The Stupidity of Direct Marketing

Eric Weaver posts a damning appraisal of an American Marketing Association webcast on consumer marketing, and rips into their general advocacy of interruption marketing.

“if you undermine trust, relationships cannot grow or survive”. But, umm, you ARE undermining trust…you ARE trying to get past barriers that consumers have put up. And if we bring this into […]

Observational research on shopping behaviour

“Why We Buy: The science of shopping” by Paco Underhill, runs through some of his 20+ years of observational research into how shoppers behave in different shopping environments.
Here’s a couple of points he raised that I found interesting:

The faster people walk, the narrower their field of vision becomes
Reflective surfaces cause shoppers to slow down; blank […]

Word of Mouth marketing

Geoff Ramsey grabs hold of New Marketing principles while addressing Word of Mouth marketing.
While there’s nothing revelatory in his comments, it’s a repeat underlining of marketing basics in the new internet economy:

Consumers care more about what other consumers think that they do about advertising.
Consumers have a high distust level for advertising
Factor in the influence of […]

Kawasaki on panels

Guy Kawasaki makes a few interesting points about getting the most from speaking on a panel:

Know the subject.
Control your introduction.
Speak up.
Entertain, don’t just inform.
Tell the truth, especially when the truth is obvious.
Answer the question that’s posed, but never limit yourself to the question that’s posed.
Be plain, simple, and short.
Never look […]

Blogs vs forums

Let’s cut to the chase - blogs as a community medium are over-rated - if it’s community you want to see online, no blog can match the massive readership influence that online forums have.
If blogs are like newspaper columns, then forums are entire newspapers unto themselves.
Even “A-list” bloggers such as John Battelle, Jeremy Zawodny, Robert […]

Seth, truth, and marketing

Seth, turn your comments on if you want to be part of the conversation.
Doesn’t New Marketing have communication at it’s core?
Yet why does New Marketing evangelist Seth Godin have his comments turned off on his blog?
Does this mean that he doesn’t want to be part of a dialogue?
A while back I had to […]

Google Sandboxing - again

What people call the sandbox now is to look at a process that has become very complex - and on forums, a word much abused.
A few years back, you could apparently drop a few hundred thousand links for semi-competitive keywords, and expect to rank well for them after a month or so.
This was when text […]

Bizal Group Lead Generation Event

Today I attended a Lead Generation Event hosted by the Bizal Group, which brought together a group of companies with a strong emphasis on generating sales and increasing turnover, in front of a business audience willing to listen.
It’s the first time these companies had tried this together, and mixed together informational presentations with self-promotion […]

When marketing campaigns are badly disjointed

Brian Carroll lists a Sales To Do List for Lead Generation

- Develop Universal Lead Definition with marketing team
- Provide marketing target companies and
- Pass leads not active in your pipeline back to marketing
- Regularly update your database/CRM!
- Provide constructive feedback to marketing regularly on your leads
- Develop a lead nurturing plan (with marketing)
- Regular […]

Learning to market offline and expand opportunities

I spent most of last week and the start of this at Worldcon in Glasgow.

Worldcon is an international science fiction and fantasy literary convention that this year was held in the UK at the Glasgow SECC as Interaction.
It is effectively a gathering of the SFF literary industry - the authors, agents, editors, and publishers - […]

I’m switching from Firefox to Internet Explorer

I moved to Firefox because of the security issues.
Running a business computer, there are files on this harddrive I would rather other people not have access to. Or my online accounts. I need to ensure by business PC is secure and reliably secure.
I gave up on Internet Explorer after it executed a virus it found […]

Consumer-centered marketing

Seth Godin lists what every good marketer should know - and I’m pleasantly surprised to see such a consumer-focused approach.
Perhaps it would be naive to think otherwise - after all, Seth Godin is the champion of Permission Marketing, but somehow the interests of the consumer all too often seem steam-rollered by the corporate mindset that […]

How to kill a sale

So I figured I’d buy a new acoustic guitar.
The old one is worn out and used to be my dad’s. Neither of which is good. I’d been tempted to smash it up and mail it to him after his recent attempt to screw the family over and steal big-time from my children.
There’s a guitar […]