Tomorrow Has Come. When The Cluetrain Manifesto was published in 1999, it smacked of silly futurism, like Maxwell Smart’s shoe-phone and Dick Tracey’s TV-wristwatch. Both of which are now possible. Likewise, the societal shift predicted by The Cluetrain is already happening. Can you feel it? Here’s a look at a few of the 95 Theses […]
Is Yours a Brand or a Bland? Procedural Memory is the key to your brand being automatically remembered.Accomplish this through Relevance x Repetition. Symbolic Thought is how to make a brand meaningful.Access this by linking the unknown to the known. Particle Conflict is the way to make a brand interesting.Achieve this by adding an element […]
“I’m a surfer,” she said as she extended her hand. It almost broke my heart. Her husband had moved her into a tiny fixer-upper on the tear-stained cheek of an Oklahoma town. With a young child dangling from each of her arms and a third one on the way, she needed us to see her […]
Do You Lean Toward Niche Marketing? Think too deeply about customer profiling and you’ll soon fall into niche marketing. And the problem with niches is they’re not created equal. Have you chosen a niche too small? Reis and Trout inadvertently popularized niches in their extraordinary 1981 book, Positioning: the Battle for Your Mind. That book […]
Can You Make It Talk? People are more interesting than non people. Mingle a bit of wood, paint and cloth, then drench the pile in sparkling imagination and a new person leaps onto the stage. Few techniques in communication are as powerful – or as often overlooked – as personification: ascribing human characteristics to inanimate […]
Seeing Yourself Real Paper Roses Have No Fragrance Most of us are out of balance and suffering for it. We’re either too pragmatic or too romantic. The pragmatist never stops to smell the roses. “What’s the use? Just get the job done, move onward and upward. Winners never quit and quitters never win.” The romantic […]
An Extremely Very Good Book At first glance it would appear that Vince Poscente and I stand for exactly opposite things. Vince is all about speed. His mantra seems to be, “You don’t have to choose; you can have it all. And you don’t have to wait, you can have it now.” Yes, at first […]
The Monster Under My Bed I learned last week why I’m no good at making small talk. The realization blew my mind. Pennie and I were sitting in the sun room looking at our computers when she asked, “Did you get the email from Janet?” “Yes.” “Should I answer it or will you?” “You, please. […]
Making the Big Money A check arrives in my office and a one-day meeting is scheduled. The business owner arrives on the appointed day. This is going to be tough. It always is. To earn my money, I must take the client through 5 steps that are easy to understand but hard to do. This […]
“When Death snatches your friend you walk into the darkness a little, calling his name, waiting to hear his voice in answer. It is a lonely and quiet time.” – Roy H. Williams, October 29, 2011, 5 days after the death of Woody Justice 2007: I’m sitting in the grand ballroom of the Mandarin Oriental […]
A Conversation Between Friends Are You Willing to Look Inside Yourself, Friend? Do you ever ask yourself hard-to-answer questions like, “What am I trying to make happen?” “How will I measure success?” “What is holding me back?” Rarely do we question our own objectives. Even more rarely do we question our emotions. People whose feelings […]
Ready. Angle. Frame. Advertising begins only after you win the attention of your target, a difficult thing to do in this overcommunicated world. May I suggest you do it like the Great Ones? When you’re ready to tell your story, choose an angle of approach. Then frame the scene. Decide what to include, what to […]
Do Good Ideas Always Work? The mind is full of clever ideas. But few of them will actually work. My friend John Young says, “A smart man makes a mistake, learns from it, and never makes that mistake again. A wise man finds a smart man and learns from him how to avoid that mistake […]
What Courage Can Do With Six Dollars Brad Lawrence has been a client of my firm for 12 years. During that time, he’s grown his business beyond all expectations. Mostly because he’s got guts. Recently, Brad was looking at a sort of charm bracelet for his jewelry store. He could buy the base bracelets for […]
non sequitur When I was in high school, it was considered a big deal if you could control a steel ball under a piece of glass with a couple of buttons that flipped little flippers. The steel ball would bounce from side to side and bells would ring and lights would light up. I could […]
