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 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 | Nov 4, 2014
Years ago, returning from a Sunday afternoon outing with some friends in their station wagon, I said I couldn’t believe the weekend was ending — the next day would be Monday already. The three-year-old daughter of my friends called to her father from the...
by Mark O'Brien | Nov 3, 2014
“I’d walk a mile over hot coals to [fill in the blank].” “I’d crawl a mile over broken glass to [fill in the blank].” How many times have you heard statements like that? Certainly there’s a proliferation of love-related songs...
