Musings of a Marketing Maven

As a marketing strategist, I often get a bird’s eye view of how high tech companies approach competitive strategy. It can be surprising to see how little “quality time” is allocated to a thoughtful analysis of the underlying drivers of the competitive environment, or assessing which moves are likely to lead to the [...]

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It’s been only a couple of weeks since I decided to start this blog, and I’m amazed at all the things I’ve learned since then. And the decisions to be made. Blogging is not for the faint of heart.

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Our Leopard 5-pack arrived today, ready for installation on our Macs. The Mac geek discussion boards have been full of cautionary tales, so I’ve backed up my MacBook Pro and will test compatibility there before installing on any other Macs.
It will be interesting to learn how Leopard compares to Tiger (Mac OS X 10.5 versus [...]

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I just paid the last phone bill for my fax machine. Sidelining the fax… It feels like the end of an era — yet another unintended consequence of email and web-based services on a small business like mine.

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I often work with an extended team of experienced designers, writers, web producers, developers and so on. Collaborating with other team members — or our mutual client — used to be a challenge before we discovered Basecamp from 37Signals. Basecamp offers a safe, secure, inexpensive hosted service to coordinate our activities. It’s lightweight, easy to [...]

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When you live near Microsoft and Amazon.com’s corporate campuses, you can run into some amazing people while grocery shopping, enjoying a latte, or exercising. Today I had one of those serendipitous encounters.
While power walking in the late afternoon sunshine, I heard about a cool new company that a colleague launched a few weeks ago at [...]

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Here’s a widget that will let you search my library for books on:

business strategy, competitive advantage
innovation and innovation management
brand strategy and brand management
market research
customer management
how customers shop, how they buy
consulting practice management

The widget links to Amazon, in case any of the search results belong on your bookshelf too.

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I love my iPhone not just because it’s an object of beauty in its own right, but because the experience of using it is so pleasurable, so much of the time.

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I’ve just stumbled across a wonderful resource for book lovers — social networking for bibliophiles.
LibraryThing provides a handy way to organize your bookshelf online, and share what you’re reading with others, or discover people whose reading interests overlap a lot with yours.

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The brands I admire most have a long-standing commitment to their core principles, the things the brand stands for in the mind of consumers. Whether you like the brand or not, you know what it stands for.
I suspect that one of the reasons brands tend to zig and zag so much is the impact of [...]

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