Marketing
I have a new pet peeve: sales and marketing people who use the word "very" as a condiment, sprinkling it heavily and indiscriminately -- like salt -- into any product or company claim. Let's look at some examples, which I'll number for subsequent reference:
Marketing
In 1988, Listen To Your Heart was the third single issued in the USA by the Swedish pop duo Roxette. In this post, I'll use the song as fun example of flanking marketing strategy. First, the original song/video. (Sorry, but EMI disallows embedding, so you'll
Marketing
Quick post to highlight this New York Times story, Spinning the Web: PR in Silicon Valley. The article starts with the story of a start-up first pondering, and then deciding not to pitch the big tech blogs like TechCrunch. Excerpt: Instead, [publicist Brooke Hammerling] decides that she will “whisper in
Marketing
I was reading this interesting post, Emerging Enterprise Content Management Trends, on the Gilbane Group blog this morning when I stumbled into this rather amazing soundbite. Jeff Fried, VP Product Management for Microsoft's FAST search engine actually proclaimed that "keyword search is dead!" Now, last I
Marketing
Thanks to a post by Darren Cunningham on LucidEra's blog I found this wonderful Dilbert cartoon which concludes that EVERYTHING IS A PLATFORM. I was happy to find this because tech marketers have so thoroughly over-used the word "platform" that I now rarely use it myself
Marketing
Continuing my recent rants about newspapers, please see this interesting story in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, entitled News You Can Lose. On the source of the problems: There’s no mystery as to the source of all the trouble: advertising revenue has
Marketing
Here's a fun software industry rendition of 'Twas the Night Before Christmas by Peter Cohan of marketing / demo consultancy The Second Derivative, entitled 'Twas the Night Before the Big Demo. Here's my favorite excerpt, from the middle of the poem: Enjoy.
Enterprise
[Revised 8/2/08; still working on cleaning up this consciousness stream.] Back in the old days, it seemed easy to create a category in software. Look at the database market, for example: * IBM invents the relational DBMS (RDBMS) category * Oracle, Ingres, and Informix enter in a largely undifferentiated way,
Marketing
Go here to check out coverage of the recent panel session I did in New York City at the CMO Club summit. Overall, I enjoyed participating on the panel and want to thank both Pete from the CMO Club for inviting me and the other panelists for the fun debate.
Marketing
Branding always has it problems. Often, they're international in nature; remember the Unix systems vendor Arete? They had big problems in France where arrete means "stop." Who wants to buy the stop computer? Sometimes, they're cultural -- I remember at Business Objects when the
Marketing
I've been traveling a lot recently (including a nice vacation at Club Med in Mexico) so please excuse the hiatus in posting. In restarting, I thought I'd blaze out of the gates with a controversial marketing rant on user conference branding provoked, in part, by a
Marketing
I've had a few marketing inquiries of late so I thought I'd devote a post or two to some of my favorite marketing topics: messaging and the marketing mission. This post’s on messaging. Surprisingly, when you Google “how to develop a marketing message” you don’
