If you’ve been on Facebook the last couple of days you’ve probably seen the post gone viral about yanny and laurel. I’m not going to go into the logistics of how all of this went viral, you can read that story here. However, what you need to know for the purposes of branding your interior design firm, is that scientists have an explanation for why each of us hears something different. The audio clip is known as an “ambiguous figure”. Like Rubin’s Vase, it’s an optical illusion.

I booked a reservation at the Mezzanine, inside the new Los Angeles outpost of the popular, New York, hotel The Nomad, and was greeted by a recorded message in a British accent. Apparently a 2015 poll of 11,000 people in 24 cities around the world, showed that a British accent is the most attractive in the world. Sociolinguists say that our perception of accents has to do more with social and cultural associations than it does with the actual sound.

They’re not new, these conversations we’ve been having about Houzz and online design services and fees. Nor is it new that some trade vendors, on the defensive, have undercut designer pricing because they can’t figure out their place in the market and because they’re afraid. Everyone deserves to earn a living. But there is definitely a new kind of undercurrent in the ether. Can you feel it? A tipping point that has a lot of designers saying, enough.

The marketing trend train moves quickly. Whether it’s Facebook live or podcasts, affiliate marketing, e-books or Instagram, I notice too many designers spinning their wheels and trying to catch up to promises made about how these tools will deliver business results fast, or my personal favorite, create passive income. Aside from the fact that passive income is usually linked to very active online infrastructure setup and content creation now, you have to ask yourself, is this fun for me?

A designer recently told me that she wasn’t interested in more business; that she had enough business and that she didn’t need to build a list to market to her ideal client. She knew where her ideal client was. Some designers are determined to get in their own way. But here’s what I’d like to remind you.

Customization is not a new trend. Research shows that millennials expect to be treated as individuals and are looking for brands that offer personalized products and experiences. As the marketplace shifts to cater to them, manufacturers are shifting too. At least some of them are and depending on your audience, that’s a good thing.

You may be quoted in the New York Times and get a flow of eyeballs to your website—maybe if the quote was that good—but was it in the right context? Will the right client invest in your services because of it? Or is it a fluff piece that diminishes your credibility? Similarly, not all online referral hubs and blogs are created equal.

By now you may have read the article in Architectural Digest’s online edition with the lede “This Is How Much the Average American Spends on a Kitchen Renovation.”

#WOW

I think it’s pretty safe to say that the picture of the renovated kitchen they used to tease the article…

Have you ever considered that your plans, strategies, way-of-getting-things-done are what are holding you back from getting what you want? Wait, what?

You’ve made the decision to go after something. You have a plan. You start to execute said plan and then something goes wrong, very wrong. In fact, it seems like that thing you want is even farther away than when you started.

Research shows that it doesn’t matter what your values are. The point is that you have them, because when your entire company is aligned around those values, it becomes more powerful.