Marketing From Hell

Tomorrow I am going to Hell … literally. There is an area on Grand Cayman Island nicknamed "Hell"  thanks to some black limestone formations that (as legend has it) caused a local at one point to explain that "this is what hell must look like!" As you might expect, the area has been turned into

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5 Strategies For Naming Your Business

Earlier this year, an issue of Fast Company magazine featured an interesting article by Chip and Dan Heath talking about the art of brand names. They focused on Lexicon, one marketing agency with a track record for creating iconic brand names like Blackberry and the Colgate Wisp. The process they uncovered is part science, part

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10 Big Brand Lessons From The Corporate Social Media Summit

Yesterday I spent the day at the Corporate Social Media Summit, a big gathering of some of the best minds in leading social media efforts on behalf of large corporate brands. The event was put on by the team at Useful Social Media – and that indeed was the theme of the day as panelists

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The $1 Million Specialization Question

Of all the small business marketing issues that I have spoken with colleagues or clients with, there is one that seems to come up with regularity. This so-called million dollar question is around the tricky topic of whether to specialize or talk about your services or products more broadly. On the plus side, if you

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How Australia Uses Social Media To Celebrate Immigrant Exper ...

Australia has a unique problem that almost no other country in the world would be able to understand. With a population of just under 20 million people, the country is one of the few places on Earth that anyone might be able to describe as underpopulated. The vast distances most people must travel to get

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How To Stand In Your Customer's Shoes (Without A Focus ...

About two months before I turned in the final manuscript on my first marketing book, it was available for pre-order on Amazon. You could see the cover and the writeup about the book, and unknown to anyone who might have visited that page – the book wasn’t even finished yet. I admit, I did pre-order

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Trend: Why Your Second Life Might Matter More Than Your Firs ...

If you could have chosen a completely different path for your career, what would you have done? For generations, asking this sort of question was usually an exercise in idle daydreaming. Yet imagine if you lived in a world where you didn’t have to choose. Where the alternative career path you never chose could still

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5 Steps To Surviving A Brand Crisis

Late last year a crippled Carnival Cruise ship was brought into port with thousands of disgruntled customers. Their vacations were ruined, they were stuck at sea and the media was having a field day covered their plight and the potential downside of the entire category of cruising. If you were Carnival, what would you do?

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Why You Should Buy Your First 5000 Twitter Followers

In 1987, Patrick Dempsey starred in a movie that gave geeks everywhere hope that they might have a shot at being popular. The movie was called Can't Buy Me Love, and the somewhat far fetched storyline was that a geek paid a popular girl at his high school $1000 to pretend to be his girlfriend.

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