Archive for October, 2006
That’s Entertainment
I actually like John Mellencamp’s new song This Is Our Country (I’m actually listening to it while blogging). To me, it strikes a nice patriotic note without being jingoistic, divisive, obnoxious, strident, or pig-headed. So I wasn’t disappointed to see John M opening last night’s World Series game with it even though… hey, just wait [...]
On the Wings of Dove
This is a must-view for anyone who has young daughters, nieces, friends… It’s been getting quite a bit of play this last week, but the first place I saw it was on Marketing Profs. The post (and accompanying video) show quite graphically how the advertising world creates an untrue and unattainable image of ‘beauty’ that’s [...]
Now That’s Some Niche Marketing
Finding an underserved niche to focus your marketing efforts on is often a good idea, but I’m not sure this one will be successful: a German businessman is launching SMINTAIR, which stands for Smokers International Airline:
SMINTAIR reinstates the liberty of smoking in all seats. Non-smokers will find the cabin air more refreshing than on any [...]
"The ‘We’ Mentality" - Technology Division
One of the challenges that technology marketers have - especially when the technology is not cool consumer “stuff”, but behind the scenes software and services sold to developers or IT - is how to build the type of allegiance that results in The “We” Mentality that Spike Jones is writing about over on Marketing Profs. [...]
Customer Service, Please! I’d like more responsibility.
I’m dealing with an incident I had with a laptop battery (More on this in a future post; we’ll see how it all turns out.), and have been doing some personal research on this most recent laptop battery recall and the incidents that led up to it. I must say, I applaud Dell in how [...]
Getting Started With Syndication (Part 3): Create Personalized News with Custom Feeds
In Part 1 of this series I provided an overview of web syndication with RSS and Atom, and in Part 2 I talked about the various feed readers you can use to keep track of frequently-updated web content.
While these technologies provide a great value to you by helping you keep up with blogs and [...]
Word of Mouth at Internet Speed
Word of mouth has always been a factor in business success. These days, though, the Internet has given us word of mouth on steroids. We had an instructive case of this in Houston this week. (I have no business with anyone involved.)
On Wednesday morning, Sabrina Farber of Garden Guy, a landscaping business in Houston, wrote [...]
Turning a Sales Call into a Sales & Marketing Call
The other day, I went on a sales call with a client of mine. We have a new product coming out, and we’re looking for beta customers. The company we called on was a bull’s eye: They’re in our “first choice” target market. They’re still using a manual approach to the process our product automates. [...]
Citgo Responds to a Boycott
What do you do when your company is the target of a boycott? That’s a question that Citgo is facing right now; the company is owned by the Venezuelan national oil company, and since Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez has been running around calling President Bush “Satan,” the company has become the target of a boycott. [...]
Incompetence. Delivered.
I’m beginning to think that if you want to find an example of the worst practice for any marketing or communications activity, you need only look to telecom giant AT&T.
They are the local phone company here in Houston. Recently I wrote about my experience with their email marketing: if, when you place an order [...]
