Archive for April, 2008
Microsoft’s customer caricatures, for all the world to watch
By now everybody has seen the painful Microsoft sales “motivation” video about Vista SP1. Like most of these kinds of corporate videos, it’s hard to imagine provoking a response in its intended viewer other than a general feeling of malaise because one’s life has led to this moment. (If you haven’t seen it, go here [...]
Little guy customer service, revisited
It’s so refreshing when you a see a company get things right. The other day I wrote about how large companies are usually the wrong place to look for models of customer service. Just after that, I experienced another example of a small company beating the pants off of the big guys in quality of [...]
Sweating the Small Stuff
In general, "don’t sweat the small stuff" isn’t a bad way to live. If you obsess about every teensie-weensie little thing - did I just spell teensie-weensie right? - you’ll drive yourself nuts, and lose track of the "stuff" that really matters.
But in marketing, a lot of what we do ends up entailing a lot [...]
Steve Rubel on marketing pollution
Steve Rubel wrote last week about how bad marketing pollutes the social environment, calling it an all too convenient truth:
However, it’s not just the environment that is endangered by toxins. The atmosphere we breathe online is too is being threatened by pollution - from marketers. The all too convenient truth is that it’s very easy [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #5
This is the fifth in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #5: Focus on your sales process to anticipate the needs of the buyers and sales people.
For starters, I’ll ‘fess up that at points in my marketing career I’ve been as guilty as the next guy in [...]
Customer service: don’t be like the big guys. Please.
The other day I was part of a conversation about how small business want to offer the kinds of web functionality that the big guys have - online customers support and ordering, that sort of thing. It occurred to me later, though, that in my experience, small businesses tend to do a far better job [...]
Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
My daily walking route takes me by an upmarket boutique hotel. I’ve only been inside for drinks. And since I’m not generally willing to fork out $15 for a gin and tonic, the times I’ve been in there are few. The drink prices are in keeping with the rack rate, which is relatively steep by [...]
Competitive analysis requires hard, cold honesty
A relatively tangential line of one of Maureen’s posts last week caught my eye:
There’s also an interesting rundown on their picks of the best brands for 2007. Lots of overlap with the best marketers - and some interesting choices: is Blackberry really a stronger brand than Apple, or is it that Apple is considered a [...]
Spitting bullets at word-spotting
Let’s face it, I don’t know anybody who enjoys calling into a call center.
Yes, sometimes we’re calling to order something, and we generally get a very pleasant person - say , some nice women up in Maine who works for LL Bean is really trying to help me figure out whether the Swimming Pool blue [...]
What is a domain name worth? Not $2.6M
There’s just something very old fashioned about news that a Maryland man sold the domain “pizza.com” for $2.6 million.
There was a time when this made sense; securing great domains was the order of the day, and if you were Domino’s or Pizza Hut and you were about to launch your online presence, pizza.com would be [...]
