DORMANT MARKETING

Educating Your CEO About Marketing (Part 2) : MarketingProfs

2010-02-16T14:02:00.000+03:00

Educating Your CEO About Marketing (Part 2) : MarketingProfs

How to Market to People Who Don't Trust Their Friends - MarketingVOX

2010-02-10T20:45:00.000+03:00

How to Market to People Who Don't Trust Their Friends - MarketingVOX

Consumers Demand Engagement - eMarketer

2010-01-30T11:39:00.000+03:00

Consumers Demand Engagement - eMarketer

Daniel Pink: The surprising science of motivation

2010-01-21T15:37:00.001+03:00

Baby Got Leads

2010-01-20T11:29:00.000+03:00

Web Is Bright Spot in Europe Travel Market - eMarketer

2010-01-14T17:36:00.000+03:00

Web Is Bright Spot in Europe Travel Market - eMarketer

Al Pacino Motivational Speech

2009-12-08T15:32:00.000+03:00

Embracing lifetime value (By Seth Godin)

2009-11-30T10:03:00.000+03:00

If you walk into a company-owned cell phone store to sign up for a contract, what are you worth?

Given the huge gross margins at AT&T and Verizon and the standard two-year contract, I think it's easy to figure on more than $2000 in lifetime value.

If you ran a business where a customer represented an additional $2,000 in profit, how would you staff? How long would you make someone wait? If staff costs $25 an hour, how long would that extra person take to pay off?

Few businesses understand (really understand) just how much a customer is worth. Add to this the additional profit you get from a delighted customer spreading the word--it can easily double or triple the lifetime value.

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Market With Meaning - Creating a Marketing Campaign - Entrepreneur.com

2009-11-10T07:45:00.001+03:00

Market With Meaning - Creating a Marketing Campaign - Entrepreneur.com

Posted using ShareThis

Marketing Spending Pays Off for Small Biz - eMarketer

2009-11-10T07:28:00.000+03:00

Marketing Spending Pays Off for Small Biz - eMarketer

How to Play right

2009-11-09T11:00:00.004+03:00

How to play right (Source)

Strategy is about deciding what to do and what not to do. In the same vein, choosing how to play is inextricably linked with choosing where to play. For a business, it comes down to choice - that is, assessing which markets are attractive and which the business is best placed to target. Managers must then select the right strategies.

In essence, this requires answers to just three questions:

what are you going to sell?

to whom are you going to sell it?

through whom are you going to reach that market?

How do you choose the right strategy for each market? The answer lies in understanding your buyers and the maturity of the market.

In 1957, the 'technology adoption lifecycle' model emerged as a way of explaining buyer maturity (Iowa State College used it to track farmers' purchasing patterns for hybrid seed corn). Six years later, academic Everett Rogers broadened and popularised the concept in his book Diffusion of Innovations. Even if Rogers does not ring a bell, you are probably familiar with elements of his thesis. The term 'early adopter', for instance, is used frequently today in management talk, as is the expression 'laggard' (those who buy well after everyone else).

Geoffrey Moore brought the concept back to life in 1991 in his bestseller Crossing the Chasm, and again in 1995 with the even more successful book Inside the Tornado. Moore points out that the adoption model is one for describing buyers, not products. The question is not 'where is my product on the curve?' but 'where are my buyers on the curve?'

Why is this important? Because the strategy that is right for early adopters is completely inappropriate for pragmatists. So you had better know your buyers.

Enthusiasts and visionaries who quickly adopt new technologies are seeking a strategic advantage. They are happy to team with you to turn your unproven technology into a complete solution, provided they can be among the first to test it.

The pragmatists, on the other hand, want to see some evidence that this new technology works.

Therefore, the right strategy in a new market is to find the visionaries. It is all right to offer them an incomplete solution provided you offer lots of services to help overcome any early deficiencies.

The 'chasm' to which Moore refers is that horrible waiting period when the early adopters have done their thing, but the pragmatists are not yet convinced that the product is safe to buy. With pragmatists, you need to target a very narrow group so they can take comfort from seeing other similar businesses adopt and profit.

Your strategy flip-flops on many fronts. It will change from:

direct to indirect and back to direct again

broad to ultra-narrow, to broad (and then look for niche add-ons)

value pricing, to market pricing, to aggressive price leadership.

With this model in mind, here are some practical steps to help make your bets right.

Make a list of the product markets you have chosen to enter.

Use the collective wisdom of your team to determine how mature most of the buyers are for each of these product markets.

Select the strategy that matches this stage of buyer maturity.

Above all, set your strategy with confidence, and don't get lost in the chasm.

2009-11-07T14:00:00.001+03:00

Introduction to Venture Capital

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Advertising Creatives

2009-11-03T17:33:00.001+03:00

2009-11-03T12:44:00.002+03:00

Fifty years ago, Everett M. Rogers developed a theory of diffusion of innovations, that is, how new things spread through a society. This could apply to the adoption of products, new social norms, revoluitons, etc... The chart above shows the stages or levels of "types of people" until it is adopted by the masses. These types are:

The innovators (the darkest brown 2.5 percent on the far left) are venturesome, the visionaries, the wild-eyed revolutionaries, at least to the others, who feel threatened by change and risk-taking. To the innovators, themselves, the adoption is a no-brainer.

The early adopters (the darker brown 13.5 percent on the left) are respectable opinion leaders. They can function effectively as evangelists and missionaries.

The early majority (the 34 percent to the left of middle) is very deliberately ahead of the curve, but willing to make safe investments.

The late majority (the 34 percent to the right of middle) is skeptical and often part of a backlash.

The laggards (the lightest brown 16 percent on the far right)

"The Golden Circle"

2009-11-03T12:00:00.001+03:00

Music Composed by Birds

2009-11-03T11:53:00.001+03:00

This is great!!!

"Reading a newspaper, I saw a picture of birds on the electric wires. I cut out the photo and decided to make a song, using the exact location of the birds as notes (no Photoshop edit). I knew it wasn't the most original idea in the universe. I was just curious to hear what melody the birds were creating.

I sent the music to the photographer, Paulo Pinto, who I Googled on the internet. He told his editor, who told a reporter and the story ended up as an interview in the very same newspaper.

Here I've posted a short video made with the photo, the music and the score (composed by the birds)."

Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.

Complexity

2009-11-03T10:39:00.002+03:00

Innovation

2009-11-03T10:37:00.001+03:00

Rubiks Cube - Cool

2009-11-03T10:36:00.001+03:00

Stop Motion Rubik s Cube

Present Like Steve Jobs

2009-11-02T21:43:00.001+03:00

Conducting a Marketing Physical To Ensure Brand Health

2009-10-31T13:23:00.001+03:00

Conducting a P'"brand Physical"

Conducting a Marketing Physical To Ensure Brand Health

View more presentations from John Moore.

Does Your Brand Tell a Powerful Story?

2009-10-29T18:12:00.000+03:00

Brilliant's not enough in today's economy--you need a compelling story so people will remember you.

By Mary van de Wiel | October 19, 2009

One of the best ways for an entrepreneur to get a leg up in this competitive climate and distinguish yourself from the rest of the pack is to tell your brand story.

Story is how we connect with one another. Wonder why the emerging social networking sites are so popular? The answer is because people crave the emotional and powerful connection that comes through telling a story.

The best brand stories are irresistible, compelling and provocative in a way that your target audience is going to hear, seamlessly and effortlessly. Telling that kind of brand story will position you and your company as a leader in the marketplace.

The most memorable brand stories tell the unexpected, speak directly to the heart or dare you to live life to the fullest. Take Nike, for example. Its brand story challenges people to be empowered, to adopt a maverick spirit in life and "just do it." That story inspires, continues to be popular and provocative, and consistently strikes an emotional chord with Nike's fans and customers around the globe.

Why is storytelling so important to your business?

An authentic brand story makes you memorable.
It differentiates you as desirable.
It brings your brand to life.
It gives you a distinct competitive advantage.
Your target market becomes hugely responsive.
It positions you as a visionary in your field.
Take the role of brand guardian seriously. This role is critical. Like the captain of a ship, you're steering your brand through stormy seas. Be mindful of your brand's behavior, intention, tone and attitude. Right now, your brand story may be transmitting subliminal messages and telling a story all its own. As brand guardian of your business, pay attention to every kind of signal your brand is conveying to your target audience.

Taking the role of brand guardian seriously doesn't mean you have to be stodgy. The great brand guardians also have a great sense of humor. If you're not having enough fun with your brand, go back to the drawing board and tap into why you started your business in the first place.

Raise your brand energy levels. What comes to mind when you think about brands such as Apple, Target, Virgin or Nike? You probably sense big personality, boundless energy or major magnetic appeal. Now, imagine you can feel the "pulse" of any of these brands. You'd pick up that they were clearly alive, pumping and showing strong vital signs, right?

Your target audience has an uncanny ability to pick up on your brand "pulse" or brand energy. Start raising your brand energy levels, because a slow simmer won't cut it here. Look at the language you use across your marketing communications. Is it bland or does it have a dynamic, knock-your-socks-off energy? After all, there's something very attractive and contagious about brands that feel totally energized, passionate, idiosyncratic and that reflect your personality. It's a clue that the entrepreneur, CEO or brand guardian is paying close attention to embedding his or her individualistic energy and passion into the business.

Make sure all aspects of your brand are in alignment. Just as a car runs best when the wheels are aligned, your brand communication needs to be aligned, too. I'm talking about consistency--across all the ways you get the word out to the market. For example, if the messages on your website are not reinforced by and aligned with your tweets or press releases, the way you answer the phone, the way your staff welcomes clients or the way you shake a client's hand, then your brand is out of alignment.

Kaira Rouda, founder and president of Real Living and author of Real You Incorporated: 8 Essentials for Women Entrepreneurs, talks about the power of story. "In today's business world, relationships drive successful sales, and your network is your net worth. You must tell your story." Rouda goes on to say, "For your business brand to resonate with customers, it must be based on something truly genuine: your reality, your passions."

Be Clear
If you're ready to start shaping your brand story, remember this tip: If you want others to recognize you, the best way to do it is to recognize yourself first. Before you tell your brand story, recognize the kind of message and meaning you want to embed in your story.

