Podcast Episode 12: Kelly Maniatis & Louise Karch name a book

Kelly Maniatis is an organisational psychologist now writing a book, and needs help with the title.

Louise Karch is a name-whisperer, and author of ‘Word Glue – Find Your Million Dollar Brand Name’. She names brands, products, businesses. ‘If you get the right name, you’ll get the attention you deserve.’

Louise: Start with the first S, who is the book for, what’s your reader ‘segment’?

Kelly: Professionals established in their career and they’re stuck in a loop of work with no escape plan, and they’re on the path to burn-out, or already there.

Louise: What is the cost to an organization of these high performers who get burnt out? They lose a lot of intellectual capital.

We will often say our title and we will go right by it without even realizing. So, what sort of words were you using just there to describe who you’re here to serve? Bright sparks. Burnt out. Ignite. So playing with, noticing the words that you say and collecting them, will help you.

Who will buy your book? Who’s the purchaser? Like, who hires you girl!

Often a book will have an intended audience, a surprising audience that comes to you, and then a unintended audience; so your competitors might buy your book, like other organizational psychologists, and you have to decide that it’s okay to share your secrets, because they’ll use them too, if you really want your ideas to spread.

You look at who’s buying this book and what do you need to say to them so they go, “That book is for me.”

Who’s going to buy this book in bulk? Are health insurers the ones who’ve got corporate contracts with these high performers and they’re the ones who are paying the healthcare costs of people who are getting burned out? Even governments are looking at what to do with wellbeing.

It turns out depression, anxiety, all those things are listed on the United Nations’ WHO, World Health Organization, issues of major concern right now. So your actually, your book was addressing one of the UN sustainability goals.

So, your book on the micro-level is going to help an individual, but you also need to think macro.

Now your book is competing against every other book that’s being released, and every other organization that’s marketing. And you can’t outspend Coca-Cola, but you can use some of their methodology. So Coca-Cola is brilliant! I mean, they’ve been around for a 100 years. They’re brilliant at going, “Here’s a social problem and here’s our antidote.” So a couple of years ago they had a campaign called Open Happiness. What was going on around the world? People were more depressed than ever.

So Coca-Cola names a campaign as the antidote. When the race riots were happening in the US, and actually there’s a couple of different stories, they’ve done this numerous times. They actually started out being an antidote for housewives who were exhausted, right? It was a drink to energize housewives. And then it was the drink to nourish people in the war. Coca-Cola is brilliant at going, “This is what’s going on, so let’s be the antidote.”

So your book is an antidote. There’s a huge cost to organizations from these peak performers who are leaving in droves, especially women. There’s a cost to them, there’s a cost to our nation, but there’s also a cost to that beautiful person who is going home feeling exhausted all the time.

Knowing that, what words come to mind for you? How are you an antidote? And now this is another S – ‘Shift’. You’re creating a shift. So what changes because of your work? What is the antidote you offer?

Kelly: Shifting from a sense of burnout to a sense of energy and vitality, that you don’t leave your career, that you’ve invested too much in your career, but you have a vitality back again.

Louise: And what’s the value of vitality? What do people get when they get an employee who’s got a vitality?

Kelly: They’re engaged, they stay, they contribute.

Louise: Okay. Now tell me what they get, speak to me like you’re the CFO, what’s the value of an employee that stays?

Kelly: From a CFO’s point of view, profitability, sales, whatever the technical skill that they contribute. They actually do that right back when they first started working in the organisation as a bright spark.

Louise: And they’re probably not going to use bright sparks, because that language like that is too unicorn and rainbows. What would the CEO say about the shift that you’re making?

Kelly: We are contributing to culture, because the CEO looks at vision. So we’ve got the right people to their vision, they’ve got the smart people there.

Louise: So what is the value of smart? What happens when you lose all your smart people because they’re burned out?

Kelly: You lose market share, people’s brains are what contributes to organizations today.

Louise: So, ‘Stop Brain Burnout. Save your shareholder value’. Now that’s miles away from Ignite Your Bright Spark.

Well it might be an awesome title, it might not be. This is why you’re going to test. What I’m trying to give you is that eagle’s perspective: who is going to care about what you’re talking about? Who’s going to buy? Who’s going to go, “We need a 100 copies of that book. Every manager needs to read this book. Kelly needs to come in and do a keynote. We need her to do coaching training on how to recognize and prevent burnout, we need her program. It’s a $100,000 for three months, get her in here, go!” We need people to say, “Get Kelly”.

In order for people to say, “Get Kelly” you have to speak in the language that they are afraid of.

LISTEN TO or WATCH the whole conversation to hear more of Louise’s naming wisdom. 

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