Lee Iacocca, among one of the first “business celebrities,” passed away on 2 July 2019. Most of us may be familiar with him in name due to his celebrity but not fully appreciate his accomplishments since he was prominent back in the 1980s—long before most of you became marketers. He, along with Steve Jobs (Apple […]
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Past success(es) can be a problem. In a 1999 Harvard Business Review article, “Why Good Companies Go Bad,” which could easily be titled, “Why Good Brands Go Bad,” Donald N. Sull writes, “Success breeds active inertia, and active inertia breeds failure.” This is as true today, perhaps, even more so than when it was first written […]
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With so many product choices today, we truly live in an age of abundance. It is also an age of sameness. Moreover, generally acceptable quality (GAQ) reigns. So, how might we break-out of the pack to win? There are four ways to win with our brand in the marketplace. I’m not referring to functional areas such […]
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I coined the term “Marketect” years ago, which is worth revisiting. Marketect is comprised of two words, “marketer” and “architect.” The word “architect” comes from the Greek word “architektor,” meaning “master builder.” Architects design structures AND supervise their development. Marketing is a lot like architecting. Instead of designing and managing the construction of buildings, bridges, […]
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No, this isn’t going to be about the purpose of the overview when coaching, but the purpose of the meeting in which you will be called on to provide it. I’m focussing this musing on the latter subject because an overview needs to be consistent with the purpose of the get-together, coupled with your appraisal […]
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The results from the poll to inform the selection of the book cover design are in and have been tabulated (without the help of a top accounting firm). It has been an interesting experiment. I learned as much about your preferences as much as I did about how you assessed the designs. Thank you all […]
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Many marketers are not entirely clear on intended target-customer behavior objectives. In practice, many marketers don’t even consider “behavior” objectives when undergoing marketing planning. It’s truly a big miss when they don’t because, plainly stated, “you don’t make a sale without generating a customer behavior.” Said another way, “stimulating the customer behavior rings the cash […]
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Some say you can judge a book by its cover while others say you cannot. I believe they are both correct. How’s that possible? It comes down to who is doing the judging and the criteria used for assessing the book cover. As you may remember from an earlier Marketing Matters musing, I created a […]
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I’m currently engaged in design development for the cover to my upcoming new book AVOIDING CRITICAL MARKETING ERRORS – How to go from dumb to Smart Marketing. I’m taking two routes to creating the book cover. One is to use one designer, who created the cover for COMPETITIVE POSITIONING, to focus on the assignment. The […]
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I’m working from my local Barnes & Noble, sipping a Starbuck’s decaf tall Pike’s Peak coffee. (I’ve already consumed a pot of the high-octane stuff and any more would have me bouncing off the walls.) I had to leave my home office as my realtor is holding a second “realtor open house.” I could say […]
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