Archive for May, 2007
Competition can be a distraction
You’ve probably experienced the “keeping up with the Joneses” phenomenon. “Over at Acme, they’re running ads on Widgets Daily! That’s why they keep getting the business!” Or, “Why can’t we have a ten-city seminar tour like they do?” The general theme: their kick-ass marketing people are doing all the right things and you’re not, and [...]
Smelling Like a Mustang
It’s not as if none of my products have actually ever lent themselves to branding extensions and merchandising.
Years after Genuity’s Black Rocket fizzled out, some of the paraphernalia created for its launch is still available on the Level 3 Merchandise site. (I have one of those lunchboxes around here somewhere.) In our marketing-spending prime, we had all [...]
Channel Consistency, Front Line Empowerment, Customer Value
Companies have a tendency to organize themselves in ways that make operational sense but don’t make customer-facing sense. So a newspaper’s web site will operate separately from print operations, with different approaches to content; or online and retail operations will be two different silos with little consistency between them.
This can cause problems for customers, [...]
Why I Like Memorial Day
While it may seem like blasphemy coming from a marketer, one of the reasons I most like Memorial Day is because there is so little marketing hoopla associated with it.
I’m sure there are all sorts of Memorial Day sales going on - any hook to get people into the store or car lot and buy [...]
Weekend Odds & Ends
Happy holiday weekend (to US readers anyway). A few items of interest…
The sound of one Web 2.0 site clapping: A while back I wrote about the GORB, which struck me as one of the more obnoxious ideas to come down the pike: a place where you can leave anonymous criticism of people, indexed by their [...]
Mini-Roundup for May 25th
Over on the Vario Creative Blog, Mark Cahill had an interesting post early in the week that discussed journalism vs. blogging. His post was inspired by a recent blogosphere rumor in which the word was that Apple would be delaying its shipment of iPhones. The result was that Apple had a market cap loss of [...]
Fundamentals and Marketing - Take 2
Yesterday, John posted on what marketing can and cannot do, pointing out that marketing cannot do, pointing out that if there are fundamental operational flaws, all the marketing in the world can’t make up for it. He was writing about phone and cable companies, but it got me thinking about a situation I found myself [...]
Speaking of Service
I’m on hold with Delta Airlines right now. Our family has gotten together on the west coast, and my parents would really like to use their miles to upgrade their flights home to first class. There was no obvious way to do that on the web site, so we called them.
After getting through a [...]
Fundamentals and Marketing
Marketing can help you address a lot of problems - low awareness, a product that doesn’t match market needs, lack of visibility, poorly understood sales channels, and so on. But sometimes marketing is supposed to overcome flaws in business fundamentals, and that rarely works. Consider this Business Week article on Cox Communications.
In the scramble for every customer, one cable [...]
Pitching Advice from Sean X
iMedia last week had an excellent cautionary post on how interactive agencies can go wrong when they make their pitches. It’s all sound advice, and much/all of it is applicable to sales pitches in general.
The article, 6 Ways to Blow a Pitch is by Sean X Cummings. Sean’s unholy six are:
Talk a lot about your agency [...]
