Brand Story. WWPD – What Would Pixar Do?
You don’t create a brand. Your brand already exists. Your job is to extract the essence of your brand and then tell its story. Easier said than done. So where to start? Let’s turn to one of today’s premier storytellers, Pixar Animation Studios. Pixar has won 27 Academy Awards. Its first feature film? Toy Story. [...]
Celebrate Your Customers’ Victories
As a young man, I saw in an email from LinkedIn that one of my connections had earned a significant promotion. I knew her as a friend of friends from college. We weren’t close, but we were both living in the same city at the time. I called her to congratulate her. In my mind [...]
Make hay while the sun shines.
NAFEM 2013 exhibited very positive vibes. The mood was as sunny inside as the bright Orlando day outside. Although the aisles were not jammed with attendees, an overwhelming majority of the exhibitors with whom I spoke were quite pleased with the results. This was an improvement over NAFEM 2011, which was cautiously optimistic. And quite [...]
Are you Cinderella or the evil stepsister?
Businesses often suffer from a self-awareness problem. Whether your business is like Cinderella or one of the evil stepsisters, your problem is the same. Your company self-image is inaccurate. Let’s start with the stepsisters. In the fairy tale, despite glaring flaws, each stepsister fancied herself filled with enough charm, smarts and good looks [...]
Rows of pizza, ice cream and foodservice technology
My colleague and I recently attended the North American Pizza and Ice Cream Show (NAPICS) in Columbus, Ohio to get a read on the latest trends affecting that segment of the foodservice industry. Beyond the seemingly endless delicious ice cream and pizza samples were similarly endless POS and technology company booths. As we met with [...]
You have to master Marketing 101 before you write your thesis
Imagine a 3D puzzle with pieces that continually change size and shape as you try to put it together. One piece launches into the stratosphere and becomes huge while another piece is a mere sliver compared to what it was five minutes ago. I’m not talking about the next Christopher Nolan thriller, but the marketing [...]
Planning your marketing campaign? SmartMarketing™ Checklist helps you quickly prioritize tactics.
How best to allocate your marketing budget to produce meaningful results? One of the tools we developed to guide the planning process is a focused, tactical checklist. You will increase planning efficiency – and save boatloads of time – when you use our SmartMarketing™ Checklist. The SmartMarketing™ Checklist works whether your approach to planning is [...]
Why Did The Chicken Cross the Road, A Marketing Mystery
It is perhaps a universally known children’s riddle: Why did the chicken cross the road? The standard response is, of course, (SPOILER ALERT) to get to the other side. Every marketer should think like the chicken. The chicken had a clear goal: get to the other side, She identified a strategy to achieve that goal: [...]
How to stand out from hundreds of competing trade show exhibits.
The aisles were not all that crowded from the projected 30,000 attendees at IHMRS in NYC in November. Yet, some booths remained consistently busy while others were mostly dead. Why the difference? Based on my observations, busy booths were staffed by engaging, purposeful, positive individuals. Also the busy booths clearly displayed operator benefits, while quiet [...]
I love your watch, but are you a brand ambassador?
I recently attended the Fabulous Food Show in Cleveland to gauge what’s hot in the food industry. The show produced a wide spectrum of brands from the largest duck producer in the country to local barbecue sauce companies. One distinguishing trend emerged from brands large to small. Within five seconds of viewing a company’s booth or talking [...]
