marketing mistakes
When throwing a party, make sure you have enough ice
Hey, did you hear that Apple came out with a new phone?
If you didn’t, well, welcome back from the Antarctic vacation! Yes, Friday was the big iPhone 3G day. People lined up at stores to get the newest and shiniest Apple product. Apple is very, very good at building excitement about their new products; whether [...]
Fun with real estate marketing
It’s a difficult time for realtors. Here in Houston it’s not as bad as in many other cities; things have slowed down, but having missed the bubble that affected so many other large cities, we’ve been spared the bust to some degree. But it’s not exactly a seller’s market.
Tough times are good times to sharpen [...]
Hold the ads, please
David Reich at My 2 Cents wrote about ads that play while you’re on hold:
Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal tells the story. Callers to customer service, while waiting for the next available representative, are seen as a huge captive audience. More than 320 million calls a month and growing, says one of the companies [...]
Kathryn Roy on Seven Infectious Diseases of B2B Marketing - and Their Cures
Over on Marketing Profs, Kathryn Roy has a great article on B2B Marketing. This is premium content that you have to pay to get at, so I can’t very well give it away here, but she’s spot on in her clever, and voice of experience, rundown on "rampant in B2B companies."
One of "Dr. Roy’s" diseases [...]
Everything but the kitchen sink
Occupational hazard, but I look at an awful lot of websites - primarily B2B, primarily technology-related.
An awful lot.
And they can, in fact, be an awful lot.
Part of what makes so many of them so awful is that they’ve got way too much going on.
We’ve all gotten pretty much inured to the clutter of consumer-oriented, [...]
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 [...]
Magical Thinking: miracle occurs here
It is tempting in business - especially when it comes to marketing, I’m afraid, to indulge in Magical Thinking.
This is when you let it get in your head that if you did just ONE THING it would make all the difference in the world.
If you went to the right show…
If you wooed the right analyst…
If [...]
A Teensie Little Note to Polaroid Marketing
I saw a post on yesterday’s Boston Filter on Polaroid’s new inkless printer, the exceedingly cool Polaroid product that was announced at this week’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas. It’s so exceedingly cool, I wrote about it over on Pink Slip. It’s so exceedingly cool, I zipped on over to the Polaroid web [...]
Hamming it up for Chanukah
I was at a small gathering at my friend Susan’s the other night, and she took a few moments to light the third candle on her menorah. Susan and her husband sang a song in Hebrew (which, as Susan pointed out, sounded just like the theme song for the old Western TV show, The Lawman. [...]
What do you do if you’re NaviSite?
If you’re a B2B marketer in the tech space, you’ve no doubt heard by now about the major fiasco that NaviSite, a web hosting provider, has been dealing with.
They acquired another company, and in the course of consolidating customers into their Massachusetts data center, hit a perfect storm of botched operations and bad luck. As [...]
