Casual Fridays

We manage our brands.
We are careful with the corporate identity, making sure we don’t use the wrong font or use the wrong PMS* color. We are diligent to ensure all our marketing pieces are “on brand”, using the same taglines and having the same look and feel.
How much difference does it make? Yes, […]

Is there a difference between depth and authenticity?
… between shallowness and a lie?
We’re a society that is defined more and more by soundbites. Defining others more and more by snapshots. The problem is we’re not that good at it.
In the majority of companies and the majority of ad agencies today, there is no […]

Via the Tom Peters! blog, I was introduced to a great NXTBook (yeah, I had never heard of that either) by Rajesh Setty, Personal Branding for Technology Professionals. It’s a great resource for identifying and promoting your personal brand. Not a technology professional? No problem. There are some examples and points […]

Educating potential customers can be powerful and perhaps nothing educates them better than experiencing your product. This is where free demos and bite-sized samples come in handy.
Maybe you have a Kool-Aid Point with your product. People are polarized to either love you or hate you. Those who love you are labled or […]

On Wednesday, Tom Peters’ website featured a reference to Catherine Kaputa, a branding specialist and author of U R a Brand. The title and concept seem to fall in line with Tom Peters’ “Brand You” philosophy. Thanks to some comments on TP’s website, I did a double-take at the underpinnings of U R […]

I submitted a proposal to write a manifesto for Changethis.com. It is a presentation I present on personal development. The premise is based on the same concept as the 3 Rs of Business. In my presentation, I encourage individuals to take stock of their personal brand, Brand You as Tom Peters says, […]

Apple recently released some fairly clever advertising.
What Works
As usual, Apple’s ads are carefully branded as they continue with a very clean and cool image. Unlike most of the iTunes ads, these strike a humorous tone. They are playful. Even so, they are not insultingly simple. Instead of playing the PC as […]

… when you can simply advertise with Blue Sheep?
I think Blue Sheep is a great example of the mindset of most advertisers and marketers today. The effort to be different is focused almost exclusively on the promotion. Meanwhile, their positioning (brand), product, pricing, placement (distribution), and people are unremarkable.
This is Flash-in-the-pan thinking. […]

Sex sells.
I won’t deny that. It does.
But sometimes we mistake that to mean selling sex works.
I’m sure you either saw or heard about the basely provocative GoDaddy ads over the last 2 years. I’m also sure that they saw some increase in sales just because of the PR generated by the blatantly sensational […]

… jumboSHRIMP Marketing
johnmoore of Brand Autopsy has made a condensed version of his jumboSHRIMP Marketing presentation available on YouTube.com.

This is a truncated version of what he presented to our seminar for the Business Marketing Association Tulsa Chapter in March. It just goes to show you that johnmoore is such a contrarian that he even […]