In my last blog post, I talked about how too much focus on ROI could not only stifle creativity, morale and initiative, but could also give companies a false sense of which elements in their marketing mix were most effective and which weren’t making the grade. This is because every item in your marketing mix
Handcuffed by ROI
Return on investment…is there another business acronym that receives more attention than the venerable yet often misunderstood, misused and abused ROI? I don’t think so. On the surface, it’s a very intuitive, straight-forward method of determining whether something is worth the expense. From a marketing standpoint, take the net amount of money you made from
Relax–we do this all the time.
Doctors see dozens of patients a day. A quick-lube store may service hundreds of cars on a Tuesday. The local discount department store probably runs thousands through its checkouts on a busy Saturday morning. And a local manufacturer may churn out tens of thousands of units over the course of three shifts. One more patient.
Choosing the right name
A successful businessperson once said that when it came to company names, he felt the name should say what the company does. His company is called “Conservation Partners,” and they’re just that: partners for people who want to conserve their farmland. Another company had a similar name: “Partners in Financial Planning.” A TV commercial now
Trade Publications
A trade publication…what’s that? As opposed to a general interest magazine or research journal, a trade publication targets a specific industry or profession. For example, Forbes is a general-interest business magazine, the Journal of Business Research is a peer-reviewed research publication, and Manufacturing Today is a trade publication geared toward the latest trends in manufacturing.
Questionable quotations
I read them all the time: advice from a famous person, usually long dead, or a founding father offering wisdom from the past. Take this one, for example: “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” It’s attributed to none other than legendary physicist
How green are digital media?
It’s often assumed that digital media are better for the environment, as opposed to old, “tree-based” media, which conjure up images of loggers cutting down majestic trees in rainforests, baby deer and tiny birds losing their homes, and piles of old newspapers bundled up and being tossed in landfills. Meanwhile, digital media go out of
The power of the printed word
Fiona Salmon, publisher solutions director at the UK’s Vibrant Media, wrote a compelling article in February on the website inpublishing.co.uk about the power of the printed word titled “Realising the value of editorial.” In it, she talks about the struggles of traditional media to adapt and change to the digital age, and about the importance
Advertising gone native
Don’t you love it when someone takes something old and tries to say it’s brand new? For years, Subaru touted its “hill-holder” clutch as a clever new feature that allowed drivers of its manual transmission vehicles to start off on hills more easily. The truth is, Studebaker invented the hill-holder clutch decades earlier and introduced
They Don’t Trust You!
In a blog post in May (“Overcoming the trust gap”), I wrote about how little people trust corporate America. Well, it turns out that corporate America doesn’t trust itself, either. A new study released by the Chief Marketing Officer Council, “Better Lead Yield in the Content Marketing Field,” found that, for example, 67 percent of
Defining expectations clearly, part II
In my last post, we heard the story of an employee who had rubbed the board president and a few board members the wrong way with her overconfidence and perceived dismissiveness. The board president had given the employee’s manager instructions to solve the problem—only to immediately say that perhaps she had misjudged the employee, and
Defining expectations clearly, part I
The board president pulled the manager aside and said she needed to discuss a problem with one of his employees with him. The employee had been observed being a bit short with other members of the board at a recent function, she said. Perhaps the employee just didn’t know how to work with board members,
What’s In a Name?
There’s a joke in sports that fans don’t really root for the players, they root for the uniforms. Long gone are the days when players would stay with the same team their entire careers. For decades now, it’s been about chasing the money, and it’s not unusual for a top player in any sport to
Social media and the Monsanto March
On May 25, protesters around the world took part in what was probably the most successful global protest ever: the “March Against Monsanto.” Monsanto is an international agriculture and biotech company headquartered in Missouri. It has been the subject of controversy recently for its production of “genetically modified organisms” or GMOs, such as crops that
Top down communications
In February 2013, Yahoo! President and CEO Marissa Mayer made a major change in the corporate culture at the online search engine company. She issued a memo via Chief Development Officer Jackie Reses that will require the company’s 14,000-plus employees to come to work at Yahoo! headquarters in Sunnyvale, CA. In other words, no more
Overcoming the Trust Gap
Corporate America, the good news is that people trust you more than they trust the government The bad news is that being more trustworthy than the government isn’t much of an achievement. The Edelman Trust Barometer, that annual worldwide survey of the trustworthiness of government, business, NGOs, and media, was released earlier this year. The
Go local, young man
Barnes and Noble recently announced it will open up its struggling Nook platform to Google’s offerings, including Chrome, Gmail, Google Maps and Google Play, an online digital content store that will compete directly with Barnes and Nobles’ own store that is built into the Nook. However, Barnes and Noble won’t get any money from Google
Books as a service
It’s been a while since I wrote about e-books, magazines and newspapers, but the fast-changing world of digital literature hasn’t slowed any. PC Magazine recently published an interesting article by Chandra Steele about “books as a service.” Steele cites the “service-product continuum,” along which products like movies morph into services that are available on demand,
The “hit by a bus” scenario
How is your institutional memory stored? If you’re like many companies, it’s in the heads of everyone who works there. This leads to that big, scary scenario: What if someone is hit by a bus tomorrow? What if someone leaves the company? What if they’re promoted, transferred, fired, become ill, take maternity leave, or are
Beyond the 5 Ps
Have you ever tried to pull together a new company newsletter, blog, or interactive website only to see the whole effort flop right before your eyes? Most of us have been there. And most of us have heard some version of the “Ps”: Proper preparation prevents poor performance. In most cases, our failure stems from
How to write an apology
No one likes to be wrong, but it’s a fact of life that at some point everyone will find the finger of blame pointed straight at them. As is the case with most things in life, the outcome of this situation depends largely on how you respond to it. Here are some tips for how
How do you quote someone?
It’s a problem that comes up all the time for writers: quoting someone accurately. Imagine a reporter or writer with a small notepad and pencil, furiously taking notes while someone he or she interviewing is talking. Maybe they’re talking rapidly. They’re agitated or in a hurry. Or maybe their English isn’t perfect because it’s not
Are You an Author or an Authoress?
English is a language that doesn’t really assign a gender for each noun in the dictionary, unlike German or Latin. A word’s gender can determine what endings the word receives depending on its usage, and what endings adjectives used to describe it receive. For example, one would say, Ich kenne die junge Frau (“I know
What you can–and can’t–control
It’s easy to prognosticate and pontificate on the future of digital this and that, but the reality is any one of us has very little control over the future of where the communication of ideas is headed. Like most people, we ride the waves but can’t control the weather. That’s why it’s nice sometimes to
