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Series – Letters to a Marketing Student. Part One: The Most Valuable 10 Hours of Your Degree

September 8, 2009

This is part one in a series of posts called ‘Letters to a Marketing Student”. Today we look at what your degree means to the world and how setting aside 10 hours each week will amplify your value on graduation day.

Confession: In university I wasted a lot of time. You will too – [...]

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Marketing With Celebrities and the Power of Micro-local

August 29, 2009

A few trivia questions. Don’t look online:

Can you name Julia Robert’s husband?
Can you name Denzel Washington’s wife?

Chances are you can’t, because they’re married to mere mortals (small brand). Unfortunately, the relationship between big brand and small brand doesn’t elevate small brand. Instead, big brand outshines small brand.
Now, continuing the metaphor:

Can you name someone John Mayer [...]

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Three Great Posts – Identity

August 23, 2009

On a daily basis I read really great pieces that offer new ideas or a fresh look at old ones. Sometimes these posts will resonate particularly strongly. ‘Three Great Posts’ is an occasional look at these articles and they come with my highest recommendation.
This weeks posts are all about identity – for both our [...]

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Five Reasons Why I Wear a Tie

August 20, 2009

I began my career in sales. At the beginning I was told to ‘dress like my prospects’ so as to not intimidate them. Of course this is rubbish. The correct approach is to dress better then they do to reinforce your role as a trusted adviser.
Now as a marketer, I still wear ties to work. [...]

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Honesty Time – Do You Matter?

August 18, 2009

If you’re a leader or manager, consider these points:

A tree falls in the wilderness: If you were gone tomorrow and succeeded by an average replacement would the team be considerably worse off? If not, you don’t matter – and your team knows it.
People are not FTE’s – they’re people: Do you know the names of [...]

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The Web Traffic Illusion

August 12, 2009

Yesterday, @AshleyMorgan followed me on Twitter so I looked up the bio.
Is it possible to break a band on Twitter? Follow Enormous and find out
Intrigued, I checked out the website. To hear Enormous’ music you have to download a free album (too much friction) or drill deep into the site to hear a sample single [...]

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A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words

August 10, 2009

If we know that a picture is worth a thousand words, than why do we continue to get it wrong? Why do tired stock photos dominate on our websites? Why do we give presentations with 100 word slides? Why do we submit reports void of graphics and diagrams? Why don’t we get [...]

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The Law of the Underdog and the Cult of #1

August 7, 2009

span class=”drop_cap”>We all love to cheer for the underdog.
It’s amazing when the improbable success of a sports team or personality becomes so unlikely that everyone – even the casual fan – piles on their bandwagon.
Too often we forget to embrace our underdog status and instead, we default to a dangerous pattern of mimicking our industry’s [...]

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Where’s Waldo?

July 31, 2009

Last week my wife noticed payments coming out of our account from the Canadian fitness chain Goodlife Fitness – although I’d canceled the membership six months ago. I called the customer service line, and was told that since I didn’t hold on to my copy of the cancellation documents, there was nothing they could do. [...]

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Book Review: Ogilvy Double Dip – Confessions of an Advertising Man and Ogilvy on Advertising

July 28, 2009

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve been reading two David Ogilvy books: Confessions of an advertising man and Ogilvy on Advertising.
As marketers we spend a lot of time focused on ‘new’ advertising methods – often too much time. Incredibly, I managed to complete an entire university marketing degree without ever coming face-to-face with [...]

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