Category: marketing
Why your advertising sucks part 5. It’s designed to make you feel good.
Too many marketing departments spend countless hours navel gazing, trying to find a omniscient inner-voice. This oracle is supposed to communicate who they are as a company and what they need to tell their customers so that they will finally understand the value they offer the world. It never works.…
Why your advertising sucks part 3: You think people are stupid.
Image by byzantin3 via Flickr David Ogilvy said 40 years ago "the consumer is not a moron, she's your wife." It seems not everyone listened because the industry continues to insult her. Ogilvy's quip may be one of the most quoted phrases in marketing and advertising but marketers often don't…
Why your advertising sucks part 2. The power of no.
What's worse than a yes man? Easy. A no man. (Or even a no woman.) Corporate culture breeds them just as incessantly as yes men. And, unfortunately, so do many large advertising agencies. OK. So who is the "no person?" And how do they make your advertising suck? Imagine a…
Why your advertising sucks. Part one: Trust.
Image by thorinside via Flickr You probably agree that most advertising isn't creatively great or even good. From the outside, one might think it's a business filled with dumb, untalented people serving marketing departments filled with bean counters who couldn't care less if their dollars are producing a fetid mess.…
Learning can be painful. But should’t we welcome the pain?
Image by debcll via Flickr Watching my two and four-year-old daughters learn about life can be a little disconcerting at times. They fall down trying to do something new, cry because they're frustrated with a difficult task, or they try to get mommy to do it because it's hard. As…
Is your brand a community?
Image by Meer via Flickr A community is a place where people come to gather, do things for each other and organize around common ideals and goals. In communities, people build trust and create relationships that hopefully last lifetimes and maybe even generations. Does this sound like your business? Maybe…
When uncertainty makes things hard, become elastic
Image by pt via Flickr The world is a scary place when no one knows what's going to happen next. All the models that told us how the economy and markets would behave aren't working. It's time for all of us to change but no one knows exactly how. But…
The Internet is “just like”..er nothing. So stop saying it is.
Image via Wikipedia Ed note: For the purpose of this post, when I say the Internet I'm including all Internet marketing, including social media marketing. Just about every meeting on social media or interactive marketing there is someone who says it's just like ___. You can put what ever you…
Shattered. It’s time to re-imagine.
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="240" caption="Image by c@rljones via Flickr"][/caption] I don't know a single person in my profession of advertising, or in an ancillary field, who isn't working much harder for the same or less money then they were a few years ago. Most industries have been hit real hard.…
