Yin, Yang, And The Business Of Polarity
How Branding And Copywriting Interact To Grow Your Business
You ever see Olympic weightlifters in action?
To get the bar on their shoulders (or over their heads) they do what’s called the second pull. That’s the explosive jumping movement you see when you watch them. After the second pull, the weightlifter needs to drop down under the bar, lightning-fast, to get ready to stand up and complete the lift.
Now, the quicker, more agile, and more flexible the weightlifter, the faster he is able to drop under the bar after the second pull. Which means…he doesn’t have to pull as hard on the bar to get under it.
The weightlifter has to do a constant dance between strength and agility.
Light and dark. Positive and negative. Masculine and feminine. POLARITY.
In Chinese philosophy, yin and yang describe how seemingly opposite or contrary forces may actually be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world, and how they may give rise to each other as they interrelate to one another (Got this from Wikipedia).
What does all of this have to do with business, you ask? Lemme tellya:
Your business is a dance of brand and copy.
(Isn’t that pretty much the same thing, Nabeel?)
No, it’s not. Here’s why:
Your brand is your relationship with your customers. It’s what they say about you when you’re not in the room. Your copy is the words you say to ask them to buy what you have to offer. The stronger your brand, the less copy you need (both in quality and quantity) to sell, and vice versa.
What is Advertising? You are trying to create a brand so strong the customer doesn’t even think of buying; it happens unconsciously.
If we go back to our weightlifter analogy:
Copy is the second pull. Branding is the drop under the bar. Copy is strength. Branding is agility.
Back to the Yin-Yang symbol:
Do you notice the little black circle in the white segment and the little white circle in the black segment?
That signifies Yang has some manifestation of Yin and Yin has some manifestation of Yang.
The polarity is interconnected and interdependent.
Branding doesn’t happen without some amount of copy (selling), directly or indirectly. Copy doesn’t happen without some amount of branding, directly or indirectly.
If you want an immediate example of this polarity in action:
I wrote a post a while ago called, “How Salesy Is Too Salesy?”. It was hard, active, masculine.
Today’s post is pretty YIN. It’s softer, more nuanced, more accommodating.
The other post still had some YIN. I ended the post saying you need to care about your customer enough to sell them your product/service the way it needs to be sold.
Today’s post does have YANG.
I’m talking about copy and sales in terms of strength and power, and there’s an image of a gorilla-strong weightlifter in your mind.
A lot of people (even copywriters) are discomfited by the copy you need to write to sell at the most competitive level.
That’s cool…go build a brand so unforgettable you never have to ask for the sale.
As long as you understand how much blood, sweat, and tears that entails.
Polarity is about choices…and holding yourself accountable for those choices.
So tell me, dear reader:
How will you use polarity in your own business?
Get on the prelaunch list for my new book, Dragon Energy: The Tao Of Personal Branding http://dragonenergy.me
Originally published at nabeelazeez.com on January 24, 2018.
