To new marketers, stickiness is the new black. “Sticky clients” are the obvious solution to attrition, the ideal new business prospects, the holy grail of market segments. Stickiness goes with everything. It’s always fashionable. It’s the right answer to the toughest marketing questions. Everyone wants sticky customers.
Some brands we love, some we hate… and most we wouldn’t miss if they went away. But every one of them – even the most obscure – has equity. Yes, brand is worth real money. In fact, the top ten brands have values that can be measured in the tens of Billions of dollars.
This is big news… even if it’s a few weeks old. In late March, IBM announced they were planning to expand their consulting services to leverage technology to create transaction-worthy user experiences.
Exactly 44 years ago today (April 10), Sir Paul McCartney announced that the Beatles would go their separate ways. In the decades since, each member of the Fab Four forged his own unique brand of Rock and Roll. But none has matched the seismic impact that the mop-topped foursome had on American music and culture.
This is HUGE. Getty, the world’s mega-repository of commercial images, adds an “embed” option, enabling bloggers and other non-commercial users to incorporate Getty-managed commercial images in their NON-COMMERCIAL work (e.g., as illustrations in blogs, but not in ads or emails that intend to sell or build brand, etc.). Now, even Tiger Woods isn’t safe!
If you’re a CMO, chew on this: Chances are, your direct reports grew up playing Super Mario Brothers. And I’m not talking about the Millennials trying desperately to land their first job in marketing. I’m talking about the Gen-X, 30-to-40-somethings who are chomping at the bit for your job, hoping you move on, or retire, or screw up.
Next year, we will mark the 30th anniversary of the term “guerilla marketing.” Yet, three decades after Levinson published his seminal book on the subject (Guerrilla Marketing, Houghton Mifflin), many business people – even those in marketing – are hard pressed to clearly explain what the term means, much less apply it to something as narrowly focused as community colleges. The concept is simple: If you’re not a BIG business, Madison Avenue doesn’t care about you. What’s more, the marketing practices they prescribe for their BIG business clients won’t work for you. If you want to be successful in an increasingly competitive marketplace, you’re going to have to stop fighting in an arena you can’t afford: traditional advertising. You’re going to have to fight your fight in the trenches. Unglamorously. And that may mean swallowing your pride.
We seem to get a lot of questions from local businesses about Guerrilla Marketing: how it works, how much it costs, whether it’s “beneath” a reputable business, and so on. So we thought we’d take a moment to answer some of those questions and maybe expose a few myths.
Last week, we hired a contractor to spray a thick coat of tar on the small parking lot we share with a neighboring business. The prep work was substantial, as the two lots had fallen into disrepair under previous owners. Weeds had taken root in small cracks and in the crevices that mark where the original macadam was laid in sections. We completed the necessary pre-work, applying a bay-safe herbicide to kill the weeds at their roots, and scraping away the dead remains of the weeds. The new tar adhered beautifully, and provided an even black surface for the entire lot. Unfortunately, it also covered all of the parking lines.
Early this morning, we emailed our first quarterly marketing update to a patch-worked list of friends and clients. As with any first edition, the road to “ready” had been long and bumpy. But having worked through several test rounds with our freelance designer, we felt confident in the product, and it felt good to finally say, “Send it!”