When you realize social can affect everything, you can create value entire differently. And that has huge implications for us as leaders, for our organizations and for our economy. But it will mean we need to stop thinking “Social Media” and start thinking about what Social really means — to be connected, purposefully and in [...]
Tag Archives | Marketing
Marketing is the way we tell our story so it’s relevant to real people in their real lives. Telling our story is more than branding and logos but how the price, the value proposition, the routes to market and all that tie together as part of a whole.
What Replaces Marketing
During the last few months, I’ve been teaching and advising some students over at Stanford University on Entrepreneurial marketing (in a class taught by Chuck Eesley). My key thesis is that Marketing is Dead. In many ways, old news. And, the more helpful and less theatrical lesson: Marketing in the 21st century is always about [...]
Who You Are Is What You Make
Sharing another talk I’ve recently done on innovation and igniting performance inside our firms. Innovations like pyramids, paper, gunpowder and silicon are the direct result of the cultures that introduced them — empire, nation-state, kingdom, democracy, theocracy, technocracy, etc. Innovation happens when human beings have a series of ideas together that they manifest into something [...]
What Does Wall Street Reward?
A recent analysis said that, all things being equal, a heavy reliance on marketing spend will hurt a company’s stock valuation. Of course, we say. Duh, we think. But have we ever really thought about how much a factor that is? Let’s think about it using an example. There are two stores in the middle [...]
Swiss Army Knife of XYZ
Because of a twitter exchange, a CEO of a company sent me their website link and asked me to check it out. After a minute of arriving, I left. I couldn’t tell who it was for, I couldn’t even tell what it was. Rather than ignoring this email, I wrote back with some advice to [...]
Smartphones as Appliances
The growth of the mobile data marketplace is one of the bright spots for business in the current recession. Mobile carriers report increasing demand for data services, and Apple and Research in Motion both reported strong earnings aided by sales of their smartphone products.
Marketing in a Social World
The business equivalent of making sausage is the marketing of marketing. In an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal (November 29-30, 2008), Tom Hayes and Michael Malone explain the new world of marketing in a Web-based world. They have a provocative name (“Marketing 3.0″) and a new concept (the business meme or “beme”). In the end, they sound like apologists trying to make a pitch for why advertising agencies are still relevant and reminds me of this humorous video imaging what would happen if a modern advertising agency designed the stop sign. In short, they are marketing marketing.
Online Communities: Ignore at Your Peril (I)
In the strategy work I do with tech companies, I’m frequently asked about web communities — how they operate, what they can and can’t do, and how a company should look to work with them. The companies we deal with generally fall into three camps when it comes to community: –Many companies are still learning [...]
Who Owns Strategy? We All Do.
A couple weeks back, I was teaching a course at Santa Clara University for their high tech marketing program, when a bright young product manager asked me a question. In a room filled with engineers and a handful of product marketers and product managers, he stood up and asked, “Shouldn’t product management own strategy?” His [...]
It’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Community!
Last Friday, I went to a party in Atherton and met two CEOs who used the word “community” as their secret sauce.