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...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 14, 2014
If you want to make yourself instantly unpopular, say this in a sales meeting: “Marketing is not a sales-support function. Sales is a marketing-fulfillment function.” But make sure the door is unlocked, the hallways are clear, and the elevator is held...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 13, 2014
Dow Jones hasn’t updated its list of the top gobbledygook terms since 2008. But the world hasn’t changed all that much over the past few years. The business lexicon has changed even less. Buzzwords are like Pit Bulls with ankles: Once their jaws are clenched, it...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 11, 2014
On a staff call one morning, Jonathan Spiliotopoulos, our Magnificent Maven of Multi-Media Machinations, said this: Helping people make important decisions is the very definition of design. Because I’m a writer, as opposed to one proficient in visual or graphic...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 29, 2014
Jonathan Spiliotopoulos, one of my O’Brien Communications Group partners, a friend, and an estimable thinker, wrote this note to me one day after he’d read a blog post in which the author was beefing about web-based ad blockers: Companies complain about...
by Mark O'Brien | Oct 1, 2014
A statement finding its way more frequently and annoyingly into the vernacular of business and politics is this: Hope is not a strategy. Yeah. The statement is true. But enough already. Its corollary statement is this: A tactic is not a strategy. Yeah. That’s...
