Archive for May, 2008
Marketing genius from Long Island City, NY
I love this sign. Read the whole thing.
Things change
Are you ready for a change in your market? Take a lesson from American automakers:
Automakers reported higher sales of small cars as oil and gasoline prices climbed to record highs in April, but said Thursday that overall vehicle sales in the United States plummeted during the month.
Sales decreased 29 percent from April 2007 at Chrysler, [...]
It was a beautiful day. Not a flogo in the sky.
People have been shooting special effects off in the sky since the Chinese decided that gunpowder had a secondary, peaceful use and ignited the first fireworks display 1000+ years ago.
I’ve always loved fireworks. And skywriting, which you don’t seem to see much anymore - or maybe I just don’t notice - but which was somewhat [...]
Who are those customers?
Who are your customers? If your organization is like most, that question may be hard to answer. I’ve worked at companies with fewer than 200 customers who had trouble coming up with a list of who they were, what products they used, and who the main contacts for each company were. And I’ve worked for [...]
In praise of customer service at Dunkin’ Donuts
I don’t "do" Starbucks.
Yes, I like and admire the fact that they give people a coffee-house-ish place to hang out.
I like that they offer Wi-Fi.
I like that they have a certain canned hip to them, and that they offer their workers benefits.
But I don’t "do" Starbucks.
I do Dunkin’ Donuts.
This is partially in support of [...]
Nobody ever did a taste test against RC Cola
Remember those old cola taste test ads, where some underdog drink (like RC Cola) would do a taste test to say, “See! We’re good! We’re really good!” They always did the tests against Coke and Pepsi, not the store brand cola or some other little-known drink. Why? Because they were the ones to beat.*
So I [...]
Effective Product Marketing Rule #7
This is the seventh in a series of posts on Pragmatic Marketing’s Effective Product Marketing Rules.
Effective Product Marketing Rule #7: Don’t confuse product positioning with program strategy and messaging.
I’ll take this in two parts.
The first part - don’t confuse positioning with program strategy - is pretty clear and straightforward.
Knowing who the audience for your product [...]
The corporate name game
Remember the Boston Garden? Candlestick Park? The Meadowlands? Names like that are a thing of the past; now it’s Fleet Center and USAirways Arena and 3Com Park and here in Houston, Minute Maid Park (formerly Enron Field!) and the Toyota Center (with a Tundra parking garage - I was thinking there should be a Prius [...]
If the Online Shoe Shopping Fits…
Because I have a somewhat odd shoe size - 10 AAA (recently widened from AAAA, but fortunately not lengthened) I order most of my shoes on line. This is a bit chancy, of course, but mostly I know what’s going to work and what’s not. And you can always send them back.
Last weekend, I spent [...]
Advertainment? Entertisement? Let’s call the whole thing off.
What do you do when people get really good at ignoring ads? You make the ads into entertainment:
NBC Universal Digital Studio will work with a division of Omnicom Group Inc. to create programs that help advertisers sell their products, the entertainment giant announced in a statement Thursday. The programming will be broadcast on NBC [...]
