People laugh at the idea of branded smells, but smell is a great investment.

You can’t edit smells. If there’s a smell in the room, you’re gonna smell it.

Smell triggers emotional memory. Get a whif of mom’s apple pie—suddenly you’re five years old.

And, smell is underexploited. In this visual world, your nose is the new frontier. Just smell Victoria’s Secret…Cadillac…Singapore Airlines…ah yes!

Never planned on diversity. Not in the mission statement…corporate values…21 principles…strategic plans… But looking back, one out of every six people in our company’s history grew speaking something other than English. Right now, it’s 30 percent. Turns out, there’s a lot of value in diversity. You can’t just assume everyone else is thinking what you’re thinking. Makes you empathize more. Makes you smarter.

People who try to make the marketing communication business about self expression, hipness, getting your name out there, making friends, making a favorable impression, or making a difference are about on my last nerve. As Bob Sugar said, “This is show business not show friends.” Marketing is nothing more and nothing less than making the cash register ring. Or as a good friend of ours says, it’s…“Transactions, baby.”

One advantage of seating a brand really deep in people’s gray matter is it gives you the option of stepping out of character from time to time. Like, when you spend about a thousand years—a thousand years!—establishing all the stuffy, stiff-upper-lip stuff for your monarchy, her majesty can step out and make jokes about her own age, while swapping wit with with W.

Some people think marketing is the art of over promising and getting away with it. It’s really the art of telling the truth in a way that moves people who are ready to be moved. Seems so simple. So why are so few people any good at it? I guess it’s like playing the blues—three chords and the truth and you could be Jimi Hendrix, right? Yeah, right.

A brand is a promise. How your brand does depends on how honest you are. Do you keep your promises? A rag-tag bunch of bootstrappers who know what they stand for—and stick to it—can blow the doors off of VC-engorged pretenders, with logos that look like they were pirated from MOMA. So, is who you say you are consistent with who are?