In response to the ever-increasing pressure to deliver ROI immediately, marketers (and founders) often skip over the important strategic step of defining their target customer. There just doesn’t seem to be time to invest in this, especially in startup or launch mode. Before you even start developing your positioning, you need to clearly articulate who… More »
How to Launch Anything: Guy Kawasaki’s Art of the Start 2.0
Guy Kawasaki is speaking in Mountain View on August 20, so I am reading his latest book, Art of the Start 2.0. It’s a fantastic and practical book for anyone starting anything whether it s a new company product or service, or generating a change internally within a larger organization. Since this describes so much… More »
Cutting through the Fog: Cloud Business Models Demystified — and Repositioned (event summary)
Who could resist an event title like that? The evening’s Harvard Business School Innovation and Strategy Roundtable (Sept.18, 2014) conversation did not disappoint. Steve White, program director for the Strategic Alliances Leadership Council (SALC), which is part of IDC’s Software Business Strategies Group was the entertaining and respectful moderator, Chris Yeh, SVP, Product and Platform… More »
How to Make Change Work: The Importance of Socializing Ideas
If you are making a big change, a leapfrog change, like repositioning your company, you will need to gather input from the people who will be affected by the change. Why? First of all, I guarantee you will see things from other people’s perspective that you would never see on your own. We all live… More »
Using Logo Design as a Strategic Communication Tool to Drive Results
Logo design needs to drive results. The logo is an integral part of the brand. It is the public face of the brand every minute of every day. It needs to be working hard every minute to support your overall communication objectives and support the message you want in the marketplace. There are tons of… More »
Six Essential Questions to Ask When Naming a New Initiative
One of the first steps toward launching a new initiative is to figure out a name. This can be a daunting task as there are many horror stories of naming or renaming initiatives gone wrong. In June 2011, for example, Overstock.com renamed itself as O.co. According to www.ragan.com, “Only three months later the company returned… More »
Latest Facebook Redesign: Implications for Your Facebook Content Strategy
Constantly implementing new ideas and directions, the latest Facebook redesign was done with the intent of positioning Facebook as a personalized newspaper. These changes have important ramifications for your content strategy. With a strong emphasis on visual content, Facebook has made changes to create subfeeds within categories, as well as allowing larger images since, time… More »
Facebook Content Strategy: Why Pepsi Has It All Wrong
At the risk of getting slammed by the Pepsi brand team, I just have to point out that being a big brand and having a big budget doesn’t always equal smart. The Pepsi Facebook strategy is … lame. There’s no other way to describe it. Here are a few representative posts: Tuesday, January 15 Saturday,… More »
Google AdWords: The Zen Moment When Your Messaging Hits the Road
We’ve often joked that you know your messaging is tight when you can get it all into a Google Ad. Seriously. With a 25-character headline, and two 35-character description lines, crafting a great on-message Google Ad is a Zen-like exercise in branding elegance. This is often where we find out how “tight” the messaging is,… More »
Drinking Our Own Medicine Is Painful
For the last several months, I’ve been running ThinkResults Marketing through our own full relaunch process and it’s been a humbling experience. When we’re working with clients through a launch process, we are fully prepared for emotional reactions, for them to take longer to move through the plan than they expect, and for there to… More »
Choosing Your Baby (Company)’s Name – Part IV
Over the last three weeks, I’ve shared some common rules I’ve used in naming new companies/products/services over the years. Hopefully these guidelines will be helpful to you. Another big decision in the naming process is deciding whether you really want a real word name (or a close approximation) like Apple or Google, or are willing… More »
Choosing Your Baby (Company)’s Name – Part III
Over the last two weeks, I shared some important rules about naming a company/product/service including making short, memorable, easy to say, with a good URL and being sure it won’t translate into something awful in another language. The final two rules include that the new name should be: 6. Available in your category – you will… More »
Choosing Your Baby (Company)’s Name – Part II
Last week, I talked about the importance of keeping the new company/product/service name short and memorable. Those two rules are a great start, and here are a few others to consider. The new name should be: 3. Easy to Pronounce – if people can’t figure out how to pronounce it, that will make it harder to… More »
Flaunting It: Why Being Bold Matters
Have you seen the ads for LifeLock? If you have, you know they are very difficult ignore. They feature the CEO, Todd Davis, SSN 457-55-5462, standing there boldly holding out his social security card. And offering you a million dollars if his service doesn’t protect your name and SSN from identity theft. Now if there’s… More »
Choosing Your Baby (Company)’s Name
So you’ve decided to have a … company. One of the first (of many) decisions is what to name it, right? This is an important, and often emotional, decision that is no less crucial than naming a baby. Except there can be more than one Brittany or Jennifer (trust me on that one … there… More »