From the monthly archives:

December 2008

Branding a hot dog eatery: Zach’s Shack

12.31.2008

How do you brand a hole-in-the-wall hot dog dive that has a MySpace page for a website and a drawing for a logo?
Zach’s Shack is a hot dog establishment on the eastern fringe of SE Hawthorne Street, one of Portland, Oregon’s busiest (and hipsteriest) shopping and entertainment districts. Surrounded by bars and restaurants, including another, [...]

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On concepts, labels, and strategy

12.29.2008

In their Guerrilla Marketing for Consultants Jay Conrad Levinson and Michael W. McLaughlin define guerrilla marketing as “a full-time business that includes every aspect of a consulting practice…it applies to everything you do. The object of guerrilla marketing is to build and maintain profitable relationships…” What a great example of how someone’s definition of a [...]

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This week’s most helpful posts, 52/2008

12.28.2008

Top 6 low- or no-cost green marketing strategies, Eco Metro

An introduction into the world of personal branding, Personal Branding Blog

The art of customer service, Open Forum

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Branding a soup: Kapustnica

12.24.2008

The great thing about Christmas is that aside from a few basic symbols and rituals, every nation and every family inject its own traditions into the holiday. So when my wife Lindsay and I were debating the menu for this year’s Christmas Eve dinner my sole contribution and only condition was: kapustnica [KAH-poost-nih-tsa].
Christmas tree. Presents. [...]

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This week’s most helpful posts, 51/2008

12.21.2008

Starting social media: Building on what you have, Altitude

The rise of “retail blogs”, The Long Tail

Why reinventing ourselves is the only way to survive, bizsolutionsplus

Dealing with detractors, Altitude

Offer a third choice, boost sales, Neuromarketing

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Marketing the future

12.20.2008

Concurrent with its bailout bid, General Motors has been running a feel-good commercial for its much-anticipated Chevrolet Volt, a plug-in hybrid vehicle due on the market in 2010. “Innovative” or “sustainable” aren’t words typically associated with GM. But the company deserves credit for 1) inventing The Long Marketing Campaign, and 2) demonstrating the irony of [...]

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How to measure social performance, pt. 1

12.19.2008

How do you measure your company’s social impact (People), the most problematic and difficult pillar of the triple-bottom line to capture? The New Economics Foundation and Global Reporting Initiative have great resources on measuring social return on investment, a value-metric that can be very demanding to implement. What can small businesses do that’s simpler and [...]

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Everyone is a story

12.16.2008

We communicate with stories. Trivial or profound, everything we do and everything that happens translates into a story. “Guess what happened at work today.” “She took a trip to Europe and fell in love.” “How about those Sharks?” As the heroes of our lives, we each are a story. The same goes for your customers. [...]

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What is authentic marketing and how to make it core

12.15.2008

The first rule of how to make an idea stick, according to brothers Heath’s Made To Stick, which I just finished over the weekend and fully recommend, is to “strip an idea down to its core” and make it “both simple and profound”. In marketing, the core (sticky) idea is a compact expression of the [...]

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