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If I had a $1 for how many times I’ve heard the rhetorical question “Is traditional marketing dead?” or purporting that it is, my business office would be located at the top floor of a fancy San Francisco building instead of my small condo. I even heard this phrase  as part of “common knowledge” last year on a phone interview for a job from someone squarely in the internet space. Makes sense given his world revolved around ecommerce. For fun, I made the case for other forms o

Look at any marketing textbook, business book or PowerPoint at a marketing conference and you’ll see different definitions of what a company brand is, but they all look familiar. First the brand focuses on the external: the symbols such as the logo, colors and other physical attributes of the company, and then the layers are peeled away to reveal core characteristics like personality and qualities that embody the brand- what you want people to think and feel when they engage

Perhaps you’ve done it already: design a product on a web site yourself using a configurator. And then pay for it. Then it’s shipped to you. And you hopefully enjoy it. This new level of customized product development and selling  — no marketing required — has mushroomed to unseen levels with the growing capabilities and sophistication of online retailing. We’ve seen mass customization before in the offline and online worlds. For instance, when buying a custom home (get it? c

Something more powerful than the largest coupon, the behemoth billboard or the mega ad campaign…the marketing of green. Now you know we don’t mean as in the color, we mean “Ecological Marketing” (yes, it really used to be called this in the 1970s) or quite simply put, using the power of  environmentally-friendly language to sell products or services. Now this isn’t all bad if the claims are true. Problem is, turns out much of the time advertisers are making claims that are ei

More and more as I look at the Apple computer advertisements over the past few years, I’ve wondered…are Apple and Microsoft really THAT different? You know, the nerdy  PC guy who tries to fend off a variety of PC system and aesthetics criticism from the chillaxin’ Apple guy? Sure, the companies have different roots, product offerings, technology, and most importantly perhaps, brand images, but recently I’ve pondered  if the dweeby Microsoft guy and laid back, clever-than-thou