marketing

Colonel Cargill, General Peckem__ troubleshooter, was a forceful, ruddy man. Before the war he had been an alert, hard-hitting, aggressive marketing executive. He was a very bad marketing executive. Colonel Cargill was so awful a marketing executive that his services were much sought after by firms eager to establish losses for tax purposes. Throughout the civilized world, from Battery Park to Fulton Street, he was known as a dependable man for a fast tax write-off. His prices were high, for failure often did not come easily. He had to start at the top and work his way down, and with sympathetic friends in Washington, losing money was no simple matter. It took months of hard work and careful misplanning. A person misplaced, disorganized, miscalculated, overlooked everything and opened every loophole, and just when he thought he had it made, the government gave him a lake or a forest or an oilfield and spoiled everything. Even with such handicaps, Colonel Cargill could be relied on to run the most prosperous enterprise into the ground. He was a self-made man who owed his lack of success to nobody.

Rescuing people from the results of their own foolishness is really what customers service is all about. Customers rarely obey the rules. They expect you to rescue them whenever they do something stupid. Will you be a __escuer,_ known far and wide for customer service, or will you steadfastly insist that your customers follow the proper procedures?

The ironic thing is that marketers have responded to this problem with the single worst cure possible. To deal with the clutter and the diminished effectiveness of Interruption Marketing, they're interrupting us even more!

What we're left with ... is the distinctly uncomfortable sense that much of what we call culture jamming achieves the same effect as traditional marketing. Both rely on the bedrock principle that branding works. Yet marketing has moved on from branding toward a more direct emotional connection to our reptilian brains, which makes it immune to the cognitive dissonance culture jamming creates. In the meantime, the brans being promoted by some activists retain the full integrity of their original message,

The first step in persuasion is to entice your target to imagine doing the thing you want them to do.

People don't trade money for things when they value their money more highly than they value the things.

What sells a book sells a book, same in traditional or self-publishing. You gotta shake your tail feathers.

Marketing is safe. Sales is risky. UNLESS, marketing has done its job. Then sales is safe too.

The best ads are about the customer and how the product will change his life.

Referring to an event in an untold story is a powerful technique rarely used.

Content Isn't King, It's the Kingdom.

Writing a book is easy, getting people to read it is the hard part.

The marketing people are always talking about something called 'consumers'. I have this image of a fat little man in baggy Bermuda shorts, a Hawaiian shirt, and a straw hat with beer-can openers dangling from it, clutching fistfuls of dollars.

Contrary to the tenets of conventional wisdom, viral ideas and campaigns were not first transmitted via the electronic media of the Internet age. Their ideological forebears lived and replicated in the host coffee-houses, inns and taverns of the early eighteenth-century.

The core of PR ((public relations) is strongest where our identity and value relationships are built through sharing and caring interactions, not sold through marketing pitches asking directly for transactions." ~ @Tracey007Bond

The secret of being a top-notch con man is being able to know what the mark wants, and how to make him think he's getting it.

Difference between TV and the internet was how far you sat from the screen. TV was an 8 foot activity, and you were a consumer. The internet was a 16 inch activity, and you participated. I think the sitting down thing is similar. You're not going to buy an armoir while standing on the subway.

In the old world, you devoted 30% of your time to building a great service and 70% of your time to shouting about it. In the new world, that inverts.