Legos sure have come a long way.
My son, who is ten, LOVES Legos (are there any 10-year old boys who do not love Legos??). Recently, he discovered an online program that allows users to build custom Lego sets.
3 hours after download, he had built several versions of the same custom car and had moved on to designing and building a virtual airplane of his own imagination. It is by far the one online site he returns to again and again.
Why? Because what he gets there is valuable. HE has control. HE gets what he wants.
I am captivated by what is truly emerging as a significant trend these days. Not only is this trend showing up in online Lego catalogs, but also in all sorts of industries. From design-your-own Nikes to the custom jeans Lands End offered a few years back to the fast food jingles that tell us we can have it “our way,” the trend of customization is all around us, and it is driving much of what we see happening on the Internet and particularly in the Internet Marketing arenas.
It’s a great lesson for all of us building our Personal Brands online.
Think about it. Which blogs and websites do you visit most often? The ones that give you what you want. The ones that touch your emotions, or inspire you, or teach you something that makes your life better. You want a combination of something familiar and unique, something that feels comfortable yet gives you the chance to grow in some way, or reflect, or create.
The bottom line is: people want Quality. We want something Unique. If given a choice, would you rather have a pre-fab home straight from the factory or a totally custom home built just for you with every bell and whistle you wanted?
Thought so. 🙂
With more and more people every day vying for a piece of the Online Real Estate Pie, and wanting to get their particular message out to as many people as possible, is it any wonder the cry for standing out from the crowd is ringing louder and louder with each passing year? In a world where so much is becoming uniformly bland and blurring together, people are hungry for originality, creativity, indeed, those very elements that make the human spirit unique from anything else out there, those elements that make us, well, Us…as opposed to the other 6+ billion people populating this tiny planet.
We are hungry for Customization.
People want to stand out, to be noticed, to define themselves as unique. Nowhere is this more evident than in Internet Marketing. While we love being a part of something bigger than ourselves, and need, to a degree, the homogenization social networks and communities provide, at the same time we also need to be the one-of-a-kind person we were born to be, which means finding some way of showing that to those in our inner and outer circles as we promote our one-dimensional businesses.
How will you customize your online presence today? What can you you add to your blog that will make it even more custom and unique? Would love to hear your thoughts!
What a wonderful analogy! It makes perfect sense too. 🙂
We do have the ability to create whatever our mind chooses. Paramount to living a life set in such a way that we are congruent with others and live a life of balance. Thanks for the reminders