourself-out-there approach to marketing your genius: You take the sweet spot of genius you’ve identified, the place where your hard and soft assets meet. You add the expression of your genius, the story you tell that introduces others to that sweet spot. Juice that with the shot of B12 you get from a crew of genius mentors, ambassadors, fat brains, and tribe and all the ways you stoke and provoke your genius mind, body, and heart every day. Now point yourself out toward the world, and live it hard.

Think about it: You’ve stripped away artifice and conformity, convention and expectation. You are right there at the heightened state of your own power, projecting and distributing your genius naturally as you interact with colleagues, clients, friends, family, and perfect strangers. You’re authentic, transparent, and fully engaged. Your paradox—the wonderful, powerful contradictions that make up your genius—presents the ideal selling proposition. What you are is a perfect magnet for exactly the work, people, environment, and experience you want to have in your life.

Here’s how it has worked for me: instead of shying away from my paradox—which is a bit of badass meets graceful integrity—I have always accepted my contradictions as a cultured woman with real street smarts who can win the game whether it’s played on Wall Street or Main Street.

I walk through life with one foot in a four-inch heel and the other in a combat boot. I’m smart yet edgy, nurturing yet candid, traditional yet rebellious, sexually charged yet driven by deep core values. Think old-school mother meets cultural modernist; ideation freak meets focused strategist; ghetto scholar meets spiritual intuitive; daydreamy ocean lover meets obsessive book collector. Every day is a surprise because I don’t know how to censor or edit myself.

I have always led with my paradox, kicked down doors with it, and taken great joy in it. As a result, my paradox has always attracted the right clients, partners, and tribe in my life, people who not only “get” me but are highly motivated by my provocative transparency, the what-you-see-is-what-you-get approach that kind of blows people away. By humbly but boldly exposing all of who I am, I send a signal to my prospective audience that they, too, can safely and fully expose themselves, and the business of engaging together begins.

In this very naked, natural, active state of just being, the genius markets itself without marketing itself. To be precise, your genius is broadcast on all frequencies and the correct audience for your
genius responds, making its way into your life from all points of engagement. When you live and leverage your paradox, you present a unique, authentic product that naturally long-tails its way into the marketplace.

Take Traci Fenton, one of my favorite examples of marketing genius by living the paradox out loud. As a senior in college, Traci was the director of a student-run public affairs conference on democracy, which she had come to believe was the best way for people to realize their full potential, not just politically and collectively but personally and individually. After the conference, she spent her last college quarter studying in Indonesia, at the time then-President Suharto was overthrown. The violent, bloody experience, seeing firsthand what it was not to live in a free and democratic environment, affected her deeply.

She returned to the United States and got her first “real” job with a Fortune 500 company, excited to make her mark. Soon after, though, her wide-eyed hopes were dashed when she realized the workplace was one of the most undemocratic environments in which one could find oneself. “After spending the last year of my life studying democracy, my new workplace was a perfect contrast to the ideals I’d come to love and live. I knew I couldn’t stay in such a toxic, dehumanizing environment for the next forty years, and I didn’t think anyone else should either.”

Leading with her genius—her values and passions, her skills and expertise—Traci spent the next decade traveling the world researching democracy, engaging and interacting with thought leaders in organizational development and democratic management. “My driving question was, how can the principles of democracy be applied in the workplace in a way that benefits the people, the bottom line, and the world?” Her organization, WorldBlu, was born of some of the answers to that question and is now working in fifty countries around
the world to design, develop, and support successful democratic organizations, companies committed to demonstrating democratic values and behavior in the workplace.

Traci didn’t hire a branding firm or a consultant or a buzz agent to present her proposition to the world. She passionately and purposefully told her genius story, she lived and proved her values, she built a passionate tribe around her genius—folks like Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, and Vineet Nayar of HCL Technologies—that helps to grow WorldBlu’s reach every day.

Traci is a brilliant, creative mind—someone who could develop and describe this big, thinky concept but who could also envision and execute the precise logistics to make it happen on a practical level. What I love about her is that she didn’t wander around corporate America miserably for ten or twenty years before turning to her purpose in life, the way so many of us do. She was fully baked right out of college and dived right into her genius destiny, her paradox leading the way. She also didn’t putz around trying to position her vision, package her program, or get buy-in from marketing partners. She just did it. She lives it first, sells it later. See how that works?

If you’re really paying attention, you’ll notice that paradox also impacts organizations lately, prompted in part by the technocentric reality of our lives. Companies are beginning to realize that assets that used to be considered opposing forces (IT left-brainers and marketer right-brainers, for example) are being fused instead of separated, creating a new kind of fully realized organism—in this particular example, someone called a marketing technologist. Imagine the promise of a company filled with whole—not incomplete or pigeonholed—people who naturally integrate their energy and effort instead of operating side by side in parallel play, to borrow a compelling term from the child development field. What a tremendous mindset shift this represents. This is where the market value of genius establishes itself.

Marketing your genius is all about acknowledging and leveraging what is unique within your paradox. It’s about isolating and identifying what differentiates you, which is, of course, your particular genius. That’s why you need to think of your genius as a premium asset rather than a commodity.

Gasoline is a commodity; its price fluctuates based on supply and demand, not on the quality or features of the product. You don’t know or care where it comes from, just so long as you can get it when you need it. A luxury car, on the other hand, is a product that is entirely distinguished by its points of differentiation, the features that set one car apart from another and establish relative value in the mind of the consumer. A luxury car is defined by its distinctive features, high value, and superior quality—the premium aspect that transforms it from a product into an asset and attracts just the consumers who can appreciate, benefit from, or leverage that particular asset. That’s your genius, the premium asset.