The Celebrification of Life, the Universe, and Everything
Eventually, everything in the world will be marketed and sold by celebrities. Here’s how to prepare yourself for this terrible fact.
The Pitfalls of Retargeting
Retargeting is an easy way to get the most out of your online marketing, but it can easily corrupt your marketing data if you’re not careful. Here’s how to avoid that.
Why DSP Advertising Doesn’t Work As Advertised
Demand-side platforms (DSPs) were supposed to revolutionize how we buy online advertising, but they have trouble delivering for performance marketers. Here’s why they haven’t lived up to the hype.
Marketing Weasel Words #9: Push the date forward
This isn’t really a marketing weasel word (yet), but I think it’s a wonderful ambiguity that often comes up in business contexts. Maybe you can deploy it in your next press release! push the date forward (v.) Translation: (1) Move the date later. (2) Move the date earlier. English is wonderfully ambiguous sometimes. For example, […]
Finding Your Career with StrengthsFinder 2.0
If you’re a mid-career professional who’s no longer finds great satisfaction in what you do, maybe it’s because your aren’t capitalizing on your biggest strengths. Here’s a process based on StrengthsFinder 2.0 that can help you identify what you love to do.
How To Become Famous: An MBA Perspective
How do you become famous? Read a business analysis of the sources of fame.
Lessons From the Original “Mad Man”
Marketing has changed enormously in the past 50 years, and yet we’re still making the same old mistakes.
Money Does Buy Happiness (Sorta)
It turns out the marketers are right: money does buy happiness. Well, almost. This is according to the Earth Institute’s World Happiness Report which was commissioned by — get this — the UN Conference on Happiness. Scandinavian countries are heavily represented at the top of the rankings with Denmark at #1. The US is decent […]
Marketing Weasel Words #8: Take it offline
More business jargon: let’s take it offline (v.) Translation: let’s stop discussing that irrelevant issue of yours, leaving you the responsibility for scheduling any follow-up. A minor idiocy about the expression is that when anybody says this, they are already offline. Also, the person who says it is trying to imply that the matter at hand is […]
Emotion Sells
If you’re like me, and you read a lot of evolutionary psychology books, you learn an odd fact: People feel first, and use facts to back up their feelings. We all sincerely hope that people vote, make career choices, and raise their children using facts and logic. Sadly, such is not the case. People use […]
Your website is only your customer’s second stop
Your website is not the sum of your online marketing. You must consider where customers actually learn about you, and then where they need to go to make you money.
Marketing Weasel Words #7: Season
Another fun marketing expression: season (n.) In the normal, temperate world, you have four seasons. In Thailand, there are three: hot, cold, and rainy. In Hawaii or Antarctica, only one. But retailers have anywhere from 12 to 24 “seasons” throughout the year. A season is basically anything that motivates them to change store decorations. As […]
Stop Using Broad Match on Google Adwords
If you are still using broad match for search engine marketing on Google, you are wasting your money. You can greatly improve your ROI by using phrase match or modified broad match instead, in combination with careful analysis of your actual search query performance. Why is traditional broad match a waste? When I started managing […]
Thoughts on Steve Jobs
I’m a little sad to see Steve Jobs pass from the scene. Steve Jobs was an inspiration to technology marketers everywhere. He made products that were simple, beautiful and delightful to use. He marketed those products in the same way: with simplicity, beauty, and inspiration. He didn’t talk down to customers. He didn’t manipulate customers […]
Your Resume Can Hurt You
These days I am doing a lot of recruiting — for marketers, specifically. And I’m here to say that I gleefully discriminate against candidates with bad resumes. Again and again, I see marketers who provide resumes with basic errors of spelling, grammar, or punctuation. Resumes full of jargon or meaninglessly vague words, with non-parallel lists […]