A few weeks ago, the Cannes Creative Festival brought together thousands of practitioners in every discipline of marketing and advertising to honor the best communications campaigns and thinking from the previous year. As a marketing writer and strategist, I spend a lot of time thinking about original examples of great marketing. Good ideas are inspirations.
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4 Easy Ways To Share Your Expertise Online
Expertise is a beautiful thing when you are a small business. If you are in the right business, you have probably spent a long time building your expertise in whatever your industry happens to be. Whether you provide consultative services for your customers, or use your expertise to help sell retail products – the expertise
Continue reading »The Marketing Truth Which Surprised Mark Zuckerberg
The first time that brands were ever allowed on Facebook, the only way they could advertise was by offering a specific promotion. No brand awareness campaigns or focus on engagement … just a simple offer. It was a symbol of how Facebook (and Mark Zuckerberg in particular) saw brands entering into the previously sacred space
Continue reading »How a Drum Shop Uses Social Media To Sell Cymbals
I remember a time when I used to spend hours listening to the sounds that different cymbals made when hit in different locations. If you aren’t a drummer, chances are this moment will be a tougher one to relate to – but trust me when I tell you that the decision to buy a cymbal
Continue reading »How "Case Study Blindness" Can Kill Innovation
Last month while working on a strategy for a large client, we had a brilliant idea. This was not the kind of idea that agencies come up with all the time while sitting in a room by themselves drawing pictures on a whiteboard. No, this was the kind of game changing idea that could solve
Continue reading »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
Continue reading »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
Continue reading »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
Continue reading »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
Continue reading »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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