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This week I’ve turned the writing reins over to my father, Larry Cuban. He and I sometimes banter about the similarities in marketing to companies/consumers and schools. This week he offers his opinions about B2S—Business to Schools (yes I made up that acronym, let’s see if it sticks). The way companies are marketing new technologies to schools just ain’t working. There are three problems companies have in promoting and selling new devices and software to K-12 schools (over $

1) Mobilize for mobility The biggest change in email behavior is how people view their in box:  since January of this year, opening email on mobile devices has increased 80 percent, according to a Litmus Study. These numbers are only expected to rise. Ways to get to your readers wherever they are: Keep text short, punchy and focused on the CTA: Channel your best inner editor to get points across in a concise, engaging way and make the CTA prominent. And remember, only the sub

It’s the golden age of “curation” and smart marketers are exploiting it to their full advantage —but consumers may be losing something in the process if we go too far with this trend. Our hyper-reliance on a computer or human to filter choices or “advise“ us what we should read, eat, buy, wear, or anything else has been thrust into the stratosphere by digital saturation of social media, pre-digested content, and curation tools. It seems that while our world has gotten bigger

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

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