Tag Archives: Marketing Tips

• Tuesday, December 18th, 2012

  It’s So Old, It’s New

  One of the best songs ever written about marketing–and really how many are there?–is “Step Right Up,” by the gravelly voiced singer Tom Waits. In about five minutes, Waits hits every sales cliche known to mankind, including the need for change, “Change your shorts, change your life, change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy, get rid of your wife….” But it’s a truism that a reliable way to get consumers interested in your product is to claim it’s new. If it’s new, there’s nothing wrong with it (so far). In our fast-paced age, there are the instances of the new pharmaceutical product that cures the common headache, and then a few months later, there are the lawsuit commercials asking, “Did you take Vioxx?” But, by and …

  READ MORE
• Thursday, December 6th, 2012

  What’s Your “Holy *^%$$” Plan?

  In the best of all worlds, marketers are representing wonderful products to a receptive audience that will award their diligence with positive stories across a variety of communications platforms (print, digital, TV, social media). Were it only that simple. A major problem for marketers is when all their hard work goes up in smoke due to something beyond their control. What can go wrong? Virtually everything. The product isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. That’s not hard to overcome, improve the product. The audience is indifferent. We’ll just have to work harder, and be more creative, so someone will pay attention to us. Integrity Scare The sure-fire, french-fried horror story, however, is when the company has done something wrong that beings into question its …

  READ MORE
• Friday, November 16th, 2012

  New Client? Sell Yourself First

  One of the enduring thrills in marketing is when a new client comes on board, which means new revenue, new opportunities to connect their product with an audience, and a new chance to show them what excellent marketers we are. Then we start looking into the client and her product and now we start to wonder. Maybe it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, or we wonder who’s going to want to buy this, and more to the point, how are we going to interest others?. Or, if it’s a service, we may go on Yelp and discover that the service isn’t really that popular, or people like the other one better, or the company has problems not related to the product exactly, but …

  READ MORE