In Atul Gawande’s brilliant book, Being Mortal, the author shows that when assisted living facilities focus on safety above all else, they create an environment that feels less like home than a prison, giving residents the sense that they have no control over their lives.  This ensures that no one wants to live in one…

Stephen Bird, Citigroup’s chief executive of global consumer banking, called the explosive emergence of new financial technology for payments and more “both an opportunity and a threat.”  This is a fantastic way to look at your biggest challenges.  It’s easy to spot the peril they pose to your business model, but the reward lies in…

Good salespeople know that the way to start a meaningful conversation with a prospect is with a question.  That’s true for your e-mail marketing, too.  Punctuation in your subject line can boost open rates by 9% — but a question mark can outperform an exclamation point by well over 40%.  So as you consider the…

Sometimes a marketing project comes along — an ad for a sports program or a flyer for an event — with the instruction, “This one isn’t really that important, so don’t spend a lot of time on it.”  Then why bother?  If it really isn’t going to have any impact, don’t do it.  But if…

How often does this happen?  You have several options — for a new logo, a new marketing campaign, a new tagline — and the one that gets chosen is (drumroll, please) the one nobody actively dislikes.  This is rarely the one that anybody was excited about, or thrilled with, or passionate about.  It’s the one…

Art history is exciting stuff, filled with sex, political intrigue, power plays, betrayal, manipulation, mutilation and murder.  What do most people know about Vincent Van Gogh?  They know he painted “Starry Night,” because there was a song about it and it gets plastered on everything, and that his ear was cut off, either by his…

When it comes to branding and marketing your business, it’s often surprising just how low the bar is.  And that’s a problem.  If you’re just trying to do better than a lot of mediocre competition, you don’t have to do much to feel successful.  But if you stop comparing yourself to your peers and reset…

A growing number of companies and organizations now have groovy, full-color LED digital signs in front of their offices.  And those signs offer all kinds of ways to animate type and images in colorful and dazzling ways.  Unfortunately, while this helps them catch the eye, it makes the message nearly impossible to read, especially from…

Business success and business failure have this in common: they’re both decision-driven.  So improving the quality of decisions you make is pretty important.  That takes a steady stream of new knowledge about the issues that affect your business — or that could impact it tomorrow.  Does your company have a system for regularly gathering new…

We all know that things change faster than they used to.  Introduce a new product, service or technology, and within months, your competitors are doing the same.  There’s an implication here for your marketing.  As the pace of change doubles and triples, it means that your marketing tools become outdated much more quickly than ever…