Marketing for the Third Millennium
Real Results, Real Value, Real Quick
Hardly had I posted the blog entry on working with email lists, which talked of the virtue of working with ‘warm lists’ through partners, than I get an egregious example of how NOT to do so! I run (in a different life) a fairly successful Meetup.com group for photographers. We are closing in on one…
I love smart advertising, smart means that I WANT to watch it, not have to be forced to ingest it. Does your advertising get searched out? If not, how could you change it so it does? For context, here is the original Mercedes Benz advert. You should watch this first – and it is a…
How about $7 a day (downtown central Austin) “we add a dollar at weekends, sorry”? Personable attendants, and a ticket that gets you there ‘in and outs’ per day.
Some weeks ago I received the attached message and new credit card form Citicards: 
I was not happy to hear that my personal data may have been compromised, but at least I live in a State that requires that a company tell me when such an event happens. In too many places that is still not the case and such an event can be quietly forgotten, more than six years after California became the first state to require such disclosure. … If one of my clients is ever in that situation my advice is to apologize, be contrite and ask what the company can do to make amends. … And to add insult to injury, I can no longer download transactions from my Citicard account into Quicken which I use for my business and personal finances. 12 weeks later, I still can’t.
I collected mail from a PO box today and was once again struck how many people did what I did. I struggled to get the mail out of the small box; not because there was a lot of mail in there, simply because of all the unsolicited brochures, mailers, junk flyers etc. … There are big tables and very large trash bins, as far as I ca see only to serve to sort the wheat from the chaff and to dump the chaff. … is when the recipient sorts through to ensure that there is no real mail in the middle of this stuff.
He recently posted a very good way for ALL of us to think about our actions whether marketing or not. You can read the article here: Act like your mum is watching you Now if only we could get drivers to adhere to this principle too!
However, I do think that the poor product marketers responsible for Quaker Instant Oatmeal have had to carry this a little too far – something you never thought you would hear me say! … It struck me how different the two – at first glance – similar product packages were and I wondered if this was legal advice at work, or whether someone in the product department was being overzealous.
On the subject of brands, and especially the change (or abandonment) of a brand identity and the adoption of a new persona. I’m struck by the difference in approaches between two recent prominent examples. In California, Albertsons bought out Lucky stores and merged them all under their own name. Recently however, they have changed back…
I tried out Filemaker’s new personal database, Bento, and am not only delighted with the $49 product, but also the service and support. All this in spite of some really, really horrible messups that would usually be reported here in much stronger terms. The story: I downloaded the preview version and was impressed enough to…
It’s hard to believe that I am still having issues with KQED, but I am! They started billing my (dormant, which brings plenty of additional issues with it) credit card again! I fought my way through a horrible voicemail system (‘If these menu options haven’t helped, please call back later’, huh?) to a real person…