Fascinate Quotes

“One of the hardest tasks of leadership is understanding that you are not what you are, but what you’re perceived to be by others. —EDWARD L. FLOM”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“To become more fascinating, you don’t have to change who you are. You have to become more of who you are.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Today, every piece of your communication faces three enemies: distraction, competition, and commoditization.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Your influence is determined by your ability to get people to take action.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“If you don’t have the biggest budget, then be the most fascinating.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“An eternally favorite deadly sin, lust fascinates through experience: our appetites and passions of sight, sound, taste, touch, and scent. We anticipate what it might be like to fulfill a craving, and that anticipation pulls us closer. As early as the sixth century AD, lust emerged as public enemy number one for Christians. And not without reason. Overcoming desire is no easy task. Buddhism presents the overcoming of desire as an ideal.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Finally it was time to go into the operating room, and the nurse came to wheel her away from me. My heart tightened. To ease her fears, the pediatric nurses gathered around her and created a “bubble parade,” blowing little soap bubbles as they went into the operating room. To create this fairy-tale experience, they used a wand. Specifically, a bubble wand. All the worry and fear melted from my daughter’s face as she was captivated by the magical moment. As a parent, I felt a great deal of gratitude for this small but meaningful touch. As a marketer, I was awed. I’d just witnessed my daughter’s customer experience switch from anxiety to anticipation in less than ten seconds.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“You will not win by being quiet. You will win by being heard.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“I’ll do the black magic. Then, I’ll hand you the wand.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“have the biggest budget, or be the most fascinating.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“By working in and among and between world-class teams, I could combine different methodologies for new combinations. I didn’t have to adhere to a fixed set of rules, and handpicked the best of each.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Sometimes the most fascinating advertising isn’t what your brand says to the world, but what it actually does in the world.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Whether you’re an old or new brand, you can draw on mythology, as long as you present it in a new way.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Too often, marketers rush in and smother consumers. Instead of a high-pressure pitch, what if you used a low-pressure (or anti-pressure) approach? Consider backing off a little. Pull customers in, rather than pushing them to buy. Build an anticipation gap.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Mr. Winston once purchased a 726-carat stone in London, setting off a heated debate about the safest way to get it back to the States. A league of bodyguards? Chartered ship? Colossal insurance policy? Harry Winston wouldn’t say which method he’d picked. Two weeks later, the priceless jewel arrived at his Fifth Avenue store, sent via standard registered mail, for 64 cents postage.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“When you speak the language of creativity, you can transform a dull commodity into something magical. Rather than charging just for the generic value of the product, you can charge for the experience.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Instead of trying to outdo your competition, focus on what makes you different. The goal is to find where you and your product diverge from standard expectations.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“What’s your specialty? Hmm, don’t have one? You might be becoming a commodity. If that’s the case, you’re in trouble. You’ll have to lower prices, because people won’t see any reason to pay more for you. You’ll have to spend more on marketing, because nobody will be buzzing about you or advocating for you. You’ll become watered down to mush, the lowest common denominator, struggling to get noticed in a world that quickly forgets me-too brands.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Here’s your choice: Spend a lot of time and money in pursuit of better. Or find what makes you different, and then do it on purpose.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“If you communicate with a slew of haphazard and conflicting messages, it’s difficult to develop a clearly established route. You’ll seem confused, or inauthentic, and the audience will be less likely to understand what you stand for.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“The Modern Marketing Maze Today, the maze changes every day, making a marketer’s job far more difficult than it was in the good old days. Unless you have the biggest budget of all your competitors, it no longer works to repeatedly drill in messages. You must”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“While this initial finding isn’t a shocker, the news wasn’t that the activity occurred, but rather exactly where the activity occurred. It took place in the nucleus accumbens, a deep and primal area linked to intense physical reward”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“It’s about your product, and brand, and you, and whether or not you will win the battle for attention. Every time you market, you are offering either the orange ticket, or the green. You’re either captivating, or a commodity. You’re fascinating, or forgotten.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“When we see something we want to eat, when we receive praise, and even when we hug our children, our mouths literally water,” says Huron. In any type of pleasure state, our mouths produce more saliva. Our tongue moves more fluidly within the mucous membranes of our mouth, creating what Huron calls “oral wetness cues.” Oral wetness is a subtle and involuntary reflex; however, it broadcasts our emotional state.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Sometimes a company wants to create an un-Passionate experience for strategic reasons. Shopping malls contain an intentionally unfascinating environment in the middle, so that customers are more likely to flock to the stores. That’s also why you won’t see a clock in a mall (so you lose track of time and stay there longer). And it’s also why the acoustics are bad in malls, so that stores seem like a comforting alternative.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch—these senses are practically built for black magic. If you speak the language of relationship, use them whenever you can. Stimulating the five senses heightens the brand experience, making it more intensely fascinating.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist

“Tractatus de Fascinatione warned against lounging in bed too late in the morning wearing nightcaps (yes, nightcaps), or breaking a religious fast on green peas (yes, green peas). How to prevent and cure? In many cases, the remedy seems almost worse than the disease: the skin of a hyena’s forehead, dust in which a mule had rolled, and a broth stewed from the ashes of a hangman’s rope. Not exactly goods you could pick up on an afternoon Costco run. In the absence of hyena forehead skin, it seems one could also lick the skin of a child’s forehead.”
― Sally Hogshead, Fascinate: How to Make Your Brand Impossible to Resist