Why Most Ads Don't Work I’ve said many times, “Most ads aren’t written to persuade, they’re written not to offend.” This goes back to chapter one, “Nine Secret Words” in my first book, The Wizard of Ads. Do you remember the nine secret words? “The Risk of Insult is the Price of Clarity.” Clarity. Ah, […]
M=12 12 I wish I could remember who gave me the book by Howard Rheingold: They Have a Word for It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words and Phrases. (Sigh.) If you ever give me a book, please write me a note in the front of it so I don’t sit scratching my head […]
Wisdom of Women I had the great good fortune to be raised by a single mother who was in extremely difficult circumstances: she had no education, no money, and received no monthly child support checks. And these were the June Cleaver/Leave It To Beaver years when it was socially unacceptable to be a “divorcée.” I […]
Accelerated Branding Why do some brands connect when others don’t? Where should you begin when building a brand from scratch? How does an old brand become new again? It's just like in the movies. Have you ever bonded with a character in a television series or a movie? That character’s attitude, values, quirks and characteristics […]
How to Make Your Ads Sparkle Ninety-nine percent of all ads fail to sparkle for the same reason that most diamonds are dull: They’re overweight. A perfectly edited ad will shoot points of light across the darkness like a perfectly cut diamond. But rare is the diamond that's cut for maximum brilliance, even though it's […]
How to Succeed as a Consultant Step 1: Become extremely good at something. Anything.“Do you see a man skilled in his work? He will stand before kings; He will not stand before obscure men.” – from the book of Proverbs, chapter 22 Step 2: Push beyond the boundaries of what’s known.Investigate the unknown. Speculate. Theorize. […]
How Art Touches the Heart How is it that you and I interpret art the same way? We agree that the musical score to Star Wars feels adventurous and triumphant. But what within the music tells us so? And there’s something about slow music in a minor key that seems sad. Don’t you agree? Firelight […]
Are Your Ads Getting Enough Complaints? Part Three in a Three Part Series When an ad campaign is producing big results, there will usually be complaints from the public. When an ad campaign is getting poor results, the public rarely complains. What makes people hate an ad? 1. It’s hard to ignore.Any ad that makes […]
10 Ways Retail is Changing Part Two in a Three Part Series 1. Hidden Profit Centers are the new MarkupLow-cost providers such as Sam’s Club and Best Buy are selling “in-store exchange” policies at the cash register to supplement the manufacturer’s warranties they don’t honor. In other words, you can’t take a faulty purchase back […]
How Retail is Changing Part One in a Three Part Series The old assumption in advertising was that the customer didn't know, and wouldn't know unless you told them. This is no longer a valid assumption. Today's customer enjoys access to information far beyond what any of us saw coming. You're aware of how quickly […]
The Media Is Not the Message “I'm in the furniture business. Which media should I use?” “I'd like to target people who are afraid of the dentist. Can you recommend a good mailing list company?” “My uncle uses television ads to attract new customers and they work really well for him. Television ads have made […]
What's Holding Your Business Back? If I were to ask you what's limiting your growth, you'd likely tell me, “Traffic. If we had more traffic, we'd make more sales. What we need is more traffic.” But traffic is rarely the problem. It's simply the byproduct of a problem you haven't been able to see. These […]
The Women In Our Lives I owe my optimism to my mother, a single parent whose ironclad confidence kept my sister and I from ever suspecting how poor we really were. We felt like Mom could do anything. She made us feel like everything was going to be okay. And amazingly, it was. I owe […]
What Makes Jack a Dull Boy? Filippo Beccari is an Italian dance teacher a long way from home. Hoping to enrich the lives of 62 orphans, he visits the orphans daily and encourages them to move to the music as he hums or plays. The year is 1773. Three years later Paul Revere rides through […]
