“Quality alone is not enough to make you successful in your workplace or to make your product sell or people desire you,” say Franziska Iseli and Christo Hall. “You need to be able to manage how you being perceived.”
Iseli and Hall are the authors of Perception: Take Charge of How Others View Your Brand, Become Irresistible, and Make a Bigger Impact. They have written a personal, practical guide to the subject of perception that’s engaging, pointed, and accessible.
And they do it by telling stories – the head of a small but growing design firm trying to find a bank loan; a young woman passed over for promotion; a musician trying to find his artistic soul. Their stories (and the stories of those around them) form the narratives around which the authors explain the importance of perception, understanding how you are perceived, and learning how to change perceptions (as in, do things differently).
They offer a logical and straightforward approach. Iseli and Hall walk the reader through defining how you want to be perceived, the importance of differentiating yourself, how to amplify perception, the differences between perception and marketing, and how to utilize all of these tools and understandings together.
Iseli and Hall (a wife-and-husband team) are the authors of Bananas About Marketing: How to Attract a Whole Bunch of Happy Clients. They also offer several marketing and perception training programs; details are available on their web sites, Basic Bananas and The BusinessHood.
I particularly like their storytelling approach. Rather than one case history after another, Iseli and Hall personalize the subject of perception by using fictional characters embedded in the overall discussion. The reader follows them as they stumble, understand, develop, and then succeed.
Perception is an excellent introduction to this important business and workplace topic.
Top photograph: The Face of Morro Rock Beach by Circe Denyer via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.