Avoid Cliches!

>Creating Passionate Users: Avoid cliches like the plague: "when I was still a Sun employee, the education marketing folks scheduled a photo shoot for a catalog/brochure on their customer training courses. When I heard about the new brochure, I pleaded, 'Whatever you do, PLEASE don't show happy people smiling and pointing at the computer screen.' Happycomputerpeople

But it was too late...

Try checking out the brochures of technical training companies, and see how little real differentiation there appears to be. I'm not saying there aren't huge variations in quality, topics, methods, etc.,-- I'm saying that you'd never know it from the look and feel of their communication. And I'm not just singling out computer training--the overall 'sameness' problem shows up everywhere from computer books to banks to churches to software to cars...

Before you can get them to be passionate, you have to get their attention. If the stuff on your website or brochure or book could be interchanged with any of your competitors, it might be that you're using a cliche, or at least falling into the conservative standards."

Great article by Kathy. I have joke to go along with it, but that is for another day.