Drifting, Surfing, Drowning and Sailing In Puddles, Swamps, Wells and Oceans About 10 months ago Mike Metzger flew from Clapham Institute in Annapolis to spend a day with us in Austin. “You meet 4 kinds of people on the ocean of life,” Mike said. “Those who drift just go with the flow. The wind and […]
When Knowledge Isn't Enough Looking to make a change? Remember: transformation happens experientially, not intellectually. We often receive instruction and agree, “I see what you're saying,” but seldom do we actually do the thing we learned. We just agree with it in our minds. This is a problem. Daniel J. Boorstin said, “The greatest obstacle […]
Money and Art A Wizard Academy Field Trip She judged us one-by-one as we entered the building. Chin held high, she looked down the ridgeline of her nose like she was sighting along the barrel of a gun. A quiet sniff let us know she did not approve. I hope to God she doesn't know […]
Do Your Words Make Music? Let's Look at Magnetic Meter Modern schools teach Journalism and Creative Writing. Study Journalism and you'll write ads that are informative. Study Creative Writing and you'll write ads that entertain. But neither is likely to persuade. Only one school of writing always1. introduces a new perspective,2. causes readers to feel […]
The Faded Color of Empty Words Advertising isn't working like it did a few years ago. You've noticed this, right? Most advertisers are convinced that technology is to blame. TV advertisers will tell you that TiVo and her sister Digital Video Recorders are blocking their television ads. But according to a recent report released by […]
10 Unusual Ways to Advertise Are you a one-person company with a lunch-money ad budget? Good News: Time and money are interchangeable. You can always save one by spending more of the other. When money is tight, spend time.(If you don't have any money AND you don't have any time, then you're spending your time […]
Will You Embarrass Yourself? Are you anxious to look foolish in front of others? Will you happily submit yourself to ridicule? Are you willing to do a thing badly until you've learned to do it well? Probably not, unless you're the one in five hundred who has what it takes to succeed. “Only those who […]
Be For What Is My friend and fellow Worthless Bastard Brett Feinstein occasionally quotes his business partner, Jamie, as saying, “Be for what is.” I think I understand what Jamie is saying. There are basically two ways of seeing:1. the way things ought to be.2. the way things are. Do you find yourself moaning about […]
Language of Shadow and Silence Silence is a language of context. White space is silence in print ads.Visual saturation is its opposite. Shadow is another language of context. Silence is seen and shadows are heard in the dim-light quiet of the printed word: We had come home. We had discussed whether to go out for […]
Thought Particles On Broadway You're deeply unhappy with the way things are, but you're not quite sure what to change or who to blame. Depression is the name we give to unfocused anger. Grief is the name we give to Anger + Sorrow.Cruelty is the name given to Anger + Joy.And Envy is Anger + […]
Peter Pan and Superman Glance at the headline above and you think, “Imaginary characters.” Add angels to that list and the category will blur to “Characters who do good” if you're a believer in angels, but will remain unchanged if you consider them to be imaginary. Change it to read “Peter Pan, Superman, Angels and […]
Symbolic Thought: the Secret to Selling As we learned in last week's memo, a person can't imagine a personal future without assembling it from stored memories of their past. This means your customer will better understand the new and different when you relate it to the old and familiar. To do this, you must employ […]
How to Create a Different Future We do not remember days. We remember moments. The secret to creating a different future is to remember a different past. Literally. What do you remember about your past? Do you remember the pain? The frustration? The injustice? Unless you want to live these things again, you need to […]
Method or Madness? Sorting my email, I came upon a survey sent to me by an acquaintance: I'm about to change the name of my company from The Success Clinic to something else, and I need your help to find the best name. Which of these do you like best? ____ Academy of Success and […]
