“Good products and services are like brushing your teeth. You’re expected to do it every day. You don’t get extra credit.” — paraphrasing Geoffrey Moore

We don’t talk about companies that we like. We don’t talk about companies that deliver quality service, day in and day out, for a reasonable price. We expect that. You’ve never called a friend and said “Did you know that Ritz hotels are really nice?” You need to give people a reason to talk about you. Word of mouth starts with the topic of conversation. (It doesn’t start with a MySpace page or a viral video). Bland companies never give us a reason to talk, so we don’t talk about them.

There are seven emotions that cause someone to make a recommendation:

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When we set out to build BzzAgent in late 2001, we wanted to build the first WOM brand. Not the first brand built by WOM, as that’s happened hundreds of times, but the first brand that stood for WOM. So, we created a cute name, a memorable bee logo and came up with snappy copy about hives and honeycombs.

The Bee Logo, the cornerstone of our brand, was developed to near perfection in under an hour, but we spent days refining it. He looked terribly upset. We messed with his forward-arching eyebrows, but every variation made it look like our bee was high on ecstasy, so the glowering low eyebrow look stuck.Whenever anyone told us the bee looked irritated, we responded by saying, “he’s not angry, he’s just determined.” Our brand was memorable, sure; but without even realizing it, the germ of our personality had begun.
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More than six months ago as I was in the midst of writing Personality Not Included I thought about all the great stories I was hearing from people and how interesting it would be to hear them all in their own words - as opposed to just shared in my voice as many of them are in the book. As I interviewed more and more people for the book, the idea for this site emerged. The Personality Project is a group blog which will feature contributed blog posts from authors, founders, bloggers, artists, and many others all about the topic of personality in business and why it matters. In some cases, you will read stories that the contributors have never shared anywhere else. In others, you will get a deeper look at what has made a particular brand or organization successful today. Ultimately, The Personality Project will share these voices over the next year - two per week every Tuesday and Thursday. So subscribe to the RSS feed or by email, or just bookmark the site to return to. I guarantee you will learn a lot along the way.

Here is a list of the first ten contributors:

1. Rohit Bhargava (the post you’re reading!)
2. Dave Balter (CEO/Founder of BzzAgent)
3. Tony Hseing (CEO/Founder of Zappos.com)
4. Yvonne Lembi-Detert (CEO/Founder of Personality Hotels)
5. Premal Shah (President of Kiva.org)
6. Sharelle Klauss (CEO & Founder, DRY Soda)
7. Amit Gupta (Founder of PhotoJojo)
8. Larry Smith (Editor & Founder, SMITH Magazine)
9. John Bell (Head of Ogilvy 360 Digital Influence)
10. Andy Sernovitz (Author, Co-Founder of WOMMA)

These will be published over the next few weeks, and I will also be sharing the next 10 contributors signed onto the project on the first of every month (so the next ten will be announced on May 1st) on the Personality Matters Blog (the official blog for the book). You can read a bit more about the team behind this effort on the About page, but we have already invited more than half of the contributors to the project and will be seeking out others over the coming months. If you know someone who you think could have a great point of view to share here, check out the Join the Project page for more details on how to nominate them. Personality is the difference between good brands and great ones … and this site will give you an inside look at the power of personality through the stories of some of the people who have managed to use it effectively already to build their brands.