Category: Marketing
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Judging a Book by Its Cover
I chuckled when this picture was sent to me. The depiction seems obvious and shocking from the perspective of a first grader. I really laughed though when I read the story that went along with it… A first grade girl handed in the drawing below for her homework assignment. The teacher graded it and the…
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The Fat Shoes
Sometimes even the best laid plans backfire in ways that we don’t expect. It’s easy to think we should charge for everything of value we provide, but trying to extract the last penny can cost us the entire sale. This is one such story. We were shopping in Mexico and went to a Skecher’s shoe…
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Signs, Signs, Everywhere There’s Signs
My family hopes I wear a seatbelt. So I was informed yesterday while driving on a Mexican highway to Guanajauto. Turns out my family also wants me to obey the speed limit, not to drive if I’ve been drinking, not to drive tired, and finally to listen to the above mentioned signs. Every overpass contained…
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Stories Sell
I critiqued Starbucks earlier in their approach to launching Via, their instant coffee. I don’t know how well it’s done, but if signs like this are any indication – people still think they are samples: Consider their problem: they have trained their customer to experience a rich, if not expensive, tradition — they enter a…
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Satiation of Desire : Be Good-Enough First
You’re walking through the desert, the sun beating upon the back of your neck. You are sweating, or at least you were, until the dryness in your throat seemed to dry up your skin as well. With sand in your eyes, you see a store on the outskirts of town selling bottled water. You pay…
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The Fine Line Between The Great and the Amateur
What makes a dancer, singer, or speaker great? I mean really great, like genius-level great? There are three things that make the great different: First, they stand out. They break conventions. No one gets excited if they play it safe. In fact, they know “playing it safe” is one of the most dangerous options around…
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The RapidChip Fallacy
“The market is going to face this big, nasty problem and they will have no other choice but to use our product to solve it.” – Excited Entrepreneur Most of the time, this entrepreneur is committing the same fallacy that we faced when working on a failed project called RapidChip. This fallacy is related to, but different from…
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Guest Blog: Mawy had a Yittle Yam
[In response to my post on Tea Bog Beet Knee, Matthew Ritzman, a friend of mine, wrote a response that I thought worthy of more attention. Matthew and I met while he was President of the local Toastmasters club that I attended. His speeches always tied in personal stories and how they impacted him and…
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Experimental Costs
“If I find 10,000 ways something won’t work, I haven’t failed. I am not discouraged, because every wrong attempt discarded is another step forward” Thomas Edison Science requires thousands of failures in order to find a success. Following the success, we look back and rationalize why that one success was obviously the solution to the…
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Preemptive Apologies
We are hiring, bringing the requisite meetings with people to find the one that is a good fit.. Earlier this week, we had breakfast with one such candidate. He was really nice and had a good skill set but it wasn’t a match with what we were looking for. After the breakfast, he sent a…