Your character is going to define exactly what happens in your story. Be as true to yourself, compelling and believable as possible. What makes you unique and different? What makes you stand out?

Your personality shapes your brand story. I'm talking about your personal values, integrity, core beliefs and ethics. Think about what inspires and motivates you. Wrap this around your brand story; it will bring your brand to life.

Define what your character stands for in your story. Why do you do what you do? What is your purpose? What's most meaningful in your life and business?

What actually happens in your story? What's the compelling action (or series of actions) that makes other things happen? What's driving your story forward?

Think about how you want your audience to react to your story. What's the outcome--the object lesson here? What kind of conclusion do you want them to reach? Think about the pulse of your brand. Are people going to pick up your brand's vital signs in your story?
So, is your brand story doing justice to your business?

Source

Bad Campaign Worse than None at All

2009-10-29T16:34:00.003+03:00

Bad creative is a drag (eMarketer)

Online marketers had better not be negligent. Good creative makes a successful campaign, but data from Dynamic Logic suggests that the worst-performing campaigns can actually negatively affect brand metrics.

The bottom 20% of online ad campaigns reduced opinions among Internet users exposed to the ads across the board. And purchase intent was pushed down the most by a bad campaign—by 4.1 percentage points.

Top-performing campaigns, by contrast, boosted online ad awareness, message association and aided brand awareness by more than 8 percentage points each.

“When it comes to digital advertising, a lot of time is spent choosing Web sites, ad sizes, formats, targeting and other factors,” said Ken Mallon, Dynamic Logic’s SVP of custom solutions, in a statement. “However, not enough time is spent producing and testing high quality ads.”

2009 data from Eyeblaster also suggests that good creative is key to online ad campaigns. The study of rich media ads showed that online ad sizes were not as important for driving click-through rates and other interaction metrics as the nature of the creative.

Source

Momentum Breakers vs. Momentum Makers Dr. John C. Maxwell

2009-10-27T15:09:00.000+03:00

A train travelling 55 mph on a railroad track can crash through a 5-foot thick steel-reinforced concrete wall without stopping. That same train, starting from a stationary position, won't be able to go through an inch-thick block in front of the driving wheel.

It is never the size of your problem that is the problem. It's a lack of momentum. Without momentum, even a tiny obstacle can prevent you from moving forward. With momentum, you'll navigate through problems and barely even notice them.

As a leader, your responsibility is to understand momentum, to get it moving for your organization, and to sustain it over time. Momentum can be tricky to comprehend, though, often appearing elusive and intangible. In this article, my goal is to give you handles so that you can better recognize how to generate momentum in your workplace. To help you grasp the concept of momentum, I'll outline ten momentum breakers alongside ten momentum makers.

Momentum Breakers and Makers
Momentum breaker - double-mindedness
Momentum maker - focus

By creating and following a clear and focused vision statement, a leader develops momentum. A leader drains away momentum by shooting at nothing or attempting everything.

Movement causes friction. When you paint a target for your team, you'll likely encounter resistance. As a leader, you can't restrict yourself by living inside of someone else's comfort zone. Great accomplishments require leaders to fix their gaze beyond what's easily attainable.

Momentum breaker - the past
Momentum maker - the future

An organization picks up steam when its leaders point to a better tomorrow. Momentum breaks down when leaders preoccupy themselves with the past. Or, as I've heard quoted, "Losers yearn for the past and get stuck in it. Winners learn from the past and let go of it."

Many people have powerful dreams. However, most don't realize that the viability of their ideal tomorrow is based on what they do today. The difference between a dream and wishful thinking is what you're doing now. Practice today what you want to be tomorrow. If you do it well enough, someday you may arrive at your dream.

Momentum breaker - individualism
Momentum maker - teamwork

If you want to kill momentum, then insist on doing things by yourself. Momentum grows through team victories in which numerous people can claim to have played a role. The level of celebration on a team depends upon the level of participation.

Momentum breaker - critical attitude
Momentum maker - constructive attitude

Tennis great Chris Evert said it best, "The thing that separates good players from great ones is mental attitude. It might only make a difference of two or three points over an entire match, but how you play those key points often makes the difference between winning and losing."

Momentum breaker - tradition
Momentum maker - creativity

Don't tear down the fence until you understand why it was built. At the same time, relentlessly question the logic, "that's how we have always done it." What worked in the past may be outdated and could hold you back in the future.

Momentum breaker - apathy
Momentum maker - passion

Passion energizes your talent and rubs off on those around you. If you have courage, then you will influence people based on your passionate convictions. If you lack courage, then you will only influence people to the extent of your comfort zone.

Momentum breaker - dishonesty
Momentum maker - character

Character is the sum total of our everyday choices. It cannot be built overnight. A trustworthy leader has a much easier time generating momentum than a leader with a reputation of being manipulative and deceitful.

Momentum breaker - conformity
Momentum maker - change

As John F. Kennedy said, "Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." Sticking with the status quo won't create an ounce of momentum. Although it's difficult and may demand sacrifice, change is required to build momentum.

Momentum breaker - ingratitude
Momentum maker - gratitude

As a Chinese proverb states, "Those who drink the water must remember those who dug the well." No one can claim to be self-made. Whatever accomplishments we attain in life have connections to the goodwill and support of those around us. When we express thankfulness for the benefits bestowed upon us by friends and colleagues, then those people are more apt to aid us again in the future.

Momentum breaker - indecision
Momentum maker - action

I am never overly impressed with idea people. Anyone who takes a long shower can come up with a good idea. I'm impressed with a person who has the tenacity and discipline to make ideas happen.

I've seen many leaders break the momentum on their team by succumbing to the paralysis of analysis. Leaders have to act with incomplete information. You can never know all of the variables. Momentum and risk go hand in hand. As a leader, if you always play it safe, then you'll never inspire excitement in those you lead.

How Do You Measure Marketing Success?

2009-10-22T18:22:00.002+03:00

Nearly three-quarters of companies have guidelines to measure the success of their marketing programs, and for one-half such measurements are a requirement for obtaining marketing funding, according to the King Fish Media “2009 Survey on Marketing, Media and Measurement,” conducted in partnership with HubSpot, Junta42 and the Upshot Institute.

The No. 1 metric of success for the marketing and sales managers polled was the number of new customers acquired. Lead generation and increased sales were also tracked by more than two-thirds of respondents.

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Startup is scoring with its dynamic pricing system

2009-10-20T16:49:00.000+03:00

Qcue (pronounced "cue-cue") said its software helps teams better price their tickets by analyzing variables that affect demand, such as the date of the game, the weather, the opponent, gate giveaways and whether the team is on a winning or a losing streak.

The software adjusts prices accordingly, meaning if your team is in a slump and the forecast calls for rain, you could be in for a deal on the ticket price. On the flip side, teams can ratchet up prices for seats that are in high demand.

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LinkedIn Surpasses 50 Million Users

2009-10-15T15:10:00.003+03:00

As we reported yesterday, growth for some of the world’s biggest social networks — like Twitter and Facebook — appear to be flattening. One site bucking that trend though is LinkedIn, which saw a 5.68% growth in traffic for the month of September, according to Compete.

It’s not just traffic that’s growing, users are increasing too. In a blog entry today, LinkedIn() reports that it now has over 50 million users worldwide.

As the company’s announcement points out, it took nearly sixteen months for LinkedIn to reach its first million users. The last million took only 12 days.

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TED: Ideas Worth Spreading

2009-10-08T12:47:00.002+03:00

How do you describe your company?

2009-10-08T12:03:00.001+03:00

If you still describe your company with words such as customer focused, cutting edge, or flexible, consider yourself forgettable.

For a better look at the widespread use of meaningless phrases, check out Gobbledygook Manifesto, an analysis of cliched words used in press releases.

Bad things happen when you ignore the competition!

2009-10-08T11:30:00.001+03:00

Fade in… From:

A 20-something sales person and his manager sit across from Joan, a new prospect who holds the decision-making and spending power at her Fortune 1000 company. Joan agreed to the meeting at the request of a colleague who knows the sales manager.

Unbeknownst to the sales duo, Joan has just finished a crisp, pointed conversation with a vendor that had screwed up for the last time. Her pain, though, is the sales guys’ lucky break. The vendor is a competitor.

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Twitter: Silly time waster? Powerful business tool?

2009-10-08T10:03:00.000+03:00

Forbes canvassed scads of businesses and pricey social-networking gurus looking for honest answers. Admittedly, we were skeptical. After all, how much can you accomplish in 140 characters or less?

Turns out there are myriad ways Twitter can have an impact, and not just as a marginal marketing tool. Indeed, we found 21 clever ways to use Twitter--for everything from boosting sales and scouting talent, to conducting market research and raising capital. Chances are, there will be many more.

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The Brand Gap

2009-10-01T14:41:00.001+03:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

The Brand Gap

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"I'm more than a Test Score"

2009-09-30T15:13:00.001+03:00

Excellent site for students (US): http://www.zinch.com/

Google "Wave" to be released to 100,000 testers Wednesday

2009-09-30T07:42:00.001+03:00

The Web application from Google Inc. combines elements of e-mail, chat, Wiki documents, blogs and photo-sharing sites to create a form of Internet communication called a "hosted conversation," or a "wave."

The app was created by Jens and Lars Rasmussen, the Australian brothers who developed Google Maps. The Rasmussen brothers said they hope Google Wave will eventually replace e-mail as the main way people converse on the Internet.

Watch Demo

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Worlds most ENGAGED Brands

2009-09-29T16:38:00.002+03:00

Download

10 Reasons Your Team Hates You

2009-09-29T14:41:00.000+03:00

SOURCE

10. You don't prioritize. Everything is important. When you do this, you remove your team's ability to say no to less important work and focus their efforts on critical tasks. The fix: write down all the tasks you have folks working on and FORCE yourself to assign a H, M, or L to each task (and treat it as such). Thou shalt only have 33% of all tasks in each of those three categories - you can't assign everything a "High" importance.

9. You treat them like employees. You don't know a darn thing about them as a person (which makes them feel like nothing more than a number). The fix: read this post about 7Up.

