What Determines a Brand’s Value Part 1

When you talk to most people about brand management, they speak in terms of basic marketing. Others think of basic branding—coming up with a hip name, obscure logo and fluffy positioning.
Brand management is about building brand value. It’s about making a brand worth more than it costs to maintain it. Managing a [...]

Creating Something for Them to Change

We are getting ready to put our house up for sale. That means touching up paint, de-cluttering, and finishing all those projects we never found the time or inclination to do (until now, of course).
Selling your house is a lot like marketing. You are going to pretty it up as much as you [...]

Help Customers with Notes

The other night we attended a networking function at a local spot called W.I.N.O. (Wine Institute of New Orleans). It is a quaint place in a good area.
When you walk in, you go to the register and pay for a card. You can put any amount on it and put additional money on [...]

The Message Itself

So now that I have barraged you over the last few days with content that does and does not work and why, let’s talk a little about how to develop the actual message.
When developing your message you need a short and long version. Often it will help to develop some additional supporting statements that [...]

Get to the Point Quickly

I’ve been writing the past few days about constructing your content to make a point and get your message across quickly and directly. I wanted to use today’s post to go through some steps in creating effective content. Instead, I’m taking another approach.
Near the exit I take off I-10 to get home is [...]

Content for Support Materials

Friday, in my post Content Construction, I discussed what content you should use in creating advertising materials. Today, we tackle support materials. If you remember, I used content to include who you are, your message and supporting imagery. The rest of the content depends on the medium.

Websites—These offer you the opportunity for [...]

Content Construction

Whatever business you’re in, your primary function is in getting your various audiences to take specific actions, or behave with a specific purpose. As I wrote on Wednesday, it comes down to message, image and content. For our purposes, we will consider content to also include the combination of message and image.
Regardless of [...]

Pictures of SQVIDs

Welcome to the fourth stop on The Back of the Napkin Virtual Book tour. Hopefully, you made the other stops at Jeff De Cagna’s Principled Innovation Blog, Peter Durand’s Center for Graphic Facilitation and Design Crush from Kelly Beall. Tomorrow marks the final stop at Pure Play with Keith Bohanna. You can [...]

The Marketing Mindset

My undergrad microeconomics professor defined economics as “the study of purposeful human behavior.” If you think about it, that makes perfect sense. Supply and demand curves, utility, market baskets, durable and non-durable goods, everything related to the economy is based on people behaving with a specific purpose in mind.
Notice, it is purposeful not [...]

Move Your Junk

We’re doing some projects around the house. The other night, we went to the big box home improvement store for some supplies. We knew we were getting more things than we could carry in our arms, so we attempted to grab a cart.
Blocking our access were two badly damaged and stuck together carts. [...]