You don’t see contractors build a house from the roof to the foundation. So why would you do the same with your marketing? When tactics drive strategy you end up with an unstable and backward result.

You need to increase sales. It’s time to don your marketing cap and analyze the situation. The team cooks up some great ideas.  We’ll catch the viral marketing buzz, put a few ads on YouTube and watch the views and revenues soar. How about a sponsorship with the Rays, I hear they’re hot right now.
These [...]

Are you settling for sour mash when you could be having whiskey?
Stephen Colbert expressed an interesting analogy while discussing his comedic profession.
We often discuss satire as distillery. You have an enormous amount of material, and you have to distill it to a syrup by the end of the day. So much of it is a [...]

Equating volume with profit. Thus targeting your marketing to the largest audience, but also the one with the narrowest margin, and least loyalty.
Assume people already know what differentiates your product or service from the competition. Or worse yet, defining your unique selling proposition in terms of ‘best in class’, ’superior customer service’, or ‘ISO 9000 [...]

Photo credit, Mortsan When grounded by strategy, marketing is effective. When strategy is driven by purpose, that is articulated by a vision, with an action oriented mission, then your organization, or brand will be more human, and radiate personality. That is how to give your marketing efforts a potency rivaling that of a poison arrow [...]

The Duct Tape Marketing blog has an inspiring podcast about Brown Lures, a company using social media in the low-tech fishing industry to sell their products. It’s a must listen for anyone in the plumbing, contracting or lawyering trades.
Even so, I bet there’s a lot of nay sayers who doubt the value of this new [...]