Recipe for Success: Strategy First, Messaging Next, Creative Last
You'll need to follow either Pizza Hut or Rolling Stone. It depends on whether customers are wrong about you, or they're right.
Putting Funny Ads To Work For Your Boring-Ass Business – Pattern Interrupt
When you shatter a pattern, their meat-computer snaps into focus.
Super Bowl Advertising vs. Your Advertising
Even guaranteed attention fizzles with a dud ad, while completely disinterested audiences can be won over with high-impact advertising.
Fundamental Forces of Business – Part 1
Walmart is the richest retailer on the planet. They use the gravitational pull better than anyone else. But gravity is the weakest force.
Learning from the Legends: Yes, Virginia, It Really Is That Simple!
Marlboro was a failed filtered cigarette brand, marketed to women with the slogan “Mild as May”
Three Smooth Stones
Generosity is important to creating positive vibes for your business. And your time is more valuable than money. It’s a limited resource.
Cowards, Cow-words and tails between your legs
Are you writing ads with your tail between your legs? If you’re not acting like the young bull with nothing to lose, someone else is.
Learning from the Legends: What Can’t be Questioned?
Immediately following the launch of the Mr. Whipple campaign Charmin displaced Scott as the #1 brand in America.
Distinctiveness vs. Differentiation vs. Bonding
Branding aims at de-commodification: getting the customer to see you as the better, worthier option. And there are three ways of pursuing this goal.
The Biggest Waste in Advertising (a Case Study)
Advertising in the bigger community to draw customers to your smaller community is as futile as trying to make the water in a river defy gravity.
Secrets of a genius storyteller
Learn from the great Ronnie Van Zant from Lynyrd Skynyrd. Appeal to your audience by speaking to them in their language.
An interview with a small business that applied the Wrigley formula
He does not sell gum. He sells used RVs and he applied the lessons from Wrigley’s and is growing like crazy.
“Emotional” Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
“Emotional campaigns are 30% more likely than rational campaigns to show large profit effects" — Binet & Field, The Long and Short of It
Should an Upwardly Mobile Zebra Shed Its Stripes?
Successful marketing, getting your company noticed, requires behavior that's not only risky, it runs counter to instinct.
Magical Thinking, Branding, and Chevy’s Christmas Ad
Your love for this small piece of commercial art, which you’ll likely share with others, can’t help but partially rub off onto Chevy.