by Mark O'Brien | Dec 1, 2014
You walk into a doctor’s office with a week-old hangnail. It’s still painful and showing signs of infection. The doctor asks no questions, hands you a bottle, tells you to put two drops in each ear twice daily, and call him in a week if you’re not feeling...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 26, 2014
For reasons best left to the imagination, Investigation Discovery still offers programming about Bernie Madoff. Bernie will be 221 years old when he gets out of jail. That seems a tad unfair, since Charles Ponzi, the originator of the scheme Bernie perfected, only...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 25, 2014
Here are Immutable Communication Rules 1 through 3: We are not the target audience. We are not the target audience. We are not the target audience. Here are Immutable Communication Rules 4 through 6: If technical people could communicate with non-technical people, God...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 24, 2014
We’ve been hearing about the trite notion of personal brand for longer than I thought. In fact, I recently found a column from 2011. It said this, part: Your personal value proposition (PVP) is at the heart of your career strategy. It’s the foundation for...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 21, 2014
Inbound marketing is a dangerous concept. There. I’ve said it. Combining pie in the sky, fantasy, delusion, and something like reckless lunacy, it panders to the misbegotten fantasies of every organization that thinks SEO and social media are latter-day...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 20, 2014
Human psychology doesn’t play nice with the relationships between price, cost, and value. To illustrate the point, I offer this letter to a hypothetical client, a company with no brand recognition in its target market. The company is reluctant to commit to an...
