Marketing is Patient Money

Marketing is Patient Money

In a beautiful little book called, The Zen Path Through Depression, Philip Martin offers advice for easing the pain of depression that could just as easily apply to the practice of marketing: When we are lost, frightened, or facing something new or unknown, our first...
Circling the Funnel

Circling the Funnel

One of the joys of my life is being compelled to conduct Internet searches to determine the ostensible meanings of the latest abbreviations, acronyms, or jargon. Here’s the item that got my attention most recently: At the most basic level — even for companies...
What I Didn’t Learn in Business School

What I Didn’t Learn in Business School

In business school classrooms they construct beautiful models of a non-world. (Peter Drucker, 1909-2005) It’s easy to dismiss Peter Drucker’s comment about the divide between the hypothetical world of business school and the pragmatic world of actual...
Marketing Makes You Nervous?

Marketing Makes You Nervous?

Why does marketing inspire anxiety? I don’t know. But I have two theories. The first is that we possess a fundamental distrust of brevity and simplicity. The second is that we don’t recognize effective marketing is simple storytelling. Most of us think the...
Tell Your Story

Tell Your Story

A few years ago, Peter Guber wrote this in the Harvard Business Review, “Critical details, data, and analytics are more effectively emotionalized and metabolized by the listener when they’re embedded in a story.” Similarly, Jonathan Gattschall wrote...
The Case of the Missing Brand: Part Deux

The Case of the Missing Brand: Part Deux

After learning Johnson’s fate at IDS, I called my buddy, Millwood, at The Bugle: “Millie. It’s O’Brien. “What’s up, OB?” “You ever heard of a company called Intergalactic Data Services?” “Yeah. Matter of...