A Memory of Life I still don't know his last name. Gille arrived from Michigan in a small jar with his photograph on the lid. His friend had sent an email to Chapel Dulcinea asking if we'd be willing to launch some of Gille's ashes into the breeze that always blows there. We replied we'd […]
I Am Sleep When Too Bigwedges into a head too small,When Too Hardcrowds into a life too soft,When Too Muchhas happened to make sense of it all,I am Sleep. Let me do my work. – Roy H. Williams Have you ever been confronted with an idea Too Big, a circumstance Too Hard, or a series […]
Souls of Cities I've created ads for local businesses from coast to coast for nearly a quarter century and I've studied the population of every place for which I've written ads; more than 100 towns in all. And I've presented seminars in an additional 92. That's a lot of travel. And I've noticed that cities […]
Why We Buy Happiness rarely triggers commerce. Unhappiness often does. Purchases are triggered by dissatisfaction with the way things are. We purchase when we have a need, a desire, an itch to scratch. We want to change our condition, our surroundings, our state of mind. We buy because we are dissatisfied. And this dissatisfaction is […]
Revealing the Vivid Unexpected Part One: The Secret of Saying Too Little Suffice it to say that last week's memo had precisely the effect I had anticipated. We'll speak no more about it. I will not dissect my own writing like a formaldehyde frog in the dim light of your monitor. But I will, for […]
Standing at your bedside, I don’t know if you’re dead or only sleeping. Soon our friends will lay pennies on your eyes to pay Charon for your passage. A silly ritual, our friends will do it anyway. But you were dead long before you died. Something caused life to shrivel in you, bloodless and […]
Your Customer and You Your prospective customer has questions about you. Where's the first place they're likely to look for answers? Sadly, your wonderful “Big enough to serve you, small enough to know you” public image probably isn't going to be enough to walk that customer out to their car and drive them to your […]
Because It Needed to Exist “Savannah's squares may be public, but they feel private. Their massive, gnarled oaks – dripping with Spanish moss – create an insular mood, not to mention a deep shade… So lazy and calming are these ancient parcels that they act as a narcotic. The temptation is to lose yourself in […]
Irrational Commitment or, Why Did Wizard Academy Build a Free Wedding Chapel? Irrational commitment is a powerful thing. It is the stuff of heroes. Legends live because of it. And like anything powerful, it can be turned toward darkness. But let us look toward the light. Francis Bacon (1561-1626) made a fascinating observation during the […]
What's with the Name Wizard Academy? Are You Guys a Cult, or What? Sigh… We get asked that question a lot. No, we don't have anything to do with witches, warlocks, séances, Harry Potter or Halloween. We're simply a school of the communication arts. Our mission is to improve the creative thinking and communication skills […]
The Power of PR Advertising is what you buy from the sales department of the media. Public Relations (PR) is what you get from the news department for free. How many ads do you suppose a good news story is worth? Q: Which of the following statements is false? 1. Thomas Edison invented electric light.2. […]
Refer to an Unseen Action A Master's Method for Subtly Surprising Broca Toward the end of last week's Monday Morning Memo I promised, “Next week I'll teach you how to increase the magnetism of a message by referring to unseen action.” Mischievously, I preceded that statement with a subtle example of the very thing. Do […]
The New Targeting Persona-based writing is the new Targeting. According to what we've seen so far, ads that employ persona-based writing are outperforming yesterday's demo-targeted ads by an average of 81 percent. Website copy, direct mail letters, radio scripts and magazine ads that use persona-based language are pulling buckets of gold from the dwindling rivers […]
Six Things Explained Every Nazi believed every other Nazi had character and integrity. Likewise, the Ku Klux Kooks and the Taliban believe themselves to be the high defenders of all that is holy and true. Your judgment of the “character and integrity” of others is rooted in the values you hold to be self-evident or […]
Heroes, Friends and Personal Pride Will you tell me the truth about yourself if I let you do it from behind a mask? I'm collecting impressions today and I'm willing to share my collected data with you. My hope is that we'll both will get a glimpse into how we measure ourselves, our friends, and […]
