The two magazines I read regularly are Men’s Health and Wired. They feed my brain in small chuncks and expose me to useful and/or facinating information. Wired is worrying me…
RANT:Did you notice that Wired was a little skinnier last month? Not thinner, skinnier. The magazine is no longer an oversized publication. According to a [...]

Larry Hendrick brings us an improved goal-setting acronym, SMARTER:
Specific Measurable Achievable Realistic Time Sensitive Enthusiasm Reward
The interesting thing that Larry has talked about is that achieving a goal is not necessarily the same as a reward. Now he’s improved his original acronym to [...]

Jay Lipe interviews Marketing Headhunter Harry Joiner in this post:Smart Marketing: Tips from a marketing headhunter:
“What are the top 5 things you look for in a person for any marketing job?”

Business orientation
Humility
People skills
Inquisitive
Track record

It’s also a good review for doing your current job better. It probably wouldn’t hurt to track Harry’s blog to keep up [...]

Maybe I skip over all the technical articles so I miss good reporting in trade publications, but this one stood out on a number of levels. Martin Rowe of Test and Measurement World reviewed new product offerings that change the configuration of oscilloscopes: Tall and Shallow or Short and Deep? Why do I like this [...]

Circuits Assembly Magazine’s blog posted What Can a Patent Cover? which alerted me to this case argued at the Supreme Court on Tuesday:

“Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings is suing Metabolite Laboratories Inc. over a patented method for diagnosing B vitamin deficiencies. After several years of litigation and appeals, the case has made it to the [...]

Seth spells it out in his new Q&A format:
Q: What do you think of my brochure
A: The thing you must remember about just about every corporate or organizational brochure is this:People won’t read it.

But that doesn’t mean that Seth thinks you should stop make brochures…read the rest of his post to understand, but at its [...]

I don’t get these every day, so thought I would put it out there:
Prescott Shibles is looking for staff for Prism Media’s “New Media” online group. Sales Development, Audience Development, and Online Product Development.

Okay, I’m a cynic about this whole Web 2.0 thing, too. But that doesn’t mean that we can’t learn from their style of hip and approachable brands and websites. After all, our customers are going to be getting used to seeing more sites that look like theirs, and perhaps we will start to look dated.
For [...]

Let’s back up Danny Sullivan’s diatribe: 25 Things I Hate About Google.
The search world is getting some potentially better choices and I don’t own any Google stock to worry about. I’ve already changed the default search tool on Firefox to ASK at work and Yahoo at home. I’m also interested in Listable and Rollyo.
Update: Looks [...]

I hope you enjoyed my little foray into “Back to Basics Week”. It was fun to review some of the strategic issues that we don’t face every day. As I posted last week, we marketers are mostly engaged in tactical elements.
But suppose you had a new product to launch. You’ve got your strategy and product [...]