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...
Let’s Get Physical

Let’s Get Physical

I received a notification from a trade association that reminded me precisely how linguistically bereft, if not spiritually desiccated, we’ve become. With offending identifiers deleted to keep my sorry keister out of the hoosegow, it said this: Submissions can...
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...
Do It Well

Do It Well

When my three siblings and I were children, Mom and Dad took us to dinner at the historic Griswold Inn in Essex, Connecticut. The place was bustling, as always. Young members of the wait staff hustled from table to table, tending to their patrons. After a few minutes,...