Business Life Cycles Are You Embracing Fundamental Change or Incremental Change? Why does every branch of medicine have pediatric specialists? Are kids a different species than adults? In a word, “yes.” According to Dr. David Nichols, “Children are susceptible to different diseases than adults. Their basic anatomy is the same as ours, but they experience […]
Visual Images vs. Mental Images A visual image is a simple thing, a picture that enters the eyes. But a mental image is more complex. Assembled in the mind from information real and imagined, mental images are complex composites of sight, sound, taste, touch, smell, opinion and mood, combined with associative memories, both conscious and […]
Avoiding Ad Speak Contrary to popular belief, Americans don't hate advertising. We just hate ads that sound like ads. Do your ads sound like ads? Are you guilty of Ad-speak? Ad-speak is filled with polished words and filtered phrases that deliver no information and have no relevance. Ambiguous claims give Ad-speak a hollow sound. Do […]
7 Diagnostic Tools for Marketing Do you feel that something might be wrong with your business but you're not quite sure what it is? Solving the problem is the easy part. The tricky part is getting clarity on exactly what the problem is. Careless doctors treat symptoms. They don't worry about why your head is […]
Pioneers and Settlers I was planning to write When Marketing is a Mirage, but that's going to have to wait. Because today I'm hearing the voice of John Steinbeck as he mumbles to his poodle, Charley, and ambles toward his pickup truck: “When I was very young and the urge to be someplace else was […]
That Glowing Bridge to the Unknown To go from one state of consciousness to another…To move from an old opinion to a new… To travel from ignorance to insightand darkness to light…requires a portal. A portal is a transitionary device of sight or sound that functions as a sort of third gravitating body between the […]
String Theology Quantum Mechanics and General Relativity are both accepted as scientific fact even though they’re mutually exclusive. Albert Einstein spent the second half of his life searching for a unifying truth that would reconcile the two. Einstein was searching for String Theory. It not only reconciles General Relativity to Quantum Mechanics, but it reconciles […]
Doing My Happy Dance Last Thursday the Wall Street Journal published a story about a new book written by two of our faculty members, hinting strongly that if the biggest advertising agencies on Madison Avenue would just buy a copy and read it, they would find the answers to all the questions that have eluded […]
How Often Should I Change My Ads? About 15 years ago I concluded that a medium-impact broadcast ad should be replaced only after the typical listener has heard it at least 12 times, and a low-impact ad should be replaced after achieving a frequency of 20. I arrived at these conclusions by carefully monitoring the […]
Persona Based Selling We buy what we buy to remind ourselves and tell the world around us who we are. “Nothing is so powerful as an insight into human nature, what compulsions drive a man, what instincts dominate his action, even though his language so often camouflages what really motivates him. For if you know […]
Where Do They Bury the Rascals? Colorful and interesting people surround you in life, but in a graveyard, everyone becomes boring: “John Smith. Devoted Husband, Loving Father.” That's it? That's a life remembered? Where do they bury the interesting people? Where do they bury the reckless daredevils and tender poets and seductive femmes fatale? Where […]
The Image and The Actual Each letter of the alphabet represents a phoneme, a tiny sound that joins with other tiny sounds to make the more complex sounds we call words. Words are mere shadows cast by ideas. But the ideas they represent are real. Numerals are images of amounts. But the amounts they represent […]
Will You Do It? “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” – Mark Twain “I too have had […]
New Things to Get Excited About BANG. Jeffrey and Bryan Eisenberg's new book hits the shelves of every bookstore in America today. Waiting for Your Cat to Bark? Well, are you? Many of you have heard me speak about society's 40-year pendulum and how we're currently in the middle of a 6-year transition from an […]
