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 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...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 19, 2014
If you’ve witnessed the fate of successful brands (little fish) after they’ve been devoured by larger corporate entities (bigger fish), you’re aware that, regardless of what they eat, bigger fish excrete the same thing, all the time. Why the...