Marketing in the Time of Cholera
Fundamentals For Thriving in a Toxic Economy
Does Anyone Know You?
The average marketing person could learn a great deal from this single ad. It’s all in there. Customers don’t know you and don’t really care. Why should they be interested?
Stop the Madness: Tell Me About Me
If you read this one post your marketing will improve by 20%!
It drives me nuts when people start marketing materials talking about themselves. The very first line of any marketing should be things your prospect wants to hear. Save them money. Make them money. Too often I hear people talk about how great they are or if I am not the right person can the email be forwarded to the right person. Always start your marketing with something that engages people. If you read this post you see I started with something hopefully you care about. If not, maybe I don’t know my market or maybe you aren’t my target market. Either way, one should try to appeal to your audience right at the beginning!
Read The Napoleon Hill books if you want to learn more about this. It’s a fundamental you can use in all parts of your life.
20,000 Download Milestone at myebook.com
Currently the book can be downloaded at four locations. This website, Kindle, myebook.com and ScribD.com. at myebook.com I just hit the 20,000 download point. Brij is trying to help me to get it up on iPad. Slow but steady progress one download at a time. If I only had more time to dedicate to this……. alot like my life. 
Too Bold?
I recently asked for people at my company to submit images to accompany our newsletter. In line with chapter 6 1/2 of my book I asked them to submit bold photos. Here is one that was suggested by someone from our office in France.
http://www.gettyimages.com/detail/200365378-015/Taxi
My goodness. Fortune favors the bold but sometimes one can go too far. It might work in France, but I even wonder about that.
Remember, go bold or go home.
Conceiving or Believing
I often hear people proposing ideas in marketing that I just find unrealistic. Somehow people believe marketing is an unlimited group with unlimited resources that can take any idea and run with it. Ultimately marketing is a zero sum game and you can only do a certain amount of things. My analogy is that each hour in the day, times the number of people you have, are like soldiers in the battlefield. The last thing you want to do is waste soldiers lives on meaningless objectives. Just you can “conceive” that they could take a hill doesn’t mean that you “believe” it can actually happen. New ideas are great, but they must be put against a litmus test of whether they can actually be accomplished. Generals who order lives of their soldiers to be wasted on hills that can’t be conquered are those who should be stripped of command. Toss out new ideas. Take risks. But don’t waste the limited amount of time you have on things that are not going to drive impact for your company. Conceiving is not believing.
PR: Proof is in the Pudding
Recently the PR firm we use at work was able to get an article published in AllBusiness.com
http://www.allbusiness.com/company-activities-management/operations-customer/13605176-1.html
The question always is “does PR really drive results in today’s new online world”? I wonder. Often PR firms will show you all the hits your press releases are driving and the coverage you are getting, yet still, my suspicious mind always wonders if this model’s day has passed? Will it drive real business results? Will we see an increase in revenue? Will the brand be improved substantially?
I know, proponents of PR will tell me I am crazy and that PR is absolutely essential. And being a marketing guy I’m suppose to go along with that……. but I just wonder if this is just echoes of an older world.
I’m a PC….. I’m Clueless
It must be great to have so much money coming in that you don’t have to have effective advertising. All over the BART station in San Francisco I use, Microsoft has advertisements that say “I’m a PC and Windows 7 was my idea”. Now I realize this advertising is meant to create awareness and Microsoft can certainly do that easily but what the heck are they thinking in Redmond? I have never been impressed with Microsoft’s marketing. They try to be so cutsie that you don’t even know what the intent is? My personal perspective is that this advertising campaign is horrid. Are they trying to say they listened to what people wanted and that’s what this release is about? Candidly, I don’t want the people in the ads to have created my operating system. I want a group of hyper intelligent forward thinking people who understand reliability and usability to have the idea for my next OS. Not a bunch of average schmoes (which I am one) to have the idea. I’m sure millions was spent analyzing what they should say and how to win back all the people who are disillusioned in Microsoft products. However, it’s the same as it ever was. If Microsoft spent has as much time over-delivering instead of overthinking, I think they would serve themselves well.
Now Available on Kindle
I was able to get a good clean version of the book up on Kindle.
http://www.amazon.com/Marketing-Time-Cholera-Fundamentals-Thriving/dp/B002V1IO3G/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=digital-text&qid=1257225366&sr=1-2