8. You don't fight for them. When is the last time you went to bat for a team member? And I mean went to bat where you had something to lose if it didn't work out? When you don't stand up for them, you lose their trust. The fix: identify something you should have gone to the mat for recently and get out there and fight. Get someone that raise they deserve. Go fight for them to get that cool new project.

7. You tell them to "have a balanced life" then set a bad example. You tell them weekends are precious and they should spend them with their family then you go and send them emails or voicemails on Sunday afternoon. The fix: either curb your bad habit of not being in balance or learn how to do delayed send in Outlook so your messages won't go out until Monday morning.

6. You never relax. You walk around like you have a potato chip wedged between your butt cheeks and you're trying not to break it. When you're uptight all the time, it makes them uptight. Negative or stressful energy transfers to others. The fix: laugh, get a remote controlled car or tricycle to drive around the office, or put on a Burger King crown. When you relax, your team knows it's okay for them to relax too.

5. You micromanage. You know every detail of what they're working on and you've become a control freak. They have no room to make decisions on their own (which means yes, they'll make a mistake or two). The fix: back off. Pick a few low risk projects and commit to not doing ANYTHING on them unless your team member asks you for assistance. It'll be uncomfortable for you. Give it a try you micromanaging control freak.

4. You're a suck-up. If your boss stopped short while walking down the hall, you'd break your neck. Your team hates seeing you do this because it demonstrates lack of spine and willingness to fight for them. It can also signal to them that you expect them to be a sycophant just like you. The fix: try kicking up and kissing down instead.

3. You treat them like mushrooms. Translation: they're kept in the dark and fed a bunch of crap. Do you ration information? Do you withhold "important" things from them because it's "need to know" only? All you're doing is creating gossip and fear. The fix: stop acting like 007 and spill some beans.

2. You're above getting your hands dirty. You're great at assigning work. Doing work? Not so much. They hate watching you preside (and they hate it even more when you take credit for what they slaved over). The fix: get dirty. Climb under the proverbial tank and turn a wrench. Roll up your sleeves and pick a smaller project you can handle in addition to your other responsibilities and DO THE PROJECT YOURSELF.

1. You're indecisive. Maybe. Or not. But possibly. Yeah. No. I don't know. OH MY GOSH MAKE A DECISION ALREADY! That's what you get paid to do as the leader. You drive them crazy with your incessant flip-flopping or waffling (mmmm waffles... oh. Sorry... still writing). The fix: DO SOMETHING! Acknowledge you might make a mistake but do something. A team is much more likely to follow a leader who makes decisions (even some bad ones) than a leader who makes no decisions at all.

There they are: 10 reasons your team hates you. Do any of them fit? I'll tell you what: I DARE you to email this post to your team members and ask them to anonymously circle any of the above behaviors that apply to you. I then further challenge you to fix the one or two that have the most votes. Trust me - all of you will be happier if you do. How's THAT for provocative?

GOLD WINNER: Accenture - Breaking Through in the Businesss-to-Business Category

2009-09-29T13:25:00.003+03:00

Try it

Case Study Summary:

Marketing Situation: The field of Management Consulting, Technology Services and Outsourcing has become intensely competitive today. Traditional players remain strong, while off-shore companies, particularly from India, and specialty technology boutiques offer new consulting alternatives. In addition, the buying process for such services is lengthy, incredibly complex, and involves the most senior members of an organization.

Accenture’s objective is always to be top-of-mind on everyone’s consideration list when a company is hiring a consultant. Finding new and innovative ways of engaging a target of senior level executives in Fortune 1,000 companies is critical. Accenture realized it needed to be associated with an unexpected idea in order to keep their name front and center in a differentiated, clever way.

Key Insights: Accenture learned through its annual proprietary research among C-level and senior executives that these target individuals go online to gather specific information, rather than just browse the web. Plus, they spend up to 50% of their time traveling.
It became clear that Accenture needed to do something innovative in the online space to provide relevant information in a fast and effective way. And it needed to do so in airports while standing out from the clutter.

These two insights were the key media drivers in developing both the Accenture Interactive Network and the Online Expandable Unit campaign.

· The Accenture Interactive Network is a 7-feet high, 10-feet wide, high-definition, interactive screen that delivers topical news, weather, sports and entertainment information as well as Accenture advertising
· Online Expandable Units expand from online banner units and hold additional content such as white papers, case studies and pod-casts that can be downloaded and do not require the user to leave the web page

These two efforts allowed Accenture to deliver brand messaging to C-Level executives while providing useful information they will value through a simple and convenient manner without complicating their already busy schedules. Plus, the initiative brings to life the Accenture tagline of “High Performance Delivered,” which underscores the unique type of success they provide to their clients.

Media Strategy: Accenture stood apart from its competition and positioned the brand as a marketing and advertising innovator through The Accenture Interactive Network and the Online Expandable Unit.

The Accenture Interactive Network is a new marketing phenomenon. The interactive display enables the latest generation of dynamic, highly interactive, multimedia-rich applications. It was developed to help Accenture effectively communicate with busy executives while they are at the airport. The Network was piloted in two of the busiest airports for executive travel, O’Hare in Chicago and John F. Kennedy in New York.

The Expandable Units were created to provide an opportunity for Accenture to showcase in-depth information about their capabilities without disrupting their target’s web experience. The content of the expandable units consisted of white papers, case studies and pod-casts which do not require the user to leave the web page. These expandable units have helped take the Accenture online media strategy from the typical branded/drive-to-site strategy to a strategy that delivers information about how Accenture can help companies achieve high performance by creating a user experience within the banner, taking less time and fewer clicks for the pay-off.

How Could this be a Template for Other Campaigns or for World Class Standards? The success of the Accenture Interactive Network in the Unites States has been noticed in other international markets. Developing and installing the Interactive Networks in other geographies such as India and China will work to target senior executives traveling in those markets.

The online expandable unit campaign, which is currently live in the US, will also be rolled out internationally. Accenture is tapping into worldwide offices to determine the type of information of greatest interest to local targets so that the expandable units can be populated with case studies, white papers and pod-casts of most relevant.

Results: The Interactive Network and Online Expandable Banner showed proven success with the Accenture target and will continue to be part of the overall Accenture media strategy.

The Accenture Interactive Network is measured quantitatively by tracking interactions and also conducting surveys on-site to measure perceptions of Accenture after interacting with the medium. The Expandable Unit campaign was tracked at a very detailed level – providing several opportunities for success within each execution.

Over 90% of C-Level executives who interacted with the Accenture Interactive Network found it easy to use, while over 85% found it both useful and that it provided relevant information. Accenture’s research showed positive perceptions of the Accenture brand with C-Level respondents who had engaged with the Interactive Network: more than 65% said they have a more positive opinion of Accenture after using the Network and more than 80% felt it demonstrated Accenture as an innovator.

Accenture Labs Brochure

2009-09-29T12:48:00.002+03:00

Very Cool.

Download Brochure

History of Scientific Marketing

2009-09-29T11:45:00.001+03:00

The use of mathematics in marketing seems to be one of the hot topics today. But is it that new?

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Modern Brand Building

2009-09-27T13:52:00.001+03:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Modern Brand Building

View more documents from Paul Isakson.

Marketing Communications Guidelines Targeting Youth

2009-09-27T13:47:00.001+03:00

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Marketing Communications Guidelines Targeting Youth

View more presentations from Naja Faysal.

GoogleSidewiki - Good tool

2009-09-25T10:48:00.000+03:00

How Starbucks lost its 'fidelity'

2009-09-24T22:05:00.001+03:00

Exclusive book excerpt: In the trade-off between quality and convenience, the coffee juggernaut fell into the trap of becoming too familiar.

In this adaptation from his new book, Trade-Off: Why Some Things Catch On, and Others Don't (Broadway Books), author Kevin Maney explains the tension between two key qualities and how a great brand got caught in a no-man's-land between them.

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Negate Competition by 'Owning' Your Space

2009-09-23T16:37:00.000+03:00

Rules to help entrepreneurs with specialized visions become unique providers—and rule their turf as long as they care enough to maintain it

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Know When to Fire a Customer

2009-09-21T17:11:00.000+03:00

While it may be the oldest business cliché there is, the fact is the customer isn’t always right.

And some customers may not be right for you. They may not be profitable. They could be demanding things that pull you away from your core strengths. Or they simply may not be worth the constant headaches.

On those occasions, you may be justified in firing your customer, telling them you will not work with them anymore.

The following items can help you decide whether it is time to say goodbye to the most challenging people you do business with.

A POTENTIAL FORMULA Every customer is bound to make you mad sometimes. And some are certain to have an outlandish demand now and then.

But those are not good enough reasons to fire them.

While there is no hard and fast rule on when it is time to sever ties, John Chisholm, writing on CustomerThink.com offers a reasonable rule of thumb.

You should tell a customer to take his business elsewhere when “the tangible and intangible costs of serving the customer outweigh the cash and any good will received from the customer.”

THE BENEFITS It is only natural not to want to fire a customer, especially in this economy. If you know that severing ties with a client is the way to go, but you are wavering, Debra Ellis, writing on her blog, offers three reminders of the benefits.

Forcing your staff to deal with “obnoxious, unrealistic and abusive” customers reduces morale, she writes. The time you spend trying to satisfy the impossible customer decreases the benefits you can provide to the good ones. And your most demanding customers “are not your profitable ones,” she says. “Rewarding them reduces your resources without a return on investment.”

DOUBLECHECK “Before you decide to end a client relationship, consider how expensive or time consuming it will be to make up the lost revenue,” suggests an item on OpenForum, an American Express Web site.

“Because it is costly to acquire a new customer, first look for ways to boost the profitability of the relationship. Can you raise prices or fees, lower the costs of the goods or services you provide, or reduce customer service? With some creativity, you may be able to find a way to turn things around.”

A HOW-TO GUIDE If you have reached the point where you are finally ready to let that difficult customer go, Tracy Fredrychowski, writing on SearchEngineAcademySC.com, a search engine optimization Web site, offers these four guidelines:

¶Be professional. “Customers should always be spoken to personally, not by letter or phone. Only when the customer is at a distance, is it appropriate to speak with them about the matter on the telephone. But in no circumstances should the contact be other than verbal. E-mails simply will not do in this case.”

