Marketing and advertising advice for owner-operated businesses
An excerpt from my family travel journal. Cape Cod was one of the stops on our thousand-mile New England road trip. Summer league baseball won’t seem relevant to your marketing and advertising, unless you look deeper.
Every summer, the best college players from across the country come by invitation to play in the Cape Cod Baseball League. I have been reading about the league since a Marc Setty at James Hardie turned me onto the book, The Last Best League: One Summer, One Season, One Dream
Clearly, this guy doesn’t get it. This pile-up of products is a classic. Trying to be all things to all people makes you nothing to anyone. I learned as a teenage disc jockey a lesson about choosing which records to play that applies equally to business:
You’re defined as much by what you don’t do as you are by what you choose to do. Kitchens and baths? Sure. Kitchens and baths and floors? Okay. Kitchens and baths and floors and garage doors? Heh?
This also steps on the toe of Be #1: Be real, know who you are—and who you aren’t. I’ll bet if you called this guy, he’d do roof repair too. I’m sure he’s not plugged into the Ten BE’s of Better Branding.
Apple doesn’t build computers, mp3 players, or even phones. They provide something more meaningful: human connections. Instead of merely selling a device, Steve Jobs and company connects us to what we care about: music, people, memories. How they do is easy to see, if you know where to look.
In his Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address, Jobs gave up the magic on a single slide. It wasn’t quoted in any news story or blog I could find. Yet, it succinctly conveys both what Apple does and how you can drive focused excellence in your company.Continue Reading
James Bond’s Aston Martin. Loaded with super-cool spy stuff, it kept him one step ahead of the bad guys and ever closer to romance. His endless array of gadgets left boys like me dreaming of getting our own. Now I have them, sorta….
My favorite five James Bond toolsEven though I didn’t get the Aston Martin (not yet, anyway), or grab private jet rides for globe-trotting adventure (coach seats are fine for me), I have amassed a set of tools to James Bond my way through my daily challenges.
Ian Flemming died in 1964, just as Bond was becoming a screen franchise. A parade of authors extended the story line (in varying levels of success) after Hollywood exhausted Flemming’s original novels. To celebrate the release of the 23rd post-Flemming Bond novel, “Carte Blanche
