Our tired, vacationing family once walked out of a Wendy’s because they were filling that must have been huge (there were three x-large sacks on the counter already). As we left, my wife doing all the fuming and me wondering exactly what Big Picture Guy was in his post The Wendy’s Queuing Conundrum–was this a [...]

I needed to get a car-charger for my iPod or I was going to prematurely kill the non-replaceable batteries. The charger I bought uses the FireWire cable I got with the iPod. Or is it a Fine-Wine cable?We’ve all seen poorly written instructions in Chinese-made goods, but I thought this faux pas was too good [...]

Now that I (almost) can do full-time marketing, I’ve got a list of a million things that we’ve put up with that need to be done properly. But I need to start with the basics, which Jay Lipe’s post at Smart Marketing can help with:
“The concept of brand marketing is often lost on the small [...]

Is the web killing every form of communication, even the brochure?
Jakob Nielsen provides a guest column in the latest BtoB Magazine, where he continues to rail on B2B websites lagging behind B2C usability, content, and hints at the death of the brochure.
“When we test users on b-to-b sites, they tell us that they expect the [...]

What year is this? I’m not sure because when I got an (unsolicited) email at work announcing the new website of a company I’d never heard of before, I felt like I was in a time-warp. While the HTML email is good alright, if irrelevant, it does date itself with this statement: “Visit and bookmark [...]

GlobalSpec’s “Marketing Maven” Newsletter had a good article on landing pages for online advertising, like AdWords. First they provided this graph to peak interest:The message being that a specific landing page doubles response from using your home page as the landing page. For me, making specific-match landing pages is impractical, but a theme-match is. The [...]

As marketers and salespeople, we all carefully craft our message to highlight features of a product, as well as to explain what it doesn’t do. Of course we are heavy on the former and light on the latter. But since we’ve provided a detailed, accurate description, the customer is well informed, right? Wrong. They only [...]

The Marketing Profs declare: The Press Release is Dead (Will Somebody Please Tell the Clients?) Hey, I’m the client and now I’ve been told. I’m imagine the PR pros out there have been debating this issue for a while. The author, Sally Saville Hodge, makes the point that you can’t expect broad PRs to be [...]

I’ve been thinking its been a while since I’ve posted a marketing nitwit here. Always fun to pick on someone else. And when I came in this morning, a 43 pound box next to my desk held today’s nitwit material.
What weighs 43 pounds? Just 315 promotional brochures for the Semicon trade show! These are the [...]

I am not a self-improvement geek. Tony Robbin’s smile is just a little too scary to me. But I like to do better, to make incremental improvements in my life. Maybe its better to say, just like my marketing, I like tactical improvements, not strategic changes. Tactical (yes): getting an MBA, Strategic (no): opening my [...]