Latest Articles
Latest Articles
Boston Proud
Something remarkable and heart-warming happened in the wake of the marathon bombings last week. Thousands of people were wandering the streets of Boston, stopped mid-race. They were lost, cold, exhausted from running, and without phone, money or ID. Residents opened...
What’s Your Value?
For business-to-business companies, there are only five-and-a-half major value propositions that matter to customers: Increased revenue Decreased costs Increased bottom-line-profits Increased productivity Increased satisfaction Sometimes...personal legacy For...
The Marketing Psychology Prism
Take a look at the new visual model I've created below. When you create your marketing and messaging, it passes through what I call your psychology prism. This prism is made up of your assumptions, past experiences, technical background, hopes, dreams, and the daily...
The Second Quarter
It's April 1, the first day of the second quarter of 2013. It's a great time of year: The first signs of spring are upon many of us. There's plenty of time to assess lessons from the first three months of the year and implement the most important ones. And we know...
Fear And Marketing
Our greatest fears often come true. I've been in business my entire adult life, I've never had a job. I've commercially published two books, written a syndicated column for the Chicago Tribune and hosted a weekly two-hour radio show on the great radio station WGN....
The Evangelist Marketing Index
If you want to evaluate your marketing, take a look at the model below. It's a proprietary index I've created to quantitatively assess my clients' marketing, and compare their marketing to the competition's. The variables are laid out by their relative impact on...
The Enthusiasm Gap
Interviewing the customers of my clients is a part of nearly every project I do. I interview some customers while the client listens, and then we switch roles, and I listen to the client take a turn. We debrief after each conversation. A nearly universal finding is...
Social Media Does Not Sell Products & Services
The next time somebody calls you insisting that you must invest more in your social media "strategy" (an oxymoron), feel free to share these numbers with them: From an AP-CNBC poll (May 2012): Half of all Americans think Facebook is a passing fad. 80 percent of all...
Thinking Big vs. Thinking Typically
To create big marketing, we must think big. The problem is, most of us are trained by management, experience, failures, fear, caution, perfection and politics to do the opposite, which I call thinking typically. For most people, typical thinking becomes a habit...
Marketing is A Transference of Perceptions
You market exactly what you believe about yourself, your company, your product or your service. Or, in other words, you cannot out-market your mindset. Let me show you: Here's how it works: (1) Your marketing shapes your (2) market's perception about your company and...