What’s Working in Marketing

There’s a problem with the anti-business rhetoric being bandied about. In case we’ve forgotten, businesses create jobs – jobs that drive the economy. Businesses also pay taxes – a lot of taxes. Quick quiz. Did you know… • In 2011, ExxonMobil made profits after taxes of $41.4 billion on sales of $486.4 billion. >> That’s [...]

Apparently, there could be some sunshine with blue skies in 2010.  This is a welcome relief for many of us, compared to the last time we blogged about marketing budgets.   In a recent Mediapost article that highlighted a poll by ANA, it seems that the worst of budget cuts are in the rear view [...]

This great blog post by Rosabeth Moss Kanter is apropos as we wind our way through the summer in hopes of an economic turnaround this fall. Are you facing falling customer orders? Slower renewals? Cancellations? Requests for ever-deeper discounts? Those are silly questions. Of course you are experiencing these recession symptoms. And you have probably [...]

I was talking with a friend the other day on the phone when he received an email message from a vendor he works with and he immediately reacted with “Yea right, that’s NOT what I need right now.”  It got me thinking about the messages we are sending to our customers and subscriber lists and [...]

Marketing professionals across the globe are facing budget challenges, with the added pressure to grow business in this tough economic climate.  You can bet there is buzz going around, because new technologies are throwing curve balls to the best laid plans.  Last budget planning period, typically August – October looks dramatically different from today in [...]

The news is filled with depressing details about layoffs. So we thought we’d share a bit of uplifting data from the manufacturing sector. The industry turnaround may be coming faster than many anticipated. We talked with Vance VanDoren, Consulting Editor at Control Engineering Magazine and manager of the IntegratorGuide.com web site. Vance shared some interesting [...]

It’s getting a little crazy out there.  Layoffs have been happening all over the place, and it promises to continue.  Marketer’s across industries are worried about their jobs and their companies, and this usually creates a little cultural paranoia in our every day business lives.  Everything becomes about revenue, where the dollars are coming from, [...]

Who knew? Really, there is an entire discussion around how all these Web 2.0 technologies influence the buying cycle, specifically of technology products.  There seems to be extra evidence surfacing that indicate technology products are well suited for blogs and influencing buyers. In yesterday’s BtoB Online, a report indicated: More than half of blog readers [...]

This just in from Media Post.  It is not the best news for our friends who are negatively affected by print advertising , but it is something we all saw coming.  Newsflash (or not): Print advertising continues to shrink.  We can all see it in the “thin-ness” of the print magazines we do receive, it’s [...]

We’ve been hearing the same thing from our clients. Everyone says things are good at the moment. And most are holding their breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop This from BtoB Magazine: Despite the slump in the overall economy, most small-business professionals rate their own business conditions as good, according to a study [...]