How much time do you spend trying to be ordinary or obvious? Probably not a lot. In fact, most marketing people actively avoid talking about the ordinary or obvious qualities of their business. Instead we spend days in creative brainstorms trying to create new messages find that brilliant unique thing that no one else has.
Continue reading »Monthly Archives: "March 2012"
The last thing I expected to do as I headed down to Austin last week for the SXSW Interactive Festival was to see a film. As a marketer, the fact that SXSW is actually a huge Film and Music festival is a point that I have often easily forgotten. Amongst the sea of startups promoting
Continue reading »This might surprise you, but Zappos doesn't offer standard overnight shipping. But for years customers of the site have been getting overnight shipping even though they didn't ask for or even pay extra for it. The reasoning is simple, if your customers have lower expectations – it is easy to consistently exceed them. We feel
Continue reading »My life would be a lot easier if I could give the same talk to everyone. I would just show up at an event or a client site, or get onto my webcam, and say the exact same thing to everyone. But I know I'll never do that. One of the main reasons is because
Continue reading »I'm not really sure when I started getting Reader's Digest delivered to my home, or even if I subscribed to it. I am a sucker for magazines and always have been. So chances are I subscribed thanks to some sort of Grouponesque deal that I found online. Call it a marketing weakness, but if I
Continue reading »Here's a sad fact about SXSW – at any given time there are at least 16 other talks, events or meetups that you could be attending besides the one that you do make it to. That's assuming you even make it to any events at all. But whether you are ambitiously aiming to make it
Continue reading »This morning I watched an amazing TED video of flying robots that can operate autonomously and collaborate with each other at the same time. It is exciting technology … just the kind of thing you would expect to come out of a TED event. As I write this, the video (and its big finish where
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