Archive for July, 2007
A Brand from Beyond the Grave
The New York Times has an article about the Robert Ludlum business. Although the writer died six years ago, his new books keep appearing.
They’re not, of course, written by him; others write them and they are marketed as part of a Ludlum franchise.
Twelve Ludlum books have been released since his death, with a 13th due [...]
Satisfaction: Diving into a Market Research Project
As a marketer, there are few things that are as satisfying to me as learning about a new industry.
Okay, I can’t give away the industry I’m poking around in, but I’ve been completely immersed recently in helping a client figure out what needs to be on their product roadmap, and how they should get there: build [...]
In Praise of Ugliness
Gerry McGovern at Giraffe Forum recently wrote about the beauty of ugly websites that work, using RyanAir as an example. Gerry’s point:
When I ask people to look at a website like Ryanair their instinctive reaction is often to say that it is ugly. If you ask most people to look at the most successful websites, [...]
Crate&Barrel Full o’ Catalogues
I like getting catalogues.
Yes, I know that they’re tree killers.
But I still like looking through them. Paging through a catalogue, you can find all kinds of stuff your wouldn’t realize you “needed” if you were doing purposeful shopping online.
I like getting catalogues.
The people in my building get a lot of catalogues.
There are six units [...]
Spam and Statistics
Mark Cahill at Vario Creative has an interesting post on spam and web statistics, and raises some great questions about how we interpret web stats:
One trend I’ve been seeing in web traffic would suggest that a good percentage of the web traffic we see in our reports is bogus as well. I attribute this [...]
This is not a bill. (Marketers beware.)
A while back, I wrote about a couple of overseas companies that send things that look suspiciously like bills for something that’s made to sound suspiciously like a trademark registration service.
Just the other day, I received a missive from the Domain Listing Service Corp. that also looked suspiciously like a bill.
When I opened it up, [...]
Furry Money 2
Apologies for the light blogging - all I can say after spending a week and a half with a new puppy in the house is, “How do people manage to have children?” It’s amazing how a little creature who can’t relieve himself without help and needs supervision can eat up your spare time.
With that [...]
The Seven Habits of Effective Marketers
A lot of people have covered this ground, I’m quite sure. In fact, I just googled and there are a number of folks who have already borrowed from Steven Covey’s Seven Habits brand with respect to marketers. So I’m not being very original here at all. But I also haven’t cheated and looked at what [...]
Country Store, Take Me Home
I am a complete sucker for the catalogues that come regularly from the Vermont Country Store, and have, in fact, blogged about my affection for them while back. I don’t order tons of stuff from them, but I do have more than a few ”practical and hard to find” things from the store. (But shoot me if [...]
Monkey Business
I had to chuckle when I read this on Steve Rubel’s blog, under a picture of a monkey on a treadmill with a breathing apparatus attached to him:
All of this leads me to the photo above. The Web 2.0 construction boom is bigger now than it ever was. Techcrunch, Scobleizer and Mashable leave me all [...]
