While scraping the last of the coffee grounds out of the grinder, trying to maximize that pot of coffee this morning, I heard an NPR Morning Edition segment on how people’s trust of Toyota is irrationally affected by incidences such as the recent recall. Apparently, people’s feelings about brands is more than their desire to […]
I am a fan of the Portland Trail Blazers like some people are a fan of running water. Anybody who knows me is aware that I am much more fun to be around the morning after a win than the morning after a loss. Last season, for the first time in many years, my beloved […]
When creating marketing messages, particularly for technology and software, the industry standard has been to break down the conversation to features and benefits. The argument is that we simply list the elements of the product and call them features. Following that, we affix a significance to those features and call those benefits. When developing that […]
When my primary client was Microsoft, they used the term “evangalist” to describe advocates who put on training presentations. I like that. It is an honest, if perhaps overblown, image. The evangalists want to speak to you about what they believe in. You know that they are advocating for a point and you expect that […]
I have been having a lot of conversations about elearning as a marketing opportunity. Thinking more about it, the semantics are backwards. Marketing is more parallel with eTeaching than eLearning. We are talking about a concept in need of a name. It is the act of creating real, valuable content and providing it to customers/students/partners. […]
I just finished a small project creating an email marketing campaign for a local financial company. They wanted to inform CPAs and financial planners of their capabilities so that said professionals would refer clientele. My clients had created a small list of contacts through sign ups at workshops they teach. They wanted to be able […]
Vint Cerf, one of the fathers of the internet, is always an enjoyable companion. At a recent conference, he really nailed the shift that marketing needs to make in the next few years: What Google has learned about advertising is that people don’t treat information as annoying advertising if they’re actually interested in the information. […]