Pregnant with America The most famous quote attributed to Alexis de Tocqueville is, “America is great because she is good, and if America ever ceases to be good, she will cease to be great.” Strangely, Tocqueville never said it. He did, however, make a number of astounding pronouncements and predictions. Alexis de Tocqueville, that 25 […]
Lenny the Misfit Caterina dumps baby Lenny on her boyfriend, then moves to town and gets married to someone else. Neither Lenny's father nor his mother is willing to give Lenny their family name, so he is known only by the name of the mountain under whose shadow he was born: Lenny Albano. An unwanted […]
Pricing, Value, and Salability Business Proverbs for Business Owners Pricing – If you're not worried that you're pricing it too cheap, you're not pricing it cheap enough. That's the best advice I can give you about Pricing in a single sentence. Never ask, “How much might someone be willing to pay for this?” Ask instead, […]
The Four Faces in Every Store “You can be anything you want to be,” was once the anthem of America. But we seem to have twisted that sunlit dream into a shriveled demon that whispers, “Hurry, hurry, hurry and you can be everything you want to be.” Too much to do, too little time. Tossed […]
Will You Change Your Little Corner? Nehemiah is a book of the history of the Jews. Have you ever read it? 450 BC – It is the time of Socrates, just a few years before Plato, Aristotle, and Alexander the Great: Nehemiah is a government worker who becomes distressed with the way things are and […]
A Very Interesting Ad The doctor's waiting room glowed with old magazines. As I stood there amidst this strange illumination, I noticed an ad for IBM Consulting that featured an executive woman peering thoughtfully into the distance. In the foreground hung the three questions that haunt every business that has ever achieved success: How do […]
Sleep Is The New Sex “Men think about it every seven seconds or so. Women romanticize it. Teenagers yearn for the weekends, when they might get a little of it… Sleep is the new sex.” – Susan A. Nielsen, journalist for The Oregonian The National Sleep Foundation has confirmed what you've long suspected: Americans aren't […]
The Cashier Con I've noticed a disturbing trend. Maybe you have, too: Cashiers have become the new pitchmen. The old pitchman came to your door and knocked. He sold encyclopedias or vacuum cleaners or miracle soap. Whatever. But you were trapped by your own politeness. You couldn't think of a way to get rid of […]
Hunger of the Candle for the Flame You are a column of wax. Your purpose began as a spark, a flicker easily ignored. But you didn't ignore it. You turned to face it and your head caught fire. Grace Hansen admonishes, “Don't be afraid your life will end; be afraid it will never begin.” […]
Outsiders and Thought Particles My computer-programmer friend Akintunde used to spend his Sunday afternoons with Pennie and me. When my audio-book Thought Particles: Binary Code of the Mind was released, Akintunde took home a copy and listened to it several times. We had long talks about it. Then he was whisked away to Kyoto, Japan, […]
Thought Particle Technology has Arrived I consider Pandora.com to be the first commercial application of Thought Particle technology. Have you allowed Pandora to read your mind yet? Pandora.com is a streaming music service crafted by a couple of hundred really serious music experts whose ideas about music are much bigger and more divergent than the […]
The Origin of Creativity I like to think God said, “Let there be…” and then paused to think for a moment. Suddenly it came to him, “Light!” If you accept the book of Genesis, then God is a creator by nature. And he created us in his image, little miniatures of himself. That means we're […]
Having Arrived at the Endand Forgotten to Live 2005 was an amazingly bad year for Pennie and me. Her mother died, my father died, and then we were brought horribly low by a financial surprise with two commas to the left of the decimal point. There was a period of weeks when it looked like […]
Poor Writer's Almanac Writers Seminar, Book Release Party, Call for Submissions Can you be in Austin on Saturday, April 22? SEMINAR: We're planning a writer's seminar in palatial Tuscan Hall featuring Chris Maddock, the rarely seen teacher of Advanced Wordsmithing, and Jeff Sexton, the instructor of that always sold-out curriculum, How to Write Powerfully and […]
