Archive for September, 2006
Infect the Language for Fun and Entertainment!
Most of us who communicate for a living have found ourselves cursing the way language gets abused in the corporate world.
We’ve all seen how horrible words and phrases spread. One day someone told me he’d been “tasked with” something, and I thought, “What a strange, contorted way to say you’ve been asked to do [...]
By any other name
Missouri City, Texas, a suburb of Houston, has some problems. It’s not considered a particularly desirable location; its main roads are a morass of not-too-high-end chain stores and restaurants; it’s not attracting any particularly interesting development. And so city leaders are thinking the solution is to change the name of the city.
Some of the motivation [...]
Brand Loyal
As marketing professionals, we’re all concerned with keeping our customers brand-loyal. Good customers buy more stuff. They act as references. They know you, and – here’s hoping – like you.
But we all keep hearing that brand loyalty is a thing of the past. That what matters most is cost. Or novelty. Or both.
What’s a marketer [...]
Timing
Certainly, the e-coli spinach crisis is not a lot of laughs - especially for the victims. (Nor is the likely underlying story about the dangers of agri-business going to be either.) Marketers of healthy/healthful foods will have their challenges recovering from this (although of course there will be plenty of opportunities here as well).
But I [...]
Word Inflation
Remember a few years ago when every product and service became a “solution?” You no longer bought laundry detergent, you got a garment cleaning solution. You didn’t just buy clothes, you bought a wardrobe solution!
Okay, I’m exaggerating, but just a little. ”Solutions” are so much sexier than products, so everyone suddenly was explaining why what they sold was a [...]
A Stroll Down Preso Memory Lane
In olden times – say, fifteen or twenty years ago - when a sales or marketing person was going to give a presentation, they had a couple of options: 35 mm. slides, flip-charts, or overheads.
Slides looked great. Someone actually designed them for you. They even used color and graphics. Unfortunately, they were expensive to create [...]
Web 2.0 Buzzword Bingo
The world is abuzz with talk about Web 2.0. Everyone wants to have a Web 2.0 business model and Web 2.0 applications and be talking about how their activities are part of the Web 2.0 mindset.
While it’s always interesting to watch buzzwords take route and - occasionally - become useful words, this one is [...]
Blogs Influence IT Purchasing
KnowledgeStorm and Universal McCann have released a study of IT professionals that finds that they read blogs and get technology information from them, and that they use RSS. This isn’t exactly a surprising finding, but it is interesting to see someone trying to measure blog readership in a specific business demographic.
Syndication technologies (RSS and Atom) [...]
We Clean Blinds
I have rarely if ever worked for a company with products that are easy to explain. My products have tended to be complex and/or required a new way of working (and we all know how much people like change) and/or they were so high-priced that, no matter that no amount of explanation could help the [...]
Vote Often and Early
I just voted (primary election) and with all the money that gets spent on elections, I have to admit that my favorite political marketing tool is still the good, old-fashioned sign. Maybe because it’s so low-tech and yesterday, maybe because I’ve been a sign holder plenty of times, I love seeing the “visibilities” (people standing [...]
