Archive for November, 2007
Open Season on Political Logos: Republicans
On Wednesday, I posted my opinion on the logos being used by the Democratic presidential candidates. In the interest of providing fair and balanced opinionated marketing, here goes for the Republicans (shown in alphabetical order, by last name).
Nice. I like the type face, the simple design, and lucky Rudy he’s a household, first-name word.
And not [...]
Starbucks Hits the Airwaves
Over at Church of the Customer Blog, Jackie Huba writes about the first television ad campaign by Starbucks. You can see the spots here.
Jackie mentions the slight decline in store visits and asks:
Is that because Starbucks has finally reached a saturation point? Or is it more complicated, the result of a series of decisions that [...]
Open Season on Political Logos: Democrats
Having just done some new logo work with a client, I’ve become more “logo aware”, and have been sizing up the logos (or bumper stickers) for the presidential candidates.
I was going to do a logo appraisal of all the candidates at once, but they’re are still too darn many of them. So I thought I’d [...]
Stop, Thief!
Dwight Silverman at the Houston Chronicle writes about how he had to call Microsoft and reactivate his copy of Vista because he made too many hardware changes to the machine it was running on. The twist is that it was a virtual machine (he’s running Vista virtually on a Mac) and one of the benefits [...]
Pragmatic Marketing Rule #8
This is the eighth in a series of posts on Practical Product Management Rules from Pragmatic Marketing.
Rule #8: Your opinion, although interesting is irrelevant.
As marketers, we’ve all had to put up with the “everyone’s an expert” syndrome, in which people feel free to second guess and take pot shots at everything we do.
Unveil the new [...]
Attack of the Blog Scrapers
Like most bloggers, I try to keep track of who’s linking to us here at The Opinionated Marketers. And in the last few weeks, the number of “blog scrapers” - spam blogs that lift our content, run it in whole or part, sometimes with a link and sometimes not, usually with incorrect or no attribution [...]
‘Tis the Season - isn’t it?
And so, sometime in the next day or so, the really serious business of Christmas Shopping begins.
I already hate the vacuous woman in the Lowe’s ad - or is it Home Depot - who pantomimes the garland, and the dancing turkey, the giant inflatable snow globe, the ornament hooks.
I’ve already seen enough of the Christmas [...]
Helping shorten the sales cycle
I have a client with a relatively high cost, enterprise level software product - and the usual attendant lllloooooonnnngggg sales cycle. I’ve lived through this before, and every time I end up scratching my head and asking myself just what marketing can do to help shorten the sales cycle.
Sometimes these things just have to run [...]
Real Estate Greenwashing
Greenwashing - the practice of doing something that makes you sound environmentally responsible, but really doesn’t amount to much - is not new, but Houston-area real estate blog Swamplot pointed out a new twist on it: an Arizona-based real estate developer is planning new “sustainable” communities around the Houston area. Except, well, there’s a problem:
Why [...]
Good customers often behave badly
Your best customers are sometimes the ones who give you headaches. Consider this survey of music piracy in Canada:
The researchers conclude that that people who download more music actually buy more CDs. They report: “We estimate that the effect of one additional P2P download per month is to increase music purchasing by 0.44 CDs per [...]