¶Keep emotions out of it. Odds are the customer made you extremely frustrated or angry, but now is not the time to vent. Customers often will take being fired personally, “so it is important that you explain your reasons rationally and clearly.”

¶Offer suggestions. Remember after you have fired them, customers will still need someone to provide the product or perform the service you did. Help them if you can.

¶“Stay polite but firm. It is time to move on.”

FINAL CALL Who knows better that the customer is not always right than the people who serve them? This from NotAlwaysRight.com.

“(A customer comes up with a 40-pound tree teetering on the edge of her flatbed cart.)

“Customer: ‘This tree sure is wobbly!’

“Me: ‘Just be careful with it, ma’am. Don’t let it fall.’

“(As I lean down to scan several other smaller plants, the customer lets go of the tree and it hits me on the head.)

“Me: ‘Ouch!’”

“Customer: ‘You should improve your attitude. You haven’t smiled once this whole time!’

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The Puma Index

2009-09-18T16:28:00.000+03:00

Occupation vs. Happiness

2009-09-17T17:37:00.002+03:00

In a study of how occupation affects happiness, business owners come out on top.

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What Keeps You Up at Night?

2009-09-17T14:25:00.000+03:00

If you're a business owner or in charge of your companies Marketing, please take this survey: Click Here to take survey

Six Types of Marketing Organizations: Where Do You Fit In?

2009-09-04T12:44:00.003+03:00

Is your marketing approach in sync with your company’s needs? Here’s how to figure that out

By Edward Landry, Andrew Tipping, and Brodie Dixon

When Eric Kim became Samsung’s executive vice president of global marketing in 1999, he found a marketing organization unsuited to the task at hand and a company not ready for the proactive approach Samsung needed from its marketing team.

Earlier in the decade, Samsung had made the decision to transform itself from a low-cost producer of electronics, sold primarily under the brand names of its OEM customers, to a manufacturer of high-end digital products. Quickly enough, management realized these electronic goods would reap higher margins if they were sold under Samsung’s own brand. Industry icon Sony had made much the same transition years earlier. Yet the marketing organization Mr. Kim inherited was not equipped for such a marketing-driven push.

Samsung’s brand message was fragmented, and marketing budgets were generally driven by short-term programs such as price promotions, according to a case study prepared by John Quelch and Anna Harrington of Harvard Business School. Mr. Kim explained in the report: “Our managers believed that good products sell themselves, that marketing was nothing more than selling, and that selling was only needed when you had a me-too or weak product.”

This type of resistance is nothing new. However, for a company that needed a more active marketing effort, it was a major problem. Mr. Kim eventually did solve it at Samsung. Indeed, we believe solutions to all such problems require a common approach. Marketers must work to understand (1) what type of marketing organization they have in place, and (2) what type of organization the company actually needs.

To help marketers meet those goals, Booz Allen Hamilton and the Association of National Advertisers have joined together to examine the types of marketing organizations that commonly exist today and their best paths of evolution to keep up with the companies and industries in which they live. Our examination identified six distinct types, or profiles, of marketing organizations. All have unique strengths, and each is appropriate to particular types of companies in certain competitive circumstances.

1) Growth Champion. This organization is highly valued within the company for its ability to drive revenue. It is considered as important as other major departments, such as finance and sales. It drives the company’s priorities and leads product innovation and new business development.

2) Senior Counselor. Functioning as a high-level advisor on marketing strategy to the chief executive officer and the individual businesses, the Senior Counselor leads major advertising, promotion, and public relations campaigns. Unlike the Growth Champion, however, it does not typically drive company-wide strategy.

3) Brand Foreman. Above all, the Brand Foreman is an efficient provider of marketing services, ranging from communications strategy to creative output and campaign execution, in support of the company’s key brands. It serves as the central manager of agency relationships, and is considered among the company’s most important support organizations.

4) Growth Facilitator. The Growth Facilitator has the authority and skills to develop and lead large, company-wide marketing efforts and helps set the business’s overall priorities. This marketing organization coordinates with other major functions, such as sales and product development.

5) Best Practices Advisor. The Best Practices Advisor works with the individual businesses to identify internal and external best practices and incorporate them into all marketing activities. This organization’s goal is helping the businesses achieve maximum effectiveness and efficiency, and it has expertise across all elements of the marketing toolkit.

6) Service Provider. This organization supplies marketing services such as advertising, promotion, and public relations at the request of the company’s brand and product teams. The Service Provider is effective at executing specific tasks and is responsive to time-sensitive requests.

Although many marketing organizations profess to fulfill most or all of these functions, they tend, in practice, to gravitate into only one of these roles. Knowing which type of marketing organization exists within a company is thus a critical first step. Then, the challenge is to understand where the company is heading and make sure the marketing team is configured properly.

Underlying these categories is a set of cultural and organizational “building blocks” that determine the type of marketing organization prevalent in each company. Our research found that the nature of the marketing organization derives from four key elements:

- Scope. Scope is the range of responsibility — the playing field — in which a marketing organization operates across the company. The scope of a marketing organization can run the gamut from executive-level jurisdiction, working hand-in-hand with the CEO on a daily basis, to purely functional, with responsibilities solely for brand management and agency relationships.

- Decision Rights. “Decision rights” refers to the authority, or autonomy, that the marketing organization has within the company. For example, can marketing approve large, growth-oriented investment decisions such as positioning, channel strategy, pricing, and communications?

- Capabilities. Some marketing organizations may have high-level general management and leadership skills, whereas others will focus more on creative expertise or technical, analytical, and administrative skills.

- Organizational Linkages. This element looks at significant relationships, such as whether central marketing is proactive in providing advice and services to the individual businesses or whether it serves more as an advisor on marketing strategy to the CEO.

To pull this all together, we have created the Booz Allen/ANA Marketing Profiler. Anyone who works with, or within, a marketing organization is invited to try it.

Simply go to www.marketingprofiler.com and spend a few minutes taking a short test. Find out which profile your organization has today and what migration path, if any, is recommended for your organization. Readings and resources tailored to your profile and migration strategy will also be provided.

Samsung’s Eric Kim made a similar analysis on his own and spent half a decade building his marketing organization into one that closely matched his company’s aspirations. The result? Samsung has climbed to No. 21 in Business Week/Interbrand’s 2004 ranking of the world’s most valuable brands. Business Week wrote, “No longer known just for undercutting the prices of big Japanese brands, the Korean consumer-electronics dynamo is suddenly cool.” Perhaps even more impressive for Mr. Kim, Samsung now ranks just one spot behind Sony (No. 20).

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Nokia Money: Banking goes Mobile

2009-09-04T10:58:00.001+03:00

The mobile provider introduced Nokia Money, a new service that will allow customers to do basic financial transactions through their mobile devices.

Given that there are more mobile phone users than banking customers worldwide (about 4 billion mobile phone users versus 1.6 billion bank accounts), Nokia believes the service will be of particular benefit to people with little or no access to traditional banking services. According to Nokia, transactions will be as simple as sending a text message or making a call.

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Big idea seen as way to squeeze more for less

2009-09-03T11:33:00.003+03:00

By Nicholas Timmins, Financial Times September 2, 2009

It is the latest big idea – one so simple and beguiling that almost everyone who grasps it believes it must make a difference.

Supporters claim it offers a way to achieve the goal desperately pursued by all political parties as public spending faces a fierce post-election squeeze – “more for less”.

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A fine-grained view of the sources of growth

2009-09-03T11:12:00.001+03:00

Google’s view on the future of business: An interview with CEO Eric Schmidt

2009-09-03T11:01:00.000+03:00

How the Internet will change the nature of competition, innovation, and company operations.

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Fly Me Anywhere, I Just Need to Work

2009-09-01T12:36:00.000+03:00

Simon Sinek, who is also working on a deadline to finish a book, has a different method of getting his work done. The poor guy has discovered that he works best — get this — on an airplane.

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Why the Yahoo! Maktoob deal is so important

2009-08-27T17:59:00.001+03:00

By Fadi Ghandour

While the global media was racing to cover the biggest story yet about entrepreneurship in the Arab world, while the story itself was hitting the sixth top spot on Twitter, a feat never before achieved by an Arab event, while the regional online community was abuzz with the news, the Arab mainstream media, with a few telling exceptions, was snoozing through it all.

Yahoo!, the global Internet portal and search engine, acquires Maktoob, the largest Arabic portal, in a landmark deal that speaks volumes about Arab entrepreneurship, and our media was just not interested because, well, it was clueless.

So, for these snoozers, here are a few clues about why this acquisition is such a big deal.

It finally puts us Arabs on the global Internet map. It will get people to pay attention to this region’s knowledge-based industry, where there is an impressive number of technology entrepreneurs.

It is the ultimate success story in a region long used to failure. For our younger generations, it is a wonderful example of how a dream can turn into a brilliant achievement through a combination of boundless creativity and down-to-earth business sense.

For our leaders, it is hopefully a painful reminder of the distance between their priorities and the ambitions of an increasingly wired younger generation (16.5 million of whom are unique visitors of Maktoob’s) eager to move away from a state-driven, oil-dominated future.

For our wealthy Arab investors, it is a wakeup call that true value lies in our youth rather than in real estate, and that talent is closer to home than they could have ever imagined.

For the Arab world, it is proof that money may count for something but, in the final analysis, an education, smarts and determination count for much more, because the two entrepreneurial gentlemen who made Maktoob started out in Jordan - their home and, it just so happens, one of our area’s more resource-poor countries - and, even when their company reached way beyond it, never left.

We should, therefore, celebrate the story of Maktoob, and we should hail its founders, Samih Toukan and Hussam Khoury, for being such tenacious entrepreneurs, at once innovative, patient and practical. But before the acquisition becomes yesterday’s news, as an early investor in Maktoob, as a friend of Samih and Hussam’s and, yes, as an occasional mentor to both, I would like to share with you the lessons learned from this experience.

Lesson 1: It is not about vision; it is about a tedious process of discovery. It is about a unique product at the right time for the right geography. Maktoob started as a consulting company, then changed to become one of the first (if not the first) Arab website developers, and then moved on to inventing Arabic web email. They saw the niche and they went all the way, building everything around that niche.

