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Self-sabotage: Is your best work getting screened out?

The harder I work, the luckier I get. That mantra has long served me well. It’s also created a blind spot: when in doubt, I work on my laptop, iPad, phone. If you don’t see a problem with that, we may have something in common.

We are fast becoming a nation of screenaholics; addicted to screens for stimulation in one form or another. We are, in short, too plugged in. We are screening out our best work.

What’s enough?

Between work and play, how many hours are you with a screen? The Council for Research Excellence says it’s about eight hours a day—more for adults 45-54.Continue Reading

The Pendulum is taking your customers back to the future

Aim at a moving target and you’ll miss. It’s better to anticipate, aim just ahead of it. Ask hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. He changed hockey because he would “skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.”

So it goes with advertising. Aiming at the market now puts you behind the game. Gretzky leveraged experience of the game. We have something better: historic cycles that predict what’s coming.

Deja Vu now in print

In their new book, Pendulum: How Past Generations Shape Our Present and Predict Our Future, Roy H Williams and Michael R. Drew detail society’s swing between Idealist (me) and Civic (we) cycles.

“We become an entirely different people every 40 years,” says Williams. “We think of these as the ‘me generation’ and the ‘we generation.'”

Continue Reading


Be aware
Observe and reflect your market

Advertising around an event as emotionally charged as 9/11’s 10th anniversary is risky. While many companies played it safe, taking a somber approach, State Farm chose a different tone that steps past the sadness so easily associated with 9/11, reminding us of the promise in a new day.

Spike Lee’s approach to this message provides an example of number six in Ten Be’s of Better Branding: observing and reflecting the market. By infusing State Farm’s message with a positive voice, Lee captures the spirit of a city and a nation that emerged from the dust and smoke more connected to the values that make us who we are. Continue Reading

Five marketing mistakes you can’t afford

That competitor across the street is plotting to steal your customers right now. Could your marketing be making it easy for them? Typically, it’s not big things that lose customers; they’re too obvious. Costly mistakes are usually the little ones, easily overlooked in your daily buzz of doing business.

How clean are your trays?

Customers see things you don’t. Dirty tray-tables left airline passengers wondering about engine maintenance. “If they can’t get the little things right, what about the big things?” surveyed passengers told Tom Peters and Robert H. Waterman, Jr. in their 1982 book, In Search of Excellence.

While some of the so-called “excellent” companies have gone by the wayside, their principles of excellence still apply. Learning from the customer, for example, helped expose these marketing mistakes:Continue Reading

Grooveyard of posts past