Archive for February, 2007
Fear and Loathing in Cupertino
Apple reveals its stunning cluelessness about the emerging user-controlled marketing environment with the latest attack of their flying lawyer monkeys: a bar in Des Moines running an “iPod Night” where people shared their iPod playlists was warned to cut it out.
“Please choose a name for your product that is consistent with Apple’s guidelines [...]
Pricing: The Oft-Ignored Marketing P
As marketers, most of us “get” the product-place-promote aspects of marketing, and a good deal of our time and energy focuses on these elements. Sometimes, however, we forget to give pricing equal time, and this is especially true for those of us who work with products and services that aren’t “off the shelf” and that aren’t sold [...]
Web 0.0 at United Airlines
Passwords are a pain in the neck. Having good password recovery on a site in a necessity.
I almost never fly United Airlines anymore - I live in Houston and Continental is almost always the best and cheapest way to get anywhere. But I have some miles with them, and when I got an email [...]
Executive Interviews and Sending the Right Message
Putting your executives in the public eye is a standard, and generally effective, PR technique. Some executives are more media-ready than others. I happened to hear one of the best executive media appearances I’ve come across in a long time while listening to a podcast of “Tech Tuesday” on the Kojo Nnamdi show from WAMU in [...]
I Hate Captcha
Can we crown captcha one of the most poorly-implemented spam prevention techniques ever?
What do you think is the right thing to type in for this captcha image?
If you said 5e3d18, you’re wrong.
This happens to me so often it’s not funny, and while I have my moments, I’m not an idiot. And I just [...]
Pimped Out John: Roto-Rooter’s Fresh Idea
What do you do with your product when it’s been around forever?What do you do when your product meets a need that while definitely necessary isn’t all that fun and exciting (and the details of which are quasi-unmentionable? What do you do when everybody’s heard of you, but that half of them know you by [...]
Should Marketing Feed Sales?
No, says Sirius Decisions (via dmnViews).
In business-to-business marketing, should sales get most of their leads from marketing? Market research firm Sirius Decisions recently benchmarked successful B-to-B marketers and found that “feeding sales” was NOT the optimal approach. Instead, marketing should focus on nurturing low-probability prospects.
I felt like I was listening to myself at any one of [...]
Email Newsletter Mistakes
Email newsletters aren’t exactly the most current marketing topic, but I think it was worthwhile for MarketingProfs to recycle an old piece on email newsletter mistakes. As I read it, I noticed that I still see many of these mistakes today - especially #4 (bad headers) and #5 (making it hard to unsubscribe).
As usual I have a [...]
Search marketing: B2C vs B2B
If you do business-to-business search marketing, this MarketingProfs article is worth a read. There’s lots of good stuff there (and it’s the first in a series) but there’s one great point I want to call out: the challenge of measuring conversion for B2B searchers:
While the ultimate goal of both B2C and B2B marketing is to create [...]
Credit Where It’s Not Due
Maureen wrote about those endless credit card offers that many of us get; like her, I am unimpressed (or even annoyed) by them. I dutifully shred them, and when they appear, I always think, I really need to call that bank and tell them to stop it. (I did this once; it worked.)
Now I’m getting a set of them [...]