Lesson 2: Conserve your cash. There is nothing more important for your survival than cash. Cash burn is not something to be proud of, so burn the least amount possible. That means founders should not take salaries as long as the business cannot afford them. Maktoob lived off bread crumbs for the longest time; they kept developing the business until the first venture investor came.

Lesson 3: Don’t fall for the hype. When Maktoob happened, cash burn was the fashion, but Samih and Hussam kept their eyes on the company, did not become seduced by sexy trends and kept building value. None of their much richer competitors survived the dotcom crash. Maktoob flourished.

Lesson 4: Build your team. This is a no brainer, but few entrepreneurs realize that it is always about your team no matter how good you are. Build the team, retain it, reward it with stock and give it freedom to innovate.

Lesson 5: Mentors are important, so listen to them and seek them out all the time. They will always give you a different perspective, challenge you and keep you on your toes. Dig deep into their knowledge: It is priceless.

Lesson 6: Aim for success not exits. Two decades of building a business is a long time. Samih and Hussam knew the exit will come only with a good brand and a viable business.

Lesson 7: Your shareholding percentage does not matter. What matters is building value for your clients, and the rewards will not be too far behind. The value of your business is what you build, and how much you own is relative to that value. It is about how to get to the exit in dollar terms, not the percentage you own; 50 percent of $10 million is half of 10 percent of $100 million.

Lesson 8: Partner with your venture and PE capital investors. Set the terms of reference early on to make sure that they understand your business and leave you alone to run it. Abraaj and Tiger understood that, and Samih and Hussam were left to build value. All equity partners made lots of money because they understood this basic rule.

Lesson 9: Split your responsibilities very clearly and very early on. The combination of Samih and Hussam as a team, as friends and as partners is unique. I don’t know anyone that had the ability to split responsibilities the way they did - and with a smile.

Lesson 10: When exiting or negotiating with someone like Yahoo, keep your eye on the ball, don’t get arrogant and keep someone to run the business in case of a no go. When Samih was on the road Hussam kept the engines greased and running.

The Next Evolution in Economics: Rethinking Growth

2009-08-24T10:50:00.000+03:00

The credit crunch has forced people across many sectors to rethink their assumptions about how they do business, the roles of the individual in the larger system, and the very future of the system itself.

These reflections are beginning to bear fruit. We've begun to see a shift from the old, linear transaction-based approach to business toward a new, circular view, in which shared resources can better benefit all in a way that adds depth (and value) to this future economy.

Economists describe this new model in many ways. One way is to use human cellular structures as a metaphor for economic growth. Call it cellular economic theory.

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Diamonds at your Door Steps

2009-08-19T12:50:00.001+03:00

Nokia Rocks the World: The Phone King's Plan to Redefine Its Business

2009-08-17T12:38:00.001+03:00

September 1, 2009

By Mark Borden

The gathering in the courtyard dining room at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca has the feel of a meeting between the Mafia's dwindling five families and an emerging Balkan gang looking to join forces. Instead of bookmakers, drug smugglers, and racketeers, the endangered species assembled are music executives from the industry's remaining major labels, including Warner and Universal Music, and an agent from the Beatles' Apple Corps.

Despite the general tension typical of an industry in free fall, there is a reunion vibe and everyone greets one another warmly over cocktails, throwing out a bit of cocksure swagger to project the notion that they can still deliver a hit. Still, nobody in attendance would deny that the days of record companies making a killing in the music industry are over.

The hosts for the evening are Nokia's 43-year-old executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, and Eurythmics founder and Nokia consultant, Dave Stewart. The two make for an odd pairing: Stewart with his quintessential British rock-'n'-roll-ness and Ojanperä with his Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness. But tuning in closely to Ojanperä's precise, inflected words, it's hard to elude his magnetism, a cross between Andy Warhol mystic and James Bond villain.

Before dinner is served, Ojanperä taps his glass of pinot noir with a knife, waves a piece of paper at his guests, and begins his opening remarks.

"This is an early advertisement from Nokia. It says: A tire you can trust ... from Nokia," he says. "Nokia is a great company from Finland that I joined in 1990. In its history, it has made great car tires and also great rubber boots."

The crowd is visibly flummoxed; after a smattering of awkward laughter, table chatter resumes. Ojanperä is close to losing his audience but plunges on. "We have since become the No. 1 cell-phone company in the world, with nearly 40% market share and 1.1 billion users. Today, Nokia is making 13 phones every second. So you can think about how many we are making during your dinner."

The magnitude of those numbers seems to register on the diners, drawing their attention back to this stranger dressed in black.

"But the numbers are not important," Ojanperä continues. "The point here is, the world is a vibrant place. We are in India, China, Africa, Russia, the United States. Think about a young boy in India who is getting his first phone: He can listen to music or take a picture or watch a movie or even make a movie. In many ways this" -- he holds up his slim E71 handset -- "is his first computer and it is connecting him to the rest of the world for the first time."

Because the group is composed of music execs, Ojanperä then explains Nokia's Comes With Music service, which offers unlimited downloads of more than 6 million songs (that can be kept for life) and is paid for with a fee built into the cost of certain mid-to-high-end Nokia handsets. "The two forces we are competing against are actually nonconsumption and piracy," Ojanperä says. "If we can get people engaged with music and compete against piracy, then we have won the war. And we believe we are revolutionizing the way music is being consumed."

Eyes roll in the audience, but Ojanperä reels them back in. "It's not only about music," he adds. "It's about paying."

That last word hangs in the room's dim yellow glow. "We want to make a difference in the payment for music. Nokia not only wants to revolutionize music, but I am claiming now that we will quickly be the world's biggest entertainment media network."

The last comment elicits snickers from every table. Ojanperä waits for the last chuckle to die. "You can laugh and say, 'What is the point? Nokia is a cell-phone company; it will never get into the entertainment business.' That's okay. Laugh. That's what people did when we said we were going to be the biggest cell-phone company in the world -- back when we were making car tires and rubber boots."

Last year, Nokia sold 472 million cell phones and generated $70 billion in revenue, earning $7 billion in profit. It is the 88th-largest company in the world by revenue, counts more than 1.1 billion customers, sells its products in more than 150 countries, and runs an operating system translated into more than 180 different languages. Nokia's share of the global cell-phone market is greater than its next three competitors combined. Yet when I ask CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo to describe Nokia, the first thing he says is, "We are not a cell-phone company."

He goes on. "Just three years ago, we were competing against Motorola, Sony Ericsson, some Korean players, even Siemens," he says from his office in Espoo, Finland, just outside of Helsinki. "The competitive environment in the industry at large has changed, and I sometimes struggle to define what industry we are in at the moment and what are the boundaries. But remember, I spoke in 2001 about putting the Internet in your pocket. And now consumers are realizing that these devices are not just for communicating by voice: It is all about information."

As the walls that divide television, computers, and cell phones crumble, it is increasingly clear that any device's fate will be decided by its ability to gather and present information on demand. And the cell phone has emerged, for now at least, as the single most important device in the global marketplace. Nokia has never managed to leverage its position as a world leader in handset sales to achieve similar dominance in the United States, where it has only 7% market share. For years, the company seemed content to target Europe, Asia, and developing countries -- and no doubt there are plenty of sales to be made in those places. But the rise of Apple's iPhone, RIM's BlackBerry, and the new Palm Pre -- coupled with the ever-widening supply of bandwidth available over those devices -- has begun to shake Nokia's comfortable perch. The iPhone, iTunes, and the wildly successful App Store -- which one analyst says will generate $1.2 billion this year -- have set the standard for what a mobile, customizable, always-on Internet experience feels like and has forced the rest of the industry to scramble. Nokia, for its part, has felt Apple's bite: In 2008, 139 million smartphones were sold worldwide, up 14% from the previous year. Of those, 61 million came from Nokia while 11.4 million were sold by Apple, giving them, respectively, 43.7% and 8.2% of the market. But in the first quarter of 2009, Nokia's market share fell to 41.2%, while Apple's rose to 10.8%.

Kallasvuo may have seen the future early -- Nokia actually produced a rudimentary Internet-capable phone as early as 1996 -- but it could be argued that his company was complacent about innovating aggressively in subsequent years. It announced Ovi, its competitor to the iTunes platform, back in 2007, but didn't actually roll it out until June of this year. Its N97 touch-screen phone, pitched as an answer to the iPhone, has been met with tepid reviews, largely because it relies on Symbian's clunky operating system (Nokia bought Symbian in 2008). At press time, the phone had yet to sign on with an American carrier.

But it's easy to assume that because Apple has done the best job to date of creating a luxurious digital platform -- hardware and software -- that scratches the modern itch for constant connectivity and content, it will proceed to conquer the world. Nokia may be slower and less sexy than what Ojanperä calls "that fruit company in Cupertino," but it has endless patience, a very long reach, and a willingness to study the competition. Asked what it's like to go up against Apple, Kallasvuo responds, "I have learned to live with it, but I also appreciate what they have done for the industry. They have shown the business opportunity to developers. It's a scale game when it comes to apps, and now we have a machine in place to counter their growth trend."

Nokia plans to win that scale game. Just take a look at the "machine" Kallasvuo is referring to: Ovi (Finnish for "door"), a hub for the company's music and gaming offerings as well as its app market, is its counter to iTunes and the App Store. Ovi is as yet available to only a fraction of Nokia customers, but when it went live in May, more than 50 million people in 109 countries instantly got access to 20,000 applications compatible with 50 different handsets (Apple currently offers more than 50,000 apps on three iPhone models). After flipping the switch to go live, Nokia execs stood in front of a world map as green lights illuminated in places where people were connecting to Ovi: The customer base was so vast, they saw lights appear in areas they thought were covered with water.

High-tech companies often talk about how their work can help people climb the socioeconomic ladder. All too often, however, their products are designed -- and priced -- for only a tiny subset of humanity. An iPhone or BlackBerry Curve or Palm Pre doesn't do much to improve the lives of the hundreds of millions of cell-phone users in India who can't access or afford a data plan.

