Wonderfuel Issue Number 24 – Stratejoy, the ridiculously unserious strategy for a more joyful life

Your fortnightly joy spark to kick the week where it hurts and remind you that joy isn’t something you find, it’s something you make. No pressure, no preaching. Just one mischievous moment to shake off the grey and get your grin back. Ready for some more wonderfuel?

We tend to treat joy as the prize at the end. Work hard. Achieve more. Earn more. Get somewhere. Then we’ll be happy.

My idea of stratejoy flips that beautifully on its head. Joy isn’t what happens when you win. Joy is how you win. And even more profound still, joy is why you win.

Because when you deliberately put more of the things that energise you, excite you, connect you and make you feel alive into your everyday life i.e. more joy,  something interesting happens. The bad stuff gets way less noticeable.

That’s stratejoy.

Not taking stuff away and trying to simplify life. But adding one thing and one thing only.

Joy.

More of it.

On purpose.

Or, as someone rather wise once said:

Whoever has the most fun, wins.

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// Quote of the fortnight //

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// The Joy Workout//

So I had an idea.

The Joy Workout

Because a workshop says “I know something and I’m going to teach you” but a workout says “we’re all doing this together”. So let’s call it a collective exploration of joy.

Different people. Different perspectives. One joyful hour. One question.

What brings you joy?

No presentations, no gurus and bloody PowerPoint.

Just interesting humans having interesting conversations about one of the most important feelings we’ve got.

You don’t need to be an expert in joy, you just need to be curious about it.

Because none of us has joy completely worked out, so let’s work it out together.

I’m looking for fellow joy mongerers to join me for the very first “Joy Workout”

Fancy joy working out with me? Here is the link.

I’ll see you in the joynasium this Thursday 17th Sept - 16.00pm GMT.

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// The founder diary //

At the start of last summer, I found myself in the “Hot Seat” during a business masterclass. In front of 30 other business owners, my mentor grilled me about Wonderment, what it stood for and who it was for.

He destroyed it. Pretty much everything. All the joyful stuff that I’d built Wonderment around needed to go. Instead, I should focus on people businesses like HR and recruitment and become the branding agency that specialised in that sector.

I came off the call feeling like I’d had the heart ripped out of my business and, if I’m being truthful, a little bit out of me too.

Enter stage left, my good friend, the wonderful Emily Penny of BeColourful, who luckily arrived at exactly the right time with a much-needed reality check. Fresh from her Fully Saturated creative agency positioning audit, Emily told me that nobody in the agency world was really owning joy. More importantly, she told me that joy was me. It was how I thought, how I worked and how I made people feel. I shouldn’t be moving away from it, or even just leaning into it. I should be jumping towards it with both feet.

It reminded me of something that happened when I was 23. My then-idol Uncle Bill, an Art Director, told me never to pursue a career as a creative. Thankfully, I ignored him and followed my heart. More than 30 years later, I’m rather pleased I did.

So what if, all those years later, I needed to do exactly the same thing again? What if the business guru had got it wrong and Emily was right? What if joy wasn’t the fluffy bit around the edges of Wonderment that needed removing to make it more commercially sensible, but the whole bloody point?

Just over a year later, you’re reading my newsletter about joy. My blog is now a Joynal. I’ve spoken at a conference and on a podcast about joy, launched another business with joy at its heart and, perhaps most ridiculously and excitingly of all, started writing a book about my own journey with joy or my joyney, as I now call it.

There’s probably a lesson in there somewhere. Listen to people. Learn from people. Seek advice from people who know things you don’t. But never assume somebody else knows you better than you know yourself, because sometimes the thing someone tells you to throw away might just be the very thing that makes you, you.

In the words of Frank Sinatra, “I did it my way.”

I’m still doing it my way. And I fully intend to keep doing it my way.

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// The joyful brand – Scrub Daddy //

Scrub Daddy didn’t reinvent the sponge.

They reinvented how we feel about one.

Because let’s face it, there aren’t many products less joyful than a kitchen sponge. For years, the category behaved exactly as you’d expect. Functional. Practical. Lots of talk about scrubbing power, absorbency and getting tough on grease.

Then Scrub Daddy came along and put a smile on it. Literally.

A ridiculously simple move that turned one of the most mundane objects in the house into something with personality. And the smile isn’t just there to look happy. You can stick your fingers through the eyes for extra grip and use the mouth to clean both sides of a spoon. You are welcome.

Joyful and useful. My favourite combination.

But that little smile also became the starting point for an entire brand world, spilling into its packaging, products and brilliantly silly social content. Scrub Daddy behaves less like a cleaning brand and more like something created to entertain you.

They haven’t made washing up joyful. Let’s not get carried away. But they have made the experience around it more playful, memorable and a little less mundane. Because you don’t need an exciting product to create an exciting brand. Sometimes the biggest opportunity for joy is hiding in the places nobody thinks to look.

Even at the bottom of the kitchen sink.

That’s the joy of Scrub Daddy.

And a shout-out to Scrub Mummy. Because we all know Daddy isn’t doing all that scrubbing on his own.

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// From the archives – Canine Paradise //

Canine Paradise was a premium doggy hotel and spa built around a lovely positioning: Expertly Loving Animals.

Because looking after someone’s dog isn’t simply about feeding them, walking them and giving them somewhere comfortable to sleep. You’re being trusted with a member of the family.

So the identity needed to feel premium enough to reflect the quality of the experience, without becoming so polished that it lost the warmth, personality and slightly hairy reality of its guests.

I created a simple dog marque with a heart quite literally at its centre, then built the wider identity around beautiful photography, natural textures and the wonderfully individual coats of the dogs themselves.

Because ultimately, Canine Paradise wasn’t really selling somewhere for your dog to stay.

It was selling the feeling that while you were away, they were somewhere they’d absolutely bloody love to be.

Turns out, every dog really can have its day.

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// Word of the fortnight – Scatterjoy™ //

I stumbled across this quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson recently:

“There is no beautifier of complexion, or form, or behavior, like the wish to scatter joy and not pain around us.”

It was the word scatter that got me. There’s something brilliantly generous about it. Scatter suggests you’re not being too precious about your joy. You’re chucking it around. Leaving little bits of it in conversations, meetings, ideas, work and with the people you bump into along the way.

And that got me thinking about the word scatterbrain. I’ve probably been called one of those a few times in my life. But I think I’d much rather be a Scatterjoy. Someone who deliberately leaves things a little more joyful than they found them.

It also connects beautifully with the motto I’ve lived by for years: Whoever has the most fun, wins.

I’ve never meant that as whoever arses around the most wins. Fun, for me, is energy. It changes the atmosphere. It makes people more open, more curious and more willing to join in. And when you bring that kind of energy into a room, a relationship, a piece of work or a business, it has a habit of spreading.

Which, I think, was Emerson’s point.

Joy isn’t something we should keep to ourselves. The really good stuff happens when we scatter it around. So there you have it. This week’s addition to the ever-growing Wonderment dictionary:

Scatterjoy.

Not a scatterbrain.

A Scatterjoy.

Whoever scatters the most joy, wins.

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// So, what’s this Wonderment thing all about then… //

The word Wonderment is what it sounds like. Something joyful, something wonderful that is meant, it is deliberate, it’s done on purpose. And that is my approach to branding. Transforming fundamental businesses into wondermental brands.

How I hear you ask?

The key to making a business more effective is to make it’s branding more affective. To create something that makes people utter “I love that brand”.

Click here to  see the pink guy dance?

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// And lastly, always remember… //

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