Casual Fridays

Here’s a great example of marketing mystery. The box below was sent to owners of ISPs.

Inside was a fortune cookie with the URL “whatsmyfortune.com” imprinted on its slip of paper.
No salesheet.
No business card.
No fancy graphics (yikes! designers).
How mysterious.
By the time you go to the website, you’re committed to find out the rest of […]

Relationship
In his book Audition, Michael Shurtleff gives twelve guideposts for actors to follow in order to “get the part.” The first guidepost mentioned is relationship. Shurtleff stresses the importance of understanding your character’s relationship with the other characters in the scene. He encourages actors to ask themselves “feeling questions” about their emotional […]

I’m sitting at my desk with a stack of industry pubs intimidating my lineup of project folders. I have a perennial backlog of marketing advice and business tip emails clogging my inbox. There seems to be an endless sea of blogs devoted to marketing and branding, some better than others (ahem). I […]

In our last article, we discussed the longevity of a product affecting how that product is promoted and sold. Art Kleiner wrote an interesting article for Strategy&Business concerning a product’s death cycle. Kleiner laments the decline of product quality since the 1980s. As quality declined, so did durability, and so did expectations. […]

We don’t mind subscribing to services (phone services, Internet access, cable TV) or publications. These have become traditional subscription items. So, an even greater obstacle than the aversion to subscriptions is the established traditions. And as Seth Godin states, traditions rarely change quickly just because the alternatives are better. This is the hurdle that Napster-like services have to overcome.

I enjoyed the article quite a bit, but felt it was too myopic. The focus was consistently placed on logos and graphic design. I don’t mind that since I began my career in design. The problem is the implication that your brand is encapsulated in your logo, stationery, literature, and packaging.

At the Milken Institute Global Conference, Safeway’s CEO gave his reasons for reducing the company’s responsibility of health care coverage for employees. Interestingly enough, he referrenced the airline industry as a warning of where his company was headed without such a change.
“I would say we were six to seven years away from […]