Archive for May, 2009
Photoshopping our B2B tech products
I saw an article in The New York Times this morning on the practice of fashion photographers and magazines to photoshop to create a more perfect look, pixel by pixel. There’s not much new here - most of us know that already good looking models and actors get altered to a completely unattainable plane of [...]
Spreading your branding dollar too thin
Opinionated Marketer emeritus John Whiteside sent me a link to a Houston Chronicle blog post on a public transportation branding controversy that’s occurring in Houston.
METRO is the overall name and brand for their pubic transportation system. I’ve been there, but don’t really know anything about Houston’s public transpo, but I don’t think they have subways/rapid [...]
Memorial Day, 2009
One of my favorite things about Memorial Day is that it is refreshingly non-commercial. Other than buying charcoal for the grill and geraniums for the graves, there’s not a lot of buying and selling going on.
Marketers - opinionated and otherwise (and I’ve seldom met a marketer who wasn’t opinionated) - get to take the [...]
Persona grata
I am a true believe in creating buyer personas to help you get to know and understand (if not love) your prospects and customers. Twenty years ago, I wrote (and pretty much adopted) my first persona, a money manager whose professional life was made immeasurably easier, better, and more profitable by having access to real-time [...]
For the life of me…what’s Ernie Boch Junior doing pushing booze?
The Improper Bostonian is a free dining, drinking, arts and entertainment magazine that gets thrown (in multiples) on our building’s doorstep every week or so. I look at it occasionally, but the demographic they’re after skews a bit younger and/or a lot more glamorous. So mostly I pick up a copy and end up putting [...]
More seize the moment marketing from Avaya
A few weeks ago, I blogged about a campaign from Avaya that suggested that using VoIP could recession proof your company.
As I noted in my post, I’m all in favor of capitalizing on things that are happening in the real world if your products and services can actually do something about them. (Gosh, I [...]
Is this any way to treat a customer?
On Saturday, I got cold-called from someone at Fidelity, wanting to let me know that they would be happy to discuss my portfolio strategy, invite me to a seminar, whatever-whatever. (Actually, what I’d really like them to do for me is instantaneously re-set my IRA to where it was a year ago, but that ain’t [...]
Wigged out: will the LA Dodgers keep marketing Manny?
Anyone who follows baseball - and I am one of those anyones - knows by now that super-star Manny Ramirez, late of the Boston Red Sox, now of the Los Angeles Dodgers, has been busted by Major League Baseball for testing positive for a banned substance. Man-Ram has been suspended for 50 games, and the [...]
When it hits the fan…
I am a baseball fan, so yesterday - when the news that noted slugger Manny Ramirez has been fanned for 50 games for doping - I went over to the Major League Baseball site to see what they had to say. (Actually, it was the second thing I did. While I am a baseball fan, [...]
A partially nifty design from HP
I had to buy a new mouse the other day. Well, “had to” may be something of an exaggeration. But I do like having an external mouse for my laptop, and my other two mice were done. On one, the batteries weren’t staying connected, on the other, the USB stick had snapped off. Oh, well.
So [...]
