Casual Fridays

AOL has a neat little section of ‘Coach’ videos. There’s a lot on relationships and dating, but my real interest was in the clips from business coaches like Jeffrey Gitomer and Tom Peters. Especially check out Peters’ Brand You presentations. Good stuff.
I wonder what a lunch meeting with Tom is like. […]

In response to John Moore of Brand Autopsy and Tom Peters of Tom Peters!, here is my stack of books I’m reading. OK, maybe I’m not reading all of them at once. I used to read 6-7 books at a time. Right now, I focus on one at a time… sometimes two. […]

Each weekday morning, I receive a bubbly, little invite to check out what I may win that day. It could be a business book (or a library of books), or it may be a seminar, CDs, an interview with a famous author, or a bag of crap from the lost and found (they’ve given […]

Are you spending all of your time trying to convert people to your product, service, church, organization, or political party?
Get ready for the long, hard road ahead.
I’m not saying that it won’t work, I’m not even saying it won’t be worth it. It is just a very difficult, yet strangely widely accepted, road to […]

Everybody stalls.
…but not everyone knows why.
I helped a VP of sales set up a program for listing available territories and each territory’s potential customers. The idea was that if they saw the untapped potential (of which the sales manager and CEO were vividly aware), the salespeople would be more motivated to pursue these opportunities.
One […]

click graphic to see enlarged image.
Maybe that explains why Gorgeous does nothing to EARN it.
This advertising campaign for Jaguar serves as a great example as to the mentality of far too many ad agencies. Their ads DEMAND attention instead of REWARDING it. Even on a website where it is oh, so easy to […]

So, as it seems most ad agencies feel the answer to the dilemma of floundering response rates is entertainment… why haven’t we seen response rates increase as advertising has become more and more entertaining? Maybe it is because entertainment doesn’t imply a noticable investment.
I used to have a whole life insurance policy. […]

‘Tis the season for giving, correct? Well here’s a couple of posts on whether to “give it away.”
First is Garr Reynolds’ take over at Presentation Zen. He gives his philosophy on giving away presentations and/or services:
Give it away give it away give it away now…
“Eat like a bird and poop like an elephant”
My […]

Practicing our telepathy, John Moore (of Brand Autopsy) and I struck a similar chord on our most recent posts. Citing an Adweek article, John takes issue with RadioShack’s VP of Marketing and Brand Communication, Kieran Hannon.
“We want to entertain [consumers] and make RadioShack relevant and exciting again for people […]

I attended a marketing association meeting yesterday. I don’t usually attend this group’s meetings because they tend to focus on only one of the 4 Ps of marketing - Promotion (go figure). This time looked different though. The summary of the presentation was as follows:
Let’s face it. Our marketing world is […]