The Heuristic Bias Of Personal Branding: Leveraging Mental Shortcuts
Before I left the restaurant industry I got my certification as a life coach. By the time we closed up shop and moved to Oregon, I was a certified brand and business coach studying brand strategy. It was one of my early strategy clients that introduced me to the word heuristic. She used it to describe what she did at the Hoffman Institute. When she said it I didn’t know what the fuck it meant but I loved how it sounded.
Google defines heuristic as, “enabling someone to discover or learn something for themselves.” That definition only deepened my love for the word. Read it again and tell me it’s not a polite translation of, fuck around and find out? Later when I pivoted from business branding to personal branding that word would add so much value to how I nurture my brandbabies.
Let’s step back for a second. It’s been my experience that businesses start one of two ways; bootstrap with learn-as-you-go encounters or investors who hire for shit you don’t know. Okay, maybe there’s a hybrid third but whatever. Either way, I’ve learned that most founders have little or no knowledge about the psychology of marketing outside of tips and tricks posted everywhere.
Tips and tricks weren’t enough for me. So I took a course and got certified as a marketing psychology specialist. What can I…
