Imagine this.  You’ve finally gotten a chance to present to the one prospect you really want for a customer – the one who could be a game changer for your company. You prepare for the pitch for days, obsessing over every detail of your proposal until it’s perfect.  Then you show up to make your…

If you read the emails, or watch the webinars or skim the books, it’s tempting to believe the “experts” who tell you that there’s one thing you can do – one secret ingredient you can add to the mix – that will transform your marketing and have an outsized impact on profits. In fact, marketing…

Right now, as you read this, hundreds or even thousands of companies are doing something completely weird but widely accepted.  They’re working on their strategic plans, and when those plans are complete, they’ll (maybe) look at how the plan impacts their marketing or brand. That’s totally backward. Before anything else, a strategic plan should focus…

“If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.”  Albert Einstein When the movie Saturday Night Fever was in the works, company executives visited the Bee Gees to hear some new songs they had written, hoping that some could be used in the soundtrack.  According to the band, the…

If you’ve ever played chess – or even watched a game – you know that only one chess piece can occupy any square on the board. If your bishop is sitting on a square, and your opponent’s knight lands on the same square? Bye-bye bishop. Your prospect’s brain is like that chessboard. Only one brand…

It’s amazing how many companies allow bad choices to undermine their ability to market effectively. Exhibit ATime recently published an article noting that, according to research, copy set with two spaces between sentences is easier to read than with one space between sentences. (For the record, this is hardly the first time research has landed…

It’s a little hard to swallow, but it’s true.  Prospects don’t care about your brand.  Not at all. That’s the big secret, and the bad news. Here’s the good news.  Prospects care very much about what you can do for them.  If you can do something no one else can do, or do it in a way no one…

The late, great Stephen Hawking was a noted theoretical physicist and author whose book, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes became an improbable bestseller.  The reason?  Hawking was really good at explaining complex ideas in a way that the average person could understand. But the truly remarkable thing is…

While marketers might complain that they never get a big enough slice of the budget, there are two times when marketing often gets too few resources when it really matters. The first is when the economy – or even just the company – is on a downhill slide.  And at first glance, it seems to…

Business owners and HR managers all face the same dilemma: good people are hard to find, and getting harder.  But some of this is almost certainly a marketing problem. First, think about those “pitches.”  Help wanted.  Now hiring.  Positions available.  Operators needed.  Not very sexy, are they?  Flip that around for a minute.  If you…