The Most Important Marketing We Do

Do you remember that time when the popular kid pushed you back into line and told you to and wait to be picked, or the day when your teacher told you not to speak up? Will you ever forget the moment your boss told you that you should suck it up, or the night when…

Read More

What’s The Best Way?

When I was a new mum thinking about ‘the best way’ to raise my son to do the things that babies of his age were supposed to do, occupied a fair amount of my time. I worried about the best way to settle him to sleep and the best way to wean him. I graduated…

Read More

How Does Your Marketing Really Make People Feel?

Imagine it’s a busy Thursday morning and you’re replying to the emails that came in overnight from people you were eager to hear from, when out of nowhere an unsolicited sales email interrupts your flow. Of course it’s just one email, it only takes a second to delete it, so where’s the harm in a…

Read More

The First Step To Building A Marketing Campaign

As marketers we tend to get lost in the tactics like designing flyers, scheduling tweets and growing a Facebook following—this makes us forget the more important stuff. A campaign by definition is “a systematic course of aggressive activities for some specific purpose”. The following is hard for you to hear and so it’s hard to…

Read More

Six Things Focus Groups Won’t Tell You

If you’re a fan, you may remember the scene in Mad Men where Peggy—fairly new to the job, joins the other girls from the typing pool in a lipstick testing experiment. All the while the ad executives are secretly looking on and taking notes from behind a two way mirror. The ad guys were smart…

Read More

The Trouble With Marketing And The Opportunity For The Future

I met with a prospective client recently who had acted on conflicting advice about marketing tactics from a couple of different sources and failed to get the results he’d hoped for. “The trouble with marketers is that each one tries to sell you on their solution.” he said. “The SEO guy will tell you that…

Read More

The Characteristics Of Great Brand Stories

Great brand stories….. Are rooted in truth. Created with intention. Have a bigger purpose beyond a single bottom line. Add intangible value to something that was once a commodity. Take time. Make the customer the hero. Change how people feel about a product or service. Start with the customer’s story. Don’t matter to everyone. Appeal…

Read More

Who Is This Marketing For?

Before holding the meeting. Before working on the strategy. Before choosing the medium. Before building the website. Before writing a single word of copy. Ask yourself, “Who is this marketing for?” If the answer is, “It’s for our shareholders, the board, my boss, or so we can feel safe doing what we’ve always done.”—go back…

Read More

How To Begin Developing A Product Story

While the guy shopping at the hardware store might think he’s comparing the features and benefits of the latest drills what he’s actually doing is imagining all of those shelves beautifully hung. We like to believe that our product story begins with the customer’s relationship to the product, when in actual fact what the customer…

Read More

Valuable Things We Ignore In The Quest For Growth

One of the first words a baby learns to say is ‘more’. They learn very early on that this one word is the shortest route to getting what they want. Every three year old knows that two cupcakes are better than one. It’s no surprise then that this lesson stays with us through life and…

Read More