Category: Great Marketing

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Great Marketing

The Final Stunt

The Last Jump

I can’t draw worth a damn, but when I thought of this it made me laugh so much that I had to put it on paper.

He was crazy, and every one my age loved him. I didn’t need to believe a man could fly, I saw it.

The guy was a Natural Born Marketeer too, think about it – he took antics normally reserved for drunken rednecks and made them into a national spectacle. This man could put on THE SHOW!

Some artists notes: Although the gates are locked you can clearly see St. Pete giving him the thumbs up that he’s in. Motorcycles are hard to draw, I’ve never seen Dilbert on a Motorcycle so I could still have a career in cartoons.

Get The Evel Story Here

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Great Marketing

American Express Members Lounge

This weekend, after the pulse pounding Michael Bay-esque software development conference, my dear wife dragged me off to the mall for some shopping (as in – she shops, I sit around and do nothing). Luckily I had a secret weapon in my arsenal. I had received a postcard earlier in the week from American Express telling me about their new members lounge at the Natick Collection (the new X-tra snooty name for what we used to call “The Natick Mall” or worse yet, just “The Mall”).

Some direct marketing actually got through to me – go figure. The lounge is very cool. American Express LoungeIt reminds me of the clubs at the airport that keep out the dirty cake-eating civilians, to create an oasis of peace and quiet for the business traveller.

I was greeted at the door and my card was run through a handheld scanner. This granted me access to the inner sanctum. It’s a room about the size of the average store in the mall, brown leather seats sort of like restaurant booths, 3 drink stations with water, lemonade and one of those multi-coffee, latte, chai, hot chocolate machines.

They wrap gifts for free and have their own bathroom. Only 2 things bothered me, one was the lack of wireless service, but they do have 3 Macs connected to the web. The other was that I can’t believe that there are people who can complain about the types of coffee offered in the machine. Here’s a great new service, all kinds of free stuff and a great place to hide, and some people can still find stuff to bitch about.

Screw them, the staff here is friendly even to those dolts. My time is up, the boss called. Shopping’s done.Loungin'

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Great Marketing

Big Rich and the Milk Bones

One day we were walking the dog and a big contractor truck drove by and honked his horn. The driver was on the side of the vehicle farther away from us and I could see him throw something over the roof of the truck towards us on the sidewalk. I caught one of the Milk Bone dog biscuits and the other hit the ground right next to Hannah, the world’s greatest dog.Hannah

This happened a few times and it was always great to see the dog freak out over the bones from heaven. On Thursday we saw the truck at the local convenience store and noticed that Big Rich has a tree service. We had a tree in the backyard that was threatening to take out the back half of the house so he came right over to look at it. The short version of the story is that by the time I got home from work that night the tree was gone with no indication it had ever been there except for a stump.

There’s also a picture on my fridge of Big Rich with Charlie Daniels (signed by both). That’s pretty cool, and I wouldn’t call any of it traditional marketing.

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Great Marketing Lead Generation

What’s Your Cost Per Lead?

Over the past 20 years ROI has been a measure of successful marketing. Many management teams want to see the ROI of each sucessful campaign. Seth Godin (sweet Red Saber post BTW) has argued for a long time that this is the “safe” path, and will ultimately lead to your destruction. If you only make the safe choices, somebody that you compete with is going to take a chance, and will eventually send you back to asking customers if they “want fries with that?”

So how do you get around this? It may be impossible if your management team is already expecting ROI on everything you propose, but you need to change the ground rules. View all of your marketing efforts as a whole – given your entire budget, how many leads do you pull in? How good are they? How many close, and for how much?

With metrics like this you can determine a cost per lead, and determine how much revenue each lead generates. Now you know the overall ROI of your marketing programs. You can see how every program performs in both terms of cost and quality. You’ll be able to make some informed decisions such as – perhaps Google clicks are not worth the huge dollars and you don’t need to be spending so much there. Are yahoo clicks worth the same amount as those from google? Which trade shows are worth going to?

The end result is that if your overall activites are generating a positive ROI you now have an excuse to to some R&D, and you should refer to it as such. Now you don’t have to try and make up numbers about what a YouTube video might do for you, or some other program that you’ve never tried before. You just say that this is an experiment and it may fail, but we will learn if it’s possible for it to generate enough return to add to our marketing mix. The great part is that as soon as you get the data you’ll be able to compare it to the rest of your programs.

The Evolution of Marketing
I’m thinking about the evolution in Marketing as an organization grows. As an enterprise is born marketing exists to serve as lead generator. As the enterprise expands, the earlier sections of the sales cycle can be outsourced to Marketing Automation. Ultimately Marketing moves into branding if it becomes necessary to influence the public, shareholders, or other groups that are not directly purchasing the product. Different skills and toolsets are used during the evolution. I’m too tired to ponder upon this more. Good night…

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Great Marketing

Mitch Joel and C.C. Chapman Hacked!

This dynamic duo is presenting now at Podcamp Boston! If google is running hard this will show up on the Main Screen where they are showing off Google Reader!

Marketing Over Coffee #1

Your pal,

J

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Email Marketing Great Marketing Swipe File

VirtualResponse Channels Dre

This is the best marketing I have ever seen for an email company. The only downside to this is that if you don’t know Salesforce.com you won’t get all the jokes, otherwise, brilliant!

[youtube]lq4m2JnCTo4[/youtube]

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Great Marketing Swipe File The Marketeer

Great Marketing

Whenever I see some brilliant marketing I’m compelled to make a note and post it here.

I was getting my car washed yesterday and before you pull around to the entry there’s a self service kiosk where you can grab a trashbag or a heavy duty paper towel. There’s also a sort of gumball machine that has peanuts in it with a dopey slogan “We’re nuts about our customers!”. Don’t be fooled by the idiotic tagline. Easy marks (aka suckers) like myself grab some, soccer moms with kids in the minivan probably do the same to keep the kids quiet.

But what happens next? You start cracking open and peeling the peanuts. So unless you are compulsive like I am, eating right over your new free trashbag, you finish the carwash and look around the inside of your car, filled with peanut shells, and say “Damn, we should vacuum this mess out!”

And, lo and behold, there’s the vacuum right next to the exit.

Have a good weekend.

Categories
Great Marketing

Bum Rush Continues

I woke up this morning and found Black Lab at #99 on the charts. Bum Rush the Charts pushed an indie artist into the top 100 on iTunes – incredible!

I’m also getting to the final prep of my latest new project, Marketing Over Coffee – keep your ears open! It’s been a crazy week and I’m going to catch up on some sleep.