Category: Marketing
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Terminator, Attention and Storytelling
This last week, we went and watched the latest Terminator movie. Essentially, it takes place after the machines are trying to kill all of the humans and ends up providing more of the backstory to the previous two movies. In the movie, there are several fight scenes that take place in factories where the robots…
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Seeing Through The Facade
Everyone has a front, a facade, a face they put forward for the world to see. It’s how they want to be perceived by those around them. If the front differs from reality, reality will be discovered. This is particularly true with companies that have many customers who have a megaphone (i.e. the internet). You’ll…
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The Sandpaper Effect
There are many occasions where the first time something mildly annoying happens, we simply let it pass. It might even be novel or amusing, but gets increasingly less so as time passes. A joke that is told once is funny, second time, meh. Third, forth, fifth, sixth times it just gets increasingly annoying. The same…
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Bragging about your Hygiene
When was the last time you met someone, and they commented: Wow, you took a shower this morning. Lookin’ good! Never. Taking a shower doesn’t earn you any extra credit with anyone you meet. It’s what people expect, which means not smelling does not earn you any credit, but reeking when you meet someone will…
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Deactionary Dreamers
Over the last several years, I have met several people who suffer from what I call Deactionary Dreamers. These people suffer from an illusion that execution has no impact on the outcome, and instead is a given. In a normal scenario (when things go well), you have three basic steps: Good Idea / Opportunity Identified A good…
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The Purpose of Conferences
Fifteen years ago, conferences were a place to do two things: meeting new people and get information that you could really only get at the conference. Today, almost all of the information can be gotten elsewhere, the only benefit is being able to get to know people – to reconnect in person with people you…
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Voce
One of the blogs I like to read is from Seth Godin and he recently had a post on Voce, which is a new cell phone service company. Seth made the point that he thought that even though Voce claimed to be better, there was little trust in the consumer to believe such a claim. …
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The Culture Code
Last week, I picked up a book called “The Culture Code: An Ingenious Way to Understand Why People Around the World Live and Buy as They Do” by Clotaire Rapaille. Earlier this year, our investor pointed me to one of the marketing VP’s for one of their companies who had done a workshop on identifying…
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The Shane Company
Every once in a while, I pickup on an advertisement that I think is rather ingenious from a marketing stand point. I wish that I had a recording of the one I heard today, but it was from the Shane Co. and it went something like this: Dave: Hi Bob. I’ve been looking for something…