Archive for October, 2007
What is it you guys do again?
In the course of my travels, I came across a web site that had a name similar to that of the company I was really looking for.
I paused for a moment to try to figure out what exactly this company did. Well, that was quite a pause - and it wasn’t exactly the pause that [...]
Marketing Delusion: "They Love Our Ads!"
Over at Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba rightly calls out self-absorbed marketers who think the world just wants more ads. The quote, from a Yankee Group analyst, is too great not to share:
“The day is coming when wireless users will experience nirvana scenarios — mobile ads tied to your individual behavior, what you [...]
Silliness and its Metaphors
Metaphors are useful. People often think in metaphoric terms, so a well chosen metaphor can help someone understand a concept quickly and clearly in a way that long-winded explanations often cannot.
But there’s a danger to metaphors; no metaphor really provides a complete explanation of anything, but it’s a human tendency to stretch them a bit [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #1
Pragmatic Marketing has a very astute set of Product Management rules for technology marketing. (What they call Product Management has a mega-overlap with what I consider Product Marketing, by the way. But in some companies - especially smaller ones - there is no separate product marketing role.)
I’m going to be working my way through Pragmatic’s [...]
Your Right to be a Pain in the Ass
When the federal Do Not Call registry came into being, it was a long-overdue victory for consumers. While telemarketing trade associations predicted dire consequences if they were not allowed to annoy people who do not want to hear from them and do not want to buy anything from them over the phone, consumers were utterly [...]
Fake News Notes
An interesting pair of stories…
Fake Steve Jobs (Forbes writer Daniel Lyons) has been giving the One Laptop Per Child project a hard time on his parody blog (which is actually one of the funniest commentaries on both Apple and the rest of the Silicon Valley crowd you can find). And so someone from OLPC’s PR [...]
Rally round the team
As I’ve said before, and I will no doubt say again, there are few marketers as deft as those marketing professional sports teams. Maybe because I live in a city with big league teams. Maybe because I live in a city that’s got a particular affinity for its big league teams. Maybe because these folks [...]
Humanize Your Email
So much marketing email is written in the dreadful “Hi, I’m a corporation!” voice. Apart from being a bit painful to read, it blows a big opportunity to make a connection with the recipient and thereby increase the chances that they will respond in some way (for example, visiting your site, making a purchase, signing [...]
Followup: CBS Doesn’t Get It
A quick followup to yesterday’s discussion of free content…
Mark Cahill at Vario Creative linked to a YouTube clip from CBS News about buzz marketing. It’s a good little report. As I clicked the link to YouTube, wondering why he didn’t just embed it in his post, I got an immediate answer to my question:
CBS News [...]
Do you really value me as a customer? (Or do you just love me for my money????)
Mary Schmidt has one of her usual goodies on the care and feeding of customers, and you might want to head on over to Mary’s to take a look at it. (Here’s where to find it.) To summarize, she writes about a recent experience with Am-Ex, which has generously gifted her with an “almost” [...]
