Helping a market grow as a segment shrinks
I grabbed the New York Times with lunch today and found myself very curious while reading today’s Advertising story about Miracle-Gro’s new campaign focusing on gardeners rather than gardening results....
View ArticlePlanes, Trains and Automobiles — And Brand Consistency
We’ve been looking at a lot of these recently. Driven by an acceptance that we really need a mountain-worthy car and it was time for the cute little sports car to go, in the last few days we took...
View ArticleEntrepreneurial Advertising? Yes, there is such a thing.
Summer School on The ClarityBlog: 15th Class Can entrepreneurs afford to advertising? Yes. I first wrote about Steven Clough’s guest lecture on digital advertising in 2011 after he visited the MBA...
View ArticlePR: The Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon
Summer School on The Clarity Blog: 14th Class I believe it was Jay Conrad Levinson of Guerrilla Marketing fame who referred to PR as a secret weapon and, having spent decades working for PR firms, I...
View ArticleDistribution Tips from Accelerate Marketing’s Elizabeth Andreini
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 11th Class How will you get what you’re selling to your customer? That’s a subject Elizabeth Andreini, president of Accelerate Marketing, has tackled with the...
View ArticleHow To Make Your Position Known
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 9th Class Even though we have not yet dealt with the important Ps of Price and Place, I here introduce a quick overview of the Promotion P in an attempt to spur...
View ArticleLessons from Radical Marketing
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 7th Class In my June 27th post, I mentioned Sam Hill and Glenn Rifkin’s book, Radical Marketing, which was published by Harper Perennial in 1999. It’s fun, well...
View ArticlePositioning: Why will they buy?
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 6th Class “Positioning is not what you do to a product. Positioning is what you do to the minds of the prospects. That is, you position the product in the mind of the...
View ArticleSegmenting and Targeting: What are you selling to whom?
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 5th Class I may have given you the impression on Tuesday that you get to magically jump from having done a bunch of research to inform your intuition straight to...
View ArticlePutting Research To Work
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 4th Class Geez these posts are long! Last class, we talked about how to get smart about your prospective customers and competitors when you’re resource constrained....
View ArticleCreative Research Techniques
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 3rd Class Today’s class deals with how to gather intelligence on competitors, the market and prospective customers when Harris Polls and Forrester Research are way...
View ArticleBuilding a Brand New Brand?
Summer School on the ClarityBlog: 2nd Class (part 1) Radical marketers, as defined by Hill and Rifkin in the book by that name, share 3 traits: They’re small. They have a strong, visceral tie with a...
View ArticleWho would you target?
A student tried to stump me Tuesday during a conversation about positioning. “For a kids’ energy drink, would you target the kids or the moms?” Depends, I said. For instance, how old are the kids?...
View ArticleAre Sponsored Articles a Disservice to Readers?
That’s the question an article in yesterday’s New York Times Business Day titled “Sponsoring Articles, Not Just Ads” seems to be asking yet not asking. So I’ll ask it: are they? To me, that’s the core...
View ArticleWhere is Tesla on the technology adoption curve?
The extensive debate around The New York Times’ Feb. 10 review of the Tesla Model S sedan and its ability to make a run from D.C. to Boston using Tesla’s new supercharger network along I-95 has...
View ArticleWhat To Do About Global Weirding?
My mother-in-law phoned Tuesday. It was sunny and headed for about 60 degrees in Iowa. “It’s really weird. But I like it!” Thursday’s Environmental blog from The Guardian opened with this paragraph:...
View ArticleLife Cycle Analysis and Green Business Development
Melissa Winters from the EPA came to UW Tuesday to talk to my Environmental Innovation Practicum class about Life Cycle Assessment, also known as Life Cycle Analysis (LCA). She talked about an...
View ArticleWhat’s in a name? Perceptions and misperceptions
Several articles about oil shale caught my eye this past week including one on grist.org explaining that oil shale isn’t oil at all but kerogen. They also noted that getting that kerogen out of the...
View ArticleHow’s your geography?
Interesting story today courtesy of The New York Times on how primary through secondary students have performed on geography tests. I loved the Seattle Times’ headline for it as I thought it told the...
View ArticleHow to market a B&B?
“How could we market the way we built the B&B to build the business?” That was the owner’s question after first learning what I do for a living and then talking about the construction of their...
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