Latest Articles
Latest Articles
How to Develop Evangelists
An evangelist is a passionate, loyal, highly communicative customer who tells friends and family how wonderful you are. They spend money with you freely and encourage their network to do the same. An evangelist is forgiving of mistakes, assumes you have their best...
Netflix: Mistakes in Public Relations
When Netflix increased its price this month, I figured the company would soon make it right like Apple did after its iPhone 4 antennagate. Netflix has not made it right. Here's a quick overview of the price raise and the Netflix response: Netflix increases prices from...
Why Google+ Traffic is Falling
Various outlets have reported that Google+ traffic fell by 3 percent last week compared to the week prior. Average time spent there was down by 10 percent. Here's why this is happening: More than 500 million people already have a social media home, and it's called...
Stay Simple
In marketing, simple is always better. In fact: The simpler your message, the better. The simpler your language, the better. The simpler your platforms from which you communicate, the better. The simpler your product names (!!) the better. The simpler your pricing...
Beyond Technology
I've often been told that the concepts I detail here apply far beyond technology. In the last year, I've been approached by -- and have been working with -- clients that do not only make technology. And I've learned that you're exactly right: the marketing issues that...
What to Ask Your Customers (And Resources)
Here are 10 questions to ask your customers to gather deep insights which you can turn into compelling, effective marketing language: 1. Who in your home uses our product? 2. Why do they use it? (Leave it open ended, just like that.) 3. What do you do with the...
Product Strategy & Selectivity
Last year, Cisco acquired one of the most popular products on the planet, the Flip digital camcorder for $590 million and promptly killed the product. In 2010, HP bought Palm for $1.2 billion and pulled the plug on it. Last year, RIM released the Playbook tablet and...
Q & A on Consumer Electronics Marketing
There's a nice Q & A in the comments section of my Harvard Business Review piece. Click here to read it.
Is Your Marketing Killing Your Consumer Electronics?
This is from an article I wrote for the Harvard Business Review: Every day, multi-million dollar consumer electronics products suffer the consequences of poor, lazy, ineffective, uninspired, unprepared, overly-technical, follow-the-status-quo marketing. Were it not...
Social Media & Maturity
Two points on Social Media this week: 1. I've been doing a lot of thinking about what kinds of companies social media works best for. It seems to me that the younger and smaller a business or category is, the more effective social media can be. But the longer a...