Why Most Ads Put Us to Sleep How often are you conscious of the fact that Earth, only Earth, is buried beneath an ocean of air? We, the fleas that dance on the skin of Mother Earth, live in this dry ocean. We use it to hold our airplanes off the ground. We blow out […]
Blogs And Reality TV The Changing Face of America Do you remember when America watched awards shows? If you were somehow unplugged and didn't receive the newsflash, the combined strength of Paul McCartney, Madonna, U2, Mariah Carey, Coldplay, Faith Hill and Jay-Z wasn't enough to swing the hammer and ring the bell during this year's […]
Treasure Hunt This week I didn't feel like writing about advertising or business or leadership or anything else an ambitious soul might find useful. So if you're in a vibrating hurry with far too much to do, right here would be the place to stop reading. The DELETE button is sitting there, twitching, anxious for […]
Stronger Ads = More Complaints It's no secret that stronger ads generate faster growth. But with each higher level of awareness comes an increase in complaints: “I'm sick of hearing your ads.”TRANSLATION: “It makes me mad that I can't ignore you.” “Your ads don't sound professional. They're not polished and smooth.”TRANSLATION: “It makes me mad […]
The American Dream America is a democracy and we believe in free enterprise. Let's look at that for a moment: Democracy is majority rule. Groupthink. “United we stand, divided we fall.” But the key to business – free enterprise – is to have an absolute dictator. In America's system of free enterprise, the person whose […]
The Future of Ad Writing America has been flattered by advertising (“Because you deserve it”), misled by ads (“Lowest prices anywhere”), hyped by ads (“While supplies last”), and lied to repeatedly (“Guaranteed!”). The result of all this misinformation is a growing numbness to ad-speak. We're becoming deaf and blind to it. With effortless ease we […]
The Critical 0.05 Percent It takes 1,800 electrons to equal the mass of a single proton. Protons and their cousins – neutrons – make up 99.95 percent of the mass in the universe. Yet it's the electrical charges of the seemingly insignificant 0.05 percent – those tiny orbiting electrons – that hold our universe together. […]
Inside the Outside It hit me. “I've become an eavesdropper, listening to the conversations of strangers.” It's 5:00AM and I'm sitting at the bar of an all-night café on the wrong side of town eating a three-dollar breakfast, listening to the smelly, funny stories of downtrodden people who know each other well. Their sparkling banter […]
Competitive Environment The bottom-rung loser in one town can move to another town and often become the king of his category. All it takes is weak competitors. I've seen it happen a dozen times. Whether you dominate your marketplace won't be determined solely by the strength of your advertising. It will be determined partly by […]
Lonely Outsider I was in the shower when my cell phone started ringing. Pennie answered it for me. It was my partner Jeff Eisenberg. Dripping, I took the phone. “Yo. Jefferson.” “I'm sending you an article from The Economist. It's something I've heard you talk about a hundred times.” “What is it?” “You know who […]
Four Kinds of Ads Great ads can be either product-specific or store-specific. Bad ads are generally category-specific. And then there are franchise ads. Franchise ads build the master brand. The hope of every franchisee is that the ads provided by the franchisor will generate enough brand magnetism to pull customers into their store. Due to […]
Hi Def Imagination People tell me they want to learn to think outside the box. No problemo. The secret is to stay out of the box to begin with. You crawl into the box when you think about your problem and wrap its known obstacles around you. So quit. Focus instead on an interesting saying, […]
Are You Merely Determined? Determination is emotional, a moment of intense focus with clenched jaw and the visualization of a mission accomplished. The sneer is gone from Casey's lip, his teeth are clenched in hate,He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate;And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it […]
What Are You Offering? Businesses don't fail due to reaching the wrong people. Businesses fail when they say the wrong things. And they say the wrong things when they believe what the public tells them. Conduct a survey. Ask the public to describe in detail the kind of place they'd like to shop. Then build […]
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