Sales and Marketing MindXchange
I just returned from three interesting days in Tempe, Arizona, at the Frost and Sullivan Sales and Marketing MindXchange. This is a highly interactive event – workshops, facilitated discussions, and a lot of networking.
I was somewhat skeptical at first, but it turned out to be a good thing for several reasons:
- The quality of the participants was high. From many ...
Brand Magic
I have never been branded in the physical sense; however millions of farm animals over the centuries would attest to its effectiveness. The original of the word “brand” is in old Norse—the language of ancient Scandinavia. It means “to burn.” It was a good idea in Scandinavia to burn an identifying mark into the rump of your livestock, because ...
The Marketing Knowledge Base
Powerful marketing messages are built on real data. There’s an important role for creative work, clever jingles and tag lines, but they won’t work for you reliably unless they are built on a solid understanding of the market.
Market research is a large and complex discipline, worthy of a book in its own right. If you have the ...
Brand Strategy
A brand is first and foremost a promise to the customer. It is intended to cause the appropriate customer to prefer the products and services associated with that brand.
Over the years, marketers have become more and more creative about how they build those perceptions. It’s no longer just about product value – it includes lifestyle issues, fashion, links to ...
Market Research
It is so easy to think that you are like me.
Yet every client is different, with unique interests, challenges, and organizations. Research is how we keep ourselves honest in business. It can be informal or formal; it can be statistically based or qualitative in nature.
We specialize in qualitative research, focused on understanding what’s really going on in ...
Business Strategy
Strategy is really just another word for intelligent planning of your business in order to maximize value creation and delivery. It can involve re-vitalization of brand; new product plans; expansion into new geographies; and much more.
There are some basic issues that turn up time and again.
- Core competencies – What is my company really good at?
- Sustained advantage – What must ...
Product Launch
Launching a new product is a complex task, and one that is well-staffed and competently handled in many organizations. However, there are two primary reasons why you may want a consultant to help:
- The product involves a new paradigm or entry into a newmarket where you have less experience
- You would like to acquire a set of product launch best ...
Vision and Values
Behind all the technology and product and business activity in a company is a group of people. Increasingly, that group is diverse in culture, language and experience. It has never been more important to clearly define the basic beliefs and intentions of the company in a way that the team can understand. This is the purpose of establishing values within ...
Marketing Communications Planning
It’s easy to imagine that the primary task of marketing is the creation and deployment of communications tools. Certainly this is an important activity, but it comes almost at the end of the workflow for marketing.
- Begin with a clear strategy;
- Identify key segments and their needs;
- Develop positioning and messages;
- Understand your delivery channels,
…and then design the ...
How this site is made
There’s a new generation of web frameworks emerging that have built upon the experience gained from past systems. I’ve written about content management and LAMP before – Django is a LAMP-based framework that started its life as a publishing platform for a newspaper in Lawrence, Kansas. It’s built in Python, which provides a huge variety of built-in ...
Computing's new frontier
The world of computing is undergoing a massive change, and it’s going to affect every one of us. It’s called cloud computing, and it’s a really different way of thinking about the use of computers and networks.
In the past, we’ve seen the rise of personal computers on the one hand, and its offshoots like mobile ...
What is Web 2.0 really?
60% of online news is now published by individuals, rather than by organizations, networks and commercial portals.
That’s a huge change.
I think the most useful aspect of Web 2.0 is the way these technologies connect individuals and enable individual voices to be heard on the web.
Web 2.0 is based on the realization that even if ...
