Musings of a Marketing Maven

Last winter I tried an early version of Acrobat Connect, and panned it. It was unreliable, so using it with clients was too risky.
Since then Adobe has overhauled the service, and it’s become quite useful when meeting with small groups for online demonstrations or collaboration. I particularly like the fact that no IT staff [...]

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Entrepreneurs and new product champions are always looking for the secret to market success. A popular formula is to hire “serial entrepreneurs” who’ve been successful before, assuming that success is transferable from one company to another.
This can be risky. As one 8-time entrepreneur writes,
Since time immemorial a post mortem of a failed company usually [...]

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Today I was struck with how many people are writing and debating about the secrets to successful marketing. Seth Godin has a new book out; the CMO Council has released a major report on B2B marketing; and I stumbled across a blog that challenges the validity of the classic marketing funnel. Pure brain candy.

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Doing a major refresh to a website can be a daunting task, no matter what size your business is. For huge corporations the challenge is coordinating messaging strategies and negotiating priority conflicts across internal fiefdoms.
For a small business like mine, without a permanent in-house web team, finding the time (and the talent) to overhaul the [...]

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A while ago, Forrester Research analyst Brian Haven asked who’s at fault when there’s a serious disconnect between the brand promise conveyed by the advertising campaign, and what a person experiences later. Is it the agency or the company (brand owner) that’s accountable?

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From everything I read, the advertising industry can’t wait to get its hands on the next big untapped inventory of screen “real estate” and consumer attention — our mobile phones.
Google’s rationale for developing and promoting Android, their mobile OS platform, has to be largely motivated by the billions they hope to earn by enabling mobile [...]

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I wince when direct marketers trumpet their expertise at managing so-called “conversations” with customers or prospects. It must be that their definition of a conversation and mine are really different.
Poor DM execution often reveals how far vendors really are from what truly matters in conversation: listening and responding appropriately to what the other party says.

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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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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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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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