What’s Working in Marketing

This isn’t just an attention grabbing headline. Something’s going on with the way our brains work and it’s especially prevalent with the younger generation. Is Google making us stupid? it’s a great question first asked several years ago by tech author Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic. Now he’s got a whole series of books on [...]

It’s always interesting to watch marketing organizations and ad agencies scramble to apply the practices they preach to clients on their own businesses. –> Find a customer problem, provide a unique way to solve it, develop differentiated messaging, and spread the word. The big challenge in the 21st Century is that we have to figure [...]

How do you get a web site visitor to notice a particular piece of information on your web site, such as a new white paper or a limited time offer on a new device? Most of us assume, that if something is somehow emphasized on our web site it will get noticed. Well, maybe not. [...]

In a new research paper by WPI Professor Soussan Djamasbi, we have our first look into Gen Y’s likes and dislikes when it comes to web pages. Gen Y’s are particularly interesting because they’ve been exposed to technology since childhood. They’re tech savvy and they’re short on attention span. That makes them an interesting target [...]

In response to our recent blog post, Building Thought Leadership: White Papers, Blogs, and More, we received an interesting bit of news from Vance VanDoren, PhD, System Integration Editor for Control Engineering Magazine. Trade magazines like Control Engineering are eagerly seeking informative material that will be interesting and useful to our readers in the industrial [...]

Search is a cornerstone of the Internet economy and an essential part of the daily lives of many social and business users. According to a new study from McKinsey & Company, The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search, in 2010, the average US Internet user performed about 1,500 searches. That’s 4+ searches a day. Over the [...]

To continue our discussion on email tales from hell, here’s an excerpt from a MarketingSherpa blog post that shows I am not the only one concerned about the quality of the many compiled and “verified” but definitely NOT opt-in lists. Note the concerns in Group #2, which is where list brokers fall. One of many [...]

After what I went through this morning, I’ve decided we need to start a thread on the topic of email list experiences from hell. I have one to get us started. One of our clients asked about purchasing third-party email lists. We warned them that this part of the marketing industry is still in rough [...]

As the days progress with this oil spill, one thing keeps circulating in the back of my mind:  This could have been BP’s shining moment. But it’s not, and in fact, as every day passes, the brand perception of BP continues to swirl down the perception drain. Their CEO botched opportunities to build support and [...]

I started teaching marketing courses in the grad program at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in the fall of 2009. I loved it and am now teaching 3-4 courses a year there. One of the students I met in my first class is Steve Shin, a bright young man already at work in the Internet marketing space. [...]