Archive for the Marketing Category

Adjectives mean you don’t know. Adverbs mean you are lying.

Okay, maybe that’s a bit of an exaggeration. We all use adjectives and adverbs when we write, and it doesn’t always mean we’re ignorant or lying. And of course all adjectives and adverbs aren’t bad. But clear ideas are best expressed primarily through nouns.

Marketing as therapy

We’re all familiar with the importance of marketing and its role in the enterprise. Mainly, good marketing helps increase revenue and decrease costs. But there are other uses, especially in transforming a company’s culture.

Make sure that your Web site is your marketing hub

In the current business climate, human marketing resources are under threat. They are too hard to manage and too expensive. At the same time, clients and potential clients are demanding more and more interaction with your company. If you were to nurture all these leads with human beings, it would cost too much. So, what [...]

Push the Limits on Print

One thing that I encourage clients and agencies to do is to take advantage of all the print techniques that are available. Too many times, whether it be because they are in a rush or it just slips their minds, designers and creative directors opt for more typical printing methods: four-color process on the standard [...]

Should you give up on market research? What the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle teaches us

It’s a common goal of marketers to start projects with research. (Well, most people want to, but they seldom do it. That’s a topic for another time). The idea is that, armed with some measurements of the audience’s attitudes, needs, and so on, we will have a better chance at structuring a successful solution. It’s [...]

The Masters - Protecting a Brand

I went to the Masters Golf Tournament this week in Augusta, GA. I could go on and on about the tournament itself, but I’ll just talk about branding for the purposes of this blog. We can talk golf in another blog elsewhere.

Do you have a ‘trampoline site’?

Do you own the compelling content on your web site? One of the key things that you want to make sure of when developing a site is that the most interesting information on your site lives on your site. That is, don’t have lots of links from your site to other sites. Chances are [...]

Does Your Marketing Need an Oil Change?

I recently overheard a conversation between neighbors chatting about a local mechanic’s shop. The people were complaining about how this particular local mechanic tried to upsell them on additional services and charged them $100 just to turn off their engine light without even fixing the issue. It seems that this mechanic is known in the [...]

Can marketing save your company?

This is an age of smaller budgets and greater expectations. So great that I routinely hear clients talk as if some new marketing program or initiative will save their company. Is this possible?

Don’t be a holographic marketer

A hologram contains every piece of image information in every piece of the hologram. Are you trying to do the same thing with your marketing?