CAN’T BUY ME LOVE
The article you just knew was coming to the mainstream marketing world arrived last week: The Buying And Selling Of Fake Followers. [1] Yes, there are multiple online sources for buying social media likes, fans and followers. And it’s cheaper than attracting them the old-fashioned way. [...]
THE ANGELS & DEMONS OF STARTUP
Whether your new business is Facebook or bake-your-own-granola kits, you are about to learn that the startup process is both very real-worldly—and not in the reality show sense—and very other-worldly. There are demons. There’s a bottom-feeding industry out there making it even tougher for the [...]
WEEKEND WITH AUNTIE E
Last weekend I had an unsettling afternoon visit with my usually delightful Auntie E. I introduced her to you a while back (THE GRACIOUSNESS OF "NO"). She turned 94 this spring, and it is with real sadness that I must admit she is slipping. We [...]
DECISION SIMPLICITY
A few months back Harvard Business Review (yes, but bear with me on this—HBR will seem like sissy stuff by the time we’re through all the references here) published an article that puts older marketing thinking in current context: “To Keep Your Customers, Keep It [...]
EINSTEIN, THE GREATEST CREATIVE
I'm not a fan of reposting the work of others without at least trying to move the thinking behind it farther along, but earlier this month I came across an article in Advertising Age that I loved titled, "Albert Einstein Would Have Been a [...]
THE TRUTH ABOUT WHAT WORKS* IN DIGITAL* MARKETING
In an alluringly-titled but complicated article published in Advertising Age last week [1], there is good news: Yes, Martha, digital does sell soap. Then, the asterisks and qualifiers start. But even in these, there is interesting learning. The general focus here is what the world’s biggest marketing [...]
THE RISE OF THE A$$HOLE
Reading Walter Isaacson’s best-selling authorised biography of Steve Jobs, released just after Jobs’ death in early October, 2011, was a surprise for me. Over the years, I’d had heard through the media (like everyone) of Jobs’ arrogance, but I figured he certainly earned some bragging [...]
WHAT RIM NEEDS TO DO NOW
My answer to this question started off as a tweet, but once again, the density of thought (see MW post DENSITY OF THOUGHT) required by the twitter medium escaped me. Forgive me. First of all, some perspective. We should acknowledge that very successful companies often experience [...]
A TALE OF THREE MARKETING JOURNALS
There is no denying it—February is one weird month. It starts with that truly odd North American phenomenon called Groundhog Day. I mean the “real” Groundhog Day, the annual event with the distinctly off-side Teutonic thread running through it, held in more than a dozen [...]
MOBILE, THE NEXT NEWEST THING
I’ve been avoiding talking about mobile marketing here for a while now. Not sure why that is, but it could be because I don’t feel like I’m done talking about social media yet. Or maybe it’s because when I went to tackle the subject 18 [...]
STEVE NASH IS… TOYOTA
As a business and marketing tool, celebrity endorsement is a double-edged sword, much like humour is (see MW post WIELDING THE SWORDS OF HUMOUR). The difference is that the cost, and therefore the stakes, for celebrity endorsement is usually much higher than they are for [...]
IDLE HANDS SPEAK SOCIAL MEDIA TRUTH
Things are clearly a bit slow (or depressing, or both) over in the creative department at Tribal DDB New York. Slow enough that they had the time to create the Wheel of Concept, Digital Edition. Take a spin by clicking here. Funny it is, but [...]
HOW TO RUN A MARKETING PARTNER REVIEW
I've been exposed to the full spectrum of review processes over the years, from sticking-needles-in-your-eyes to OMG-what-a-wonderful-relationship-that-would-be. Here's what I believe works best for all parties. Keep your list of participants as small as possible. A short list of three is ideal. If you can, [...]
HOW TO AVOID A RELATIONSHIP REVIEW
You avoid a relationship review by having a relationship review. Let me be more specific: You avoid the big, formal competitive business relationship review (which the agency world so colourfully, albeit inaccurately, calls the gang bang) by having regular little reviews along the way. These [...]
YOU LIKE ME? REALLY?
Advertising Age and the Ipsos Observer people released new research [1] in mid-February that sought to better understand the social media habits of US consumers. To no one’s surprise, Facebook is the dominant social network through which users want to receive communications from marketers. Nearly 75% [...]
CHIRPING FROM THE CHEAP SEATS
Please allow me to re-visit what is now very old news in the social media world. Somehow I missed it when it happened. Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author of significant acclaim, wrote an article which appeared in The New Yorker magazine’s October 2010 issue titled: [...]
SURPRISES & NOT FROM THE MEDIA WORLD
It makes sense to be forward-looking at the beginning of the year. Some of what I learned in researching-up for this topic was a surprise to me, and some of it, luckily, actually made sense: 1. Where Online Media is Going It’s always discussed with [...]
WIELDING THE SWORDS OF HUMOUR
Humour in marketing. No weapon in the marketers’ arsenal is as potentially powerful and so often misused. At the most simplistic level, humour in marketing works like this: If an ad makes us smile, we like the ad and the brand too. I get the [...]
REVISION TO: THINKING OUTSIDE THE GRID
I hate it when truth gets in the way of a good story. I recently had a long and interesting chat with the senior marketing person at Audi Canada during the period I wrote about in an Oct 5th post on this blog. Now I need to revise my [...]
THINKING OUTSIDE THE GRID
Marketing gurus and practitioners are constantly talking about how vitally important it is to project a consistent brand image. And it is. Everyone understands this best at the literal level, which has resulted in the creation and enforcement of corporate or brand identity guidelines. These can [...]