Nokia has always been a company with a conscience. Maybe it's something in the (icy) water of social-democratic Finland, home to the father of open-source computing, Linus Torvalds, who created Linux. But as a result, Nokia has invested a great deal not only in the development and production of hardware but also in studying the people who use it.

The company believes there are three reasons why people adopt new technology. The first is survival, the second is social, and the last is entertainment. The common thread among the three can be loosely described as culture, and Nokia has worked hard to develop a deep understanding of all the cultures in which it operates. It runs 10 research labs worldwide, each based on an Open Innovation philosophy and affiliated with a local university -- Berkeley and Stanford in the Bay Area, MIT and Cambridge in the two Cambridges, as well as locations in Hollywood, Helsinki, Nairobi, and Beijing. Researchers learn what different people's needs are -- and what they can afford -- by immersing themselves in locales that cover the widest spectrum of the human condition. So while Apple, RIM, and Palm offer singular products that target an elite, niche market, Nokia builds devices to satisfy every budget and appetite for information, making it indispensable all over Africa and Asia. In effect, it micro-slices the global population: Its 100-odd phone models run from $10 to $700, offering the barest of functions on the low end to rich media on the high end. "By providing services and tailored content to even the low-end market, we become a lifeline," says Ojanperä.

When I meet with Henry Tirri, Nokia's research chief, who oversees the R&D labs, he explains how his teams are working to build a handset that senses what a user is doing -- jogging, say -- and then selects music from a personal library to suit that activity. Then in the next breath, he describes how his labs developed features such as a compass that shows Muslim users the direction of Mecca or a voice-based version of a Craigslist-style service for countries with high illiteracy rates. Last April, the company launched a program in India called Life Tools. For a fee of $1.30 a month, users can receive daily information about agriculture, education, and/or entertainment. In addition to cricket scores and Bollywood gossip, rural farmers get weather updates and daily crop prices from three of the closest markets. The pilot program has been expanded from one Indian state to 10, and Nokia is in the process of applying the model to Africa and the rest of Asia. Recurring micropayments from even a small fraction of those combined populations could quickly become a multibillion-dollar revenue stream. As Gartner Group's lead analyst, Nick Jones, puts it, "India has a billion people and is primarily a rural country -- if you get a dollar a month from 200 million farmers, that's a good business. Of course, they won't all buy the app, but it's all part of Nokia's wider vision to offer services."

The rollout of Ovi was a major step in Nokia's effort to infiltrate the cultural turf now ruled by Apple. "Apple has a dominant role in the U.S.," concedes Tirri. "But in the global game, it's a very different company. Personally, I'm fascinated by the law of large numbers. Nokia makes more than a million handsets a day, so when we do an innovation, we can have it in the hands of more than 400 million people very quickly."

While U.S. app developers have, to this point, been focused mostly on Apple, it may be only a matter of time before the size of the opportunity Nokia offers begins to dawn on them. "Nokia is a richer community for developers," notes Gartner's Jones. And that creates a rich opportunity for Nokia, too: "If they can extract even a few dollars more from each handset," Jones adds, "there's a huge business there."

Ovi is only one part of a multipronged strategy to redefine Nokia's mission and its reputation. In the developing world, that may mean delivering farming information; in richer markets, it means entertainment and media. Ojanperä -- an architect of the Ovi project who once ran Nokia's research group and after that was chief of strategy -- has taken it upon himself to spearhead this effort. Two years ago, he relocated from Finland to the United States, to be closer to the world's most famous content creators. From the company's U.S. headquarters, in a drab office park 30 miles north of Manhattan in White Plains, New York, he has quietly brokered multimedia collaborations with the likes of filmmaker Spike Lee and Heroes creator Tim Kring.

But it is Ojanperä's experiments with Dave Stewart that best reveal the range and depth of Nokia's ambition. For most of us, Stewart registers as the less-beautiful half of the groundbreaking '80s musical duo Eurythmics. A company like Nokia -- hungry for a pop-culture ambassador -- couldn't have done much better. In addition to Stewart's work with Annie Lennox (which has sold more than 75 million records), he is a black-card-carrying member of the Cannes/Davos/TED contingent. He has recorded hits with Mick Jagger, Tom Petty, No Doubt, Celine Dion, and others (collectively selling more than 100 million albums). He is a longtime friend of Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen (who was best man at Stewart's wedding, where Deepak Chopra officiated and the wedding singers were Bono and Elton John). He hangs around with the bad boy of the art world, Damien Hirst. ("Damien had this idea for a piece where he was going to have his hands surgically removed and then, you know, sewn back on," says Stewart. "It was mad, but he was dead set on it. We found this doctor in Mexico who was going to do it, but luckily, he decided against it.") In his spare time, Stewart also runs a consulting business with Chopra called DeepStew and is the U.S. creative director for the international ad shop the Law Firm. Last year, he got a personal thank-you note from President Barack Obama for "American Prayer," the song he cowrote with Bono and turned into a celebrity-packed video endorsing Obama.

I met Stewart one afternoon last September at New York's Morrison Hotel Gallery, on the Bowery, in what was once the rock venue CBGB. When I arrive, he is helping mount a collection of his photographs for a show the next evening. He unrolls a print of his portrait of France's first lady Carla Bruni. She is bathed in sunlight with her hands in a prayerful position and a hand-rolled cigarette in her mouth. It could be titled "Madonna and Spliff." "I'm writing an album with her," says Stewart, who in July performed with Bruni at Radio City for Nelson Mandela's 91st birthday. (In 2003, Stewart had organized the 46664 Concert in Cape Town to help Mandela raise AIDS awareness in Africa and created a phone donation campaign around Mandela's prison number.)

Stewart's function at Nokia is to connect the company to talent, opportunities, and new ideas. While not a staff employee, he has an official title: change agent. Stewart and Ojanperä were introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, in 2006, and Ojanperä was captivated by Stewart's unorthodox style. "We both connected very deeply around the idea that a cell phone is really just an empty shell," says Stewart. "And we also agreed that content is the seed." The two met for breakfast the next morning, and a day hasn't gone by since that they haven't communicated.

That summer, at an annual Nokia corporate event in Helsinki, Ojanperä brought Stewart along. "We invite maybe 150 people," says CEO Kallasvuo. "Typically they're men in dark suits. Tero comes in with a guy in a white suit. And I said, 'Who is this?' " Stewart has taken Ojanperä into his inner circle as well. "I took Tero to meet Bono at his house in the south of France," says Stewart. It's not hard to imagine Ojanperä at Chateau Bono discussing how Nokia is using technology to help raise people out of poverty, or to imagine Bono seeing the appeal of working with Nokia. "Tero's definitely thinking 3-D all the time," Stewart says. "He is very contemplative, and that is attractive to Bono."

Ojanperä and Stewart's mission was to persuade Bono and U2 to release the band's recent album through Ovi, a plan that never materialized. Nevertheless, the visit underscores Nokia's approach to building out this part of its business. Where Apple chose to let the technology (and moneymaking potential) do the talking when it came to getting desperate record labels to sign on with iTunes or getting app makers to sell their work through the App Store, Nokia sees the process as first and foremost about building relationships with individual human beings. As Stewart puts it, "Maybe this is because of the social-democratic philosophy of the Finns, or maybe it's just their humanity, but Nokia actually cares about artists."

I facetiously ask Stewart if his experience with Ojanperä is less exciting than hanging with pals like Bono. "Oh no, no, no. We talk for hours and hours," he replies. "He's the one who can comprehend the two worlds of creativity and engineering and this vast enormous network and how they can possibly come together. It's like he sees these two enormous ships floating in space yet moving hundreds of miles an hour; with Nokia, he can direct them to a docking point."

Just how well Ojanperä is able to meld creativity and engineering may be the biggest question for Nokia going forward. But no one can fault him for being unwilling to roll the dice. He and Stewart have even gone so far as to create what they hope will be a global, multi-ethnic pop star from scratch.

Stewart is sitting on a sofa in his Hollywood recording studio with a singer named Cindy Gomez. Originally a performer with Stewart and his 30-piece orchestra, her life changed when Ojanperä put Nokia's director of gaming, Mark Ollila, in touch with Stewart. "We had this idea for a dance game, but we didn't really have any content to drive it," says Ollila. "We just knew that we wanted it to bridge music and gaming and be available exclusively on our mobile phones."

Stewart suggested that Nokia build the game around Gomez. "Dave was so quick to understand," says Ollila. "He saw very clearly that she could be the star and also use the game as a platform to launch her as an artist."

When I visit, Stewart and Gomez are recording the third of what will be five music tracks for the game, eventually titled Dance Fabulous. The next week, Gomez, a Canadian who happens to sing in eight languages -- including Cantonese, Hindi, and Mandarin -- is heading to Berlin to do the motion-capture work that will transform her (gorgeous) likeness into the avatar at the center of the game. "I'm not sure we could have invented her," says Ollila.

Before Dance Fabulous went live in June -- to some 40 million Nokia handsets -- Stewart, who manages Gomez, signed a deal with his longtime friend Jimmy Iovine at Universal. The songs from the game are now sold via Nokia's online Music Store (its pay-per-song site) and also through the prepackaged Comes With Music. Gomez also nabbed a five-week European concert tour -- backed by Nokia -- of venues in Helsinki, Paris, and Rome, and played to a crowd of 65,000 in Vienna at an AIDS benefit called the Life Ball.

"Fifteen months ago, I was selling furniture in Toronto," Gomez says. "Now I'm the first artist to debut in a game where I'm also this crazy video character." After the Life Ball, Stewart and Gomez flew to Cannes to take in the film festival and spend a few days on Paul Allen's boat, Octopus. "We ended up performing for everyone," says Stewart. "Quentin Tarantino, Juliette Binoche, Mick Jagger. It was really quite wild."

In early June, Stewart sits on a private jet in London on his way to a consulting gig in Yorkshire. A week earlier, he was in the studio with Mick Jagger, singer Joss Stone, Slumdog Millionaire composer A.R. Rahman, and reggae scion Damian Marley for a stealth supergroup he's building. (That's not a first for Stewart: The Traveling Wilburys came together in his backyard while he was entertaining Bob Dylan and George Harrison.) The details are still being worked out, but if plans proceed, Nokia and major phone carriers will partner in presenting the band to the world.

Before the plane takes off, Stewart mentions yet another project he's working on. "I've written a story about this Indian boy who finds a Nokia phone and starts playing Dance Fabulous," he says. "He's quite good, but also quite poor. He convinces his family to drive to Mumbai for a big dance competition -- sort of like Little Miss Sunshine. There's a character played by Cindy who is going to be the host of the show and it's going to be a love story, like Slumdog. So anyway, I've sold the idea and it's going to be a movie called Street Dancing, and A.R. Rahman is going to take the songs I wrote with Cindy and remix them in a Bollywood style. Pretty great, right?"

A few days later, I sit down with Ojanperä in a conference room in White Plains. I mention his speech at the Greenwich Hotel and how it seemed at the time that the music execs were skeptical. We discuss the Dance Fabulous collaboration with Universal and how Nokia is allowing Stewart and Gomez to sell the music in any venue. I suggest that another company might have locked up the rights to such a project.

Ojanperä reminds me of what he said that night at dinner: "I think that people feel better when they are working together and sharing their creativity." ("The reason I get on so well with Nokia is that we are both open-source," Stewart notes.) In Europe, says Ojanperä, "we struck a cross-continent licensing arrangement with all the majors. Our plan is to change the whole landscape of how music publishing works, and I think it is going to be a better direction for everyone."

He also tells me that while his ambition for Nokia is to be the biggest entertainment base in the world, it's only part of an even greater ambition to be the largest network in the world -- period.

Beyond entertainment, Nokia sees in its billion-person base an opportunity to insert itself into all types of commercial exchanges. One example currently being tested in Nokia's labs is software that recognizes images shot on a cell phone's camera; the image acts as a sort of visual bar code, then connects users to a menu of online information -- the best price on a pair of Nike Air Force Ones, say, or a movie review, or a reservation number for the restaurant in the Eiffel Tower. "With our point-and-find technology and navigational services, we can essentially turn the world into a gallery where users can comparison-shop, find the best price, and then order online. All the technology is there," says Ojanperä. "We want to be part of the new value chain, and eventually, I'd like to earn a piece of every transaction in the world that happens with this device."

That seems quite a distance down the road for Nokia. Apple and its ilk have shown that "putting the Internet in your pocket" for the highest-end customers can be an extremely lucrative proposition. But for all of Nokia's success in the bottom and middle tiers -- and all of Ojanperä's well-connected efforts -- the Finnish company still has work to do before it is a leader, or even a contender, in the finicky minds of the American techno elite.

"Nokia hasn't yet established that 'I'm a Nokia person' brand that would stand up against the 'I'm an Apple person' brand," says Gartner analyst Jones. "Nokia is stronger on the engineering stuff than the emotional stuff, and they need to become more balanced." Still, Jones continues, in the long run, maybe that won't matter much. "Look at the real world: It's not about people in the high end. The real world is people in the middle, and Nokia owns that world in terms of numbers. They may not own mindshare, but they certainly have a lot to work with.

"This is a long-term game," Jones goes on. "They've changed the company's whole organizational structure. I think they can do it."

"Businesswise, I don't believe in revolution," says CEO Kallasvuo. He talks about Nokia's "evolving" into a content provider: "We now think of ourselves as a devices-and-services company that is deeply involved in media, music, gaming, and navigation." Still, that doesn't mean evolution can't eventually turn you into something quite different. As Kallasvuo says of Ojanperä: "Tero is looking more and more like Dave Stewart every day."

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What Next for the CMO?

2009-08-12T14:47:00.000+03:00

In the U.S., the average tenure for a CMO is roughly 23 months. In the U.K., it is even shorter. Al Ries states over at AdAge that of all the firms in the Fortune 1000, only 7% of the most highly paid executives have marketing in their job title, and only 15% of those same firms even have a senior level marketing position, such as CMO.

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Modern science builds the case for an old-fashioned virtue - and uncovers new secrets to success

2009-08-05T15:11:00.002+03:00

New scientific studies rely on new techniques for reliably measuring grit in individuals. Take the survey and assess your own level of "Grit".

http://www.gritstudy.com/

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There Are No Mergers, There Are Only Collisions (by Simon Sinek)

2009-08-04T16:57:00.003+03:00

50% of all corporate mergers completely fail.
An additional 25% never achieve the ROI that was promised.

That means 75% of mergers weren't worth it. Can you imagine walking into a CEO's office and saying, "I've got a great deal, it's got a 75% chance of failure." You'd be laughed out of the room. Yet CEOs initiate mergers and acquisitions all the time. And when their mergers fail, the first line of the article in the Wall Street Journal is always the same, "the two cultures didn't mix."

Months and months and often millions of dollars are spent combing through the books to see if all is in order, yet what CEOs forget is that companies are nothing more than structures...and those structures are filled with people. What makes two companies fit well together is not their product lines - it's how their people get along. Sadly, this little detail is often completely ignored.

Just because there is "synergy" (the rationale so often used to justify so many mergers in the first place) between product lines or marketplaces, doesn't guarantee any success. That one company makes ink and another makes rubber stamps, for example, means little when it comes to two entirely different corporate cultures needing to play nice together. Unless the plan is to fire everyone from one company and completely rehire for all the new job openings with employees who fit one of the cultures, more diligence should should be spent evaluating the cultural fit before the collision...er...merger takes place.

The great irony is that the single biggest factor that contributes to the majority of merger debacles is amazingly simple to evaluate. It costs neither millions of dollars nor countless of months to evaluate a corporate culture. It takes about a day per company. One day.

It begs the question, then, why is something so important and so crucial to the success of a merger so often completely ignored until it's too late?

The answer is uncomfortably simple: you can't see the culture. The product lines, the market opportunities, the balance sheets are all things that can be easily seen, and easily evaluated and tabulated. The culture is not. A strong culture exists when all the employees within an organization share the same values and beliefs. We can tell a company has a strong culture, not because we read it on a balance sheet, but because we can feel it when we walk the halls. There is an obvious camaraderie among the employees and a genuine desire to do good by the company. In contrast, when we walk the halls of companies with a weak culture we feel cold...or worse, we feel nothing at all. People in a bad culture are more motivated by self-gain than by a desire to see their company...and their colleagues...do well. When we feel a strong culture, we sometimes wish we worked there.

The best part is, if you try to have this discussion with so many of the CEOs who initiated the mergers in the first place, they'll tell you that what you're talking about is fluff. But if that fluff is important enough to avoid a 75% chance of a collision, then maybe it's worth buying that model with the anti-lock brakes after all.

Will My Video Get 1 Million Views on YouTube?

2009-08-04T16:32:00.002+03:00

"Charlie Bit Me," the fourth most-viewed YouTube clip of all time, is a viral video in the truest sense of the word. In May 2007, the father of two British tykes uploaded a home video he wanted to share with the kids' godfather in Colorado and a few American colleagues. After three months, only a few dozen people had seen the video, and he considered taking it off the site. Then, something strange happened: On Aug. 24, 2007, the video was viewed 25 times in California. Three days later, that number was up to 79, with a dozen more coming in from Washington, Texas, and Wisconsin. The number of daily views doubled roughly every week as "Charlie Bit Me" spread around the country and through Europe. On Nov. 5, a couple of guys in Canada filmed a frame-by-frame remake. Two weeks later, CollegeHumor.com linked to the video, and by January it was on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. A year and a half later, it's been watched 104 million times.

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The Water Issue

2009-08-04T16:24:00.003+03:00

Before the dawn of civilization, there were 326 million trillion gallons of water on Earth. Today, after millennia of population growth, industry, and agriculture, there are still 326 million trillion gallons. Unlike other natural resources, we cannot run out of water.

But it doesn’t mean that we always will have enough of it when and where we need it or that we can’t make it too dirty to drink. We have altered the water cycle—from ocean to cloud to ground and back to ocean—by putting 6 billion people in the middle of it. Now, the Earth isn’t generating clean, drinkable water as we’ve come to expect.

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Online services that make it easy to lie and cheat!

2009-08-04T15:52:00.001+03:00

A host of shady online services is making it easy to lie and cheat.
Are you sick of lying, cheating, and stealing the old-fashioned way? Of course you are—it’s too hard. Who wants to spend all that time and effort cooking up excuses, ruses, and swindles to deceive unwitting victims, when you could be enjoying your ill-gotten gains?

Good news! There’s no need to abandon your commitment to indolence. A raft of new online services is making it easy for shirkers, layabouts, mountebanks, and freeloaders to deceive their employers, IRS agents, professors, spouses, children, and others. Here’s a brief tour through this online mall of deception.

Fake ATM Receipts
customreceipts.com

It’s a known fact: chicks dig rich guys. But how are you going to score when you’re almost broke? Carny rolls don’t work like they used to (and besides, if you flash one, you might be expected to use it). No, today’s smart grifters log on to Custom Receipts and order fake ATM slips that’ll trick the objects of their affection into believing they’ve got mountains of money in the bank. As the site recommends: “Hand out your number on the back of one of our fake ATM receipts. They’re a player’s dream come true.”

Only $16 for a stack of 52, one for every week of the year.

Alibi Network
alibinetwork.com

After you’ve hooked up with some honey whose fallen for your ATM receipt trick, you’ll probably want to start spending a little quality time with her at that $29.99 motel across town. But what about that nosy spouse of yours at home, the one who is always interfering with your personal life? Get yourself over to the Alibi Network and set yourself up with a bulletproof excuse that will fool even the shrewdest shrew. From their website:

The basic concept is rather simple: we invent, create and provide alibis and excuses for people wishing to justify absences. These alibis can take various forms: a telephone call simulating work emergency or car accident, an invitation to a classical music event, a letter documenting your participation in a sales seminar, a Dallas Cowboys football game or a Britney Spears concert ticket…

They’ll even “provide you with seminar handout and certificate of achievement or the program of an event to which you were invited.” Won’t wifey be proud of your accomplishment.

Fees for the alibi service start at $75. (Governor Sanford, give us a call.)

Fake Receipt Generator
theflashblog.com

This is the free gift that keeps on giving. Pad your expense account. Sweeten your Schedule C. Accidentally leave one of these in the gift box to make that $8 necklace look like it cost $295. Ka-ching—those receipts add up quick. The uses for this customizable receipt maker are limited only by your insatiable desire to avoid doing the right thing.

Corrupted Word Files
corrupted-files.com

What is it with professors and their rigid rules about turning in papers by a certain time and date? Do they really expect a free spirit such as you to adhere to their patched-sleeve, tweedy, uptight schedules? Deadlines are for squares and businesspigs only—down with the man! For $4.95, this site will sell you a “wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC.” That pointy-head geek will waste all weekend trying to open your “term paper” while you wait for the folks at PaperMasters.com to hurry the hell up and finish your real report so you can turn it in Monday morning with an “I swear I’m gonna go back to using a typewriter!” grin. Hey, Mr. Professor, put that in your carved Marx-head briar pipe and smoke it.

If the idea of using these kinds of services appeals to you, remember that getting caught can lead to fines, prison time, or moving into a dingy studio apartment and fighting a losing custody battle for your kids. A quick review of the IRS’s tax fraud penalty page could make you think twice about using bogus receipts to pad your expenses. Even the deception merchants are starting to feel the heat: in early July one of the more notorious fake-receipt generating services, falseexpenses.com, dropped off the face of the Web after a recent blitz of blog-fueled publicity. Why, things have gotten so bad it almost makes you want to give up and resort to a life of integrity.

America's Most Trusted Newscaster

2009-08-04T15:30:00.000+03:00

Surprising?

Why the #$%! Do We Swear? For Pain Relief

2009-08-04T15:29:00.002+03:00

I had a feeling that was true. Read more

Interview with Seth Godin - Marketing Guru

2009-08-02T15:25:00.000+03:00

A Good Way to Change a Corporate Culture

2009-07-29T12:58:00.002+03:00

"I'd like to talk to you about a big project," the woman told me on the phone. "We need to change our culture."

She was a senior leader in a professional services firm, where people really are their most important asset. Only it turns out the people weren't so happy. Theirs was a very successful firm with high revenues, great clients, and hard working employees. But employee satisfaction was abysmally low and turnover rates were staggeringly high. Employees were performing, they just weren't staying.

This firm had developed a reputation for being a terrible place to work. When I met with the head of the firm, he illustrated the problem with a personal example. Just recently, he told me, a client meeting had been scheduled on the day one of his employees was getting married. "I told her she needed to be there. That the meeting was early enough and she could still get to her wedding on time."

He paused and then continued, "I'm not proud of that story, but it's how we've always operated the firm." Then he looked at me, "So, Peter, how do you change the culture of a company?"

Such a simple question. I wanted to give him a simple answer.

Read Full Article

Momentum Makers vs Momentum Breakers

2009-07-29T10:20:00.002+03:00

By John Maxwell

A train travelling 55 mph on a railroad track can crash through a 5-foot thick steel-reinforced concrete wall without stopping. That same train, starting from a stationary position, won't be able to go through an inch-thick block in front of the driving wheel.

It is never the size of your problem that is the problem. It's a lack of momentum. Without momentum, even a tiny obstacle can prevent you from moving forward. With momentum, you'll navigate through problems and barely even notice them.

As a leader, your responsibility is to understand momentum, to get it moving for your organization, and to sustain it over time. Momentum can be tricky to comprehend, though, often appearing elusive and intangible. In this article, my goal is to give you handles so that you can better recognize how to generate momentum in your workplace. To help you grasp the concept of momentum, I'll outline ten momentum breakers alongside ten momentum makers.

Momentum Breakers and Makers
Momentum breaker - double-mindedness
Momentum maker - focus

By creating and following a clear and focused vision statement, a leader develops momentum. A leader drains away momentum by shooting at nothing or attempting everything.

Movement causes friction. When you paint a target for your team, you'll likely encounter resistance. As a leader, you can't restrict yourself by living inside of someone else's comfort zone. Great accomplishments require leaders to fix their gaze beyond what's easily attainable.

Momentum breaker - the past
Momentum maker - the future

An organization picks up steam when its leaders point to a better tomorrow. Momentum breaks down when leaders preoccupy themselves with the past. Or, as I've heard quoted, "Losers yearn for the past and get stuck in it. Winners learn from the past and let go of it."

Many people have powerful dreams. However, most don't realize that the viability of their ideal tomorrow is based on what they do today. The difference between a dream and wishful thinking is what you're doing now. Practice today what you want to be tomorrow. If you do it well enough, someday you may arrive at your dream.

Momentum breaker - individualism
Momentum maker - teamwork

If you want to kill momentum, then insist on doing things by yourself. Momentum grows through team victories in which numerous people can claim to have played a role. The level of celebration on a team depends upon the level of participation.

Momentum breaker - critical attitude
Momentum maker - constructive attitude

Tennis great Chris Evert said it best, "The thing that separates good players from great ones is mental attitude. It might only make a difference of two or three points over an entire match, but how you play those key points often makes the difference between winning and losing."

Momentum breaker - tradition
Momentum maker - creativity

Don't tear down the fence until you understand why it was built. At the same time, relentlessly question the logic, "that's how we have always done it." What worked in the past may be outdated and could hold you back in the future.

Momentum breaker - apathy
Momentum maker - passion

Passion energizes your talent and rubs off on those around you. If you have courage, then you will influence people based on your passionate convictions. If you lack courage, then you will only influence people to the extent of your comfort zone.

Momentum breaker - dishonesty
Momentum maker - character

Character is the sum total of our everyday choices. It cannot be built overnight. A trustworthy leader has a much easier time generating momentum than a leader with a reputation of being manipulative and deceitful.

Momentum breaker - conformity
Momentum maker - change

As John F. Kennedy said, "Conformity is the jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth." Sticking with the status quo won't create an ounce of momentum. Although it's difficult and may demand sacrifice, change is required to build momentum.

Momentum breaker - ingratitude
Momentum maker - gratitude

As a Chinese proverb states, "Those who drink the water must remember those who dug the well." No one can claim to be self-made. Whatever accomplishments we attain in life have connections to the goodwill and support of those around us. When we express thankfulness for the benefits bestowed upon us by friends and colleagues, then those people are more apt to aid us again in the future.

Momentum breaker - indecision
Momentum maker - action

I am never overly impressed with idea people. Anyone who takes a long shower can come up with a good idea. I'm impressed with a person who has the tenacity and discipline to make ideas happen.

I've seen many leaders break the momentum on their team by succumbing to the paralysis of analysis. Leaders have to act with incomplete information. You can never know all of the variables. Momentum and risk go hand in hand. As a leader, if you always play it safe, then you'll never inspire excitement in those you lead.

Closing Assignment
I'll leave you with a simple assignment. Assess your personal momentum. Are you speeding through the obstacles in your life or struggling to surmount even the smallest problems? What is responsible for your momentum or lack thereof? Do you recognize any of the momentum makers or breakers in your personal leadership?

Organizational Story Telling

2009-07-08T16:42:00.001+03:00

Organizational storytelling is slowly but surely becoming a hot strategy for conveying important information about your business, both internally and externally.

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Why You Need to Fail

2009-07-08T16:41:00.000+03:00

"Peter, I'd like you to stay for a minute after class." Calvin teaches my favorite body conditioning class at the gym.

"What'd I do?" I asked him.

"It's what you didn't do."
"What didn't I do?"

"Fail."

"You kept me after class for not failing?"

"This," he began to mimic my casual weight lifting style, using weights that were obviously too light, "is not going to get you anywhere. A muscle only grows if you work it till it fails. You need to use more challenging weights. You need to fail."

Calvin's onto something.

Every time I ask a room of executives to list the top five moments their career took a leap forward — not just a step, but a leap — failure is always on the list. For some it was the loss of a job. For others it was a project gone bad. And for others still it was the failure of a larger system, like an economic downturn, that required them to step up.

Yet most of us spend a tremendous effort trying to avoid even the possibility of failure.

According to Dr. Carol Dweck, professor at Stanford University, we have a mindset problem. Dweck has done a tremendous amount of research to understand what makes someone give up in the face of adversity versus strive to overcome it.

It turns out the answer is deceptively simple. It's all in your head.

If you believe that your talents are inborn or fixed, then you will try to avoid failure at all costs because failure is proof of your limitation. People with a fixed mindset like to solve the same problems over and over again. It reinforces their sense of competence.

Children with fixed mindsets would rather redo an easy jigsaw puzzle than try a harder one. Students with fixed mindsets would rather not learn new languages. CEOs with fixed mindsets will surround themselves with people who agree with them. They feel smart when they get it right.

But if you believe your talent grows with persistence and effort, then you seek failure as an opportunity to improve. People with a growth mindset feel smart when they're learning, not when they're flawless.

Michael Jordan, arguably the world's best basketball player, has a growth mindset. Most successful people do. In high school he was cut from the basketball team but that obviously didn't discourage him: "I've missed more than 9,000 shots in my career, I've lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I've been trusted to take the game wining shot and missed. I've failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed."

If you have a growth mindset, then you use your failures to improve. If you have a fixed mindset, you may never fail, but neither do you learn or grow.
In business, we have to be discriminating about when we choose to challenge ourselves. In high risk, high leverage situations, it's better to stay within your current capability. In lower risk situations, where the consequences of failure are less, better to push the envelope. The important point is to know that pushing the envelope, that failing, is how you learn and grow and succeed. It's your opportunity.

Here's the good news: you can change your success by changing your mindset. When Dweck trained children to view themselves as capable of growing their intelligence, they worked harder, more persistently, and with greater success on math problems they had previously abandoned as unsolvable.

A growth mindset is the secret to maximizing potential. Want to grow your staff? Give them tasks above their ability. They don't think they could do it? Tell them you expect them to work at it for a while, struggle with it. That it will take more time than the tasks they're used to doing. That you expect they'll make some mistakes along the way. But you know they could do it.

Want to increase your own performance? Set high goals where you have a 50-70% chance of success. According to Psychologist and Harvard researcher the late David McClelland, that's the sweet spot for high achievers. Then, when you fail half the time, figