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 17, 2014
If you’ve been keeping up with the experts (ahem), you’re like to have noticed many of them writing obituaries for branding (case in point). There’s a short list of reasons for which people write such things: They want to be controversial, in which...
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 10, 2014
First I would straighten out the language. (Confucius, asked how he would restore order to the world) I’ve worked for three of America’s major insurance and financial services organizations. Those are the terms by which those companies chose to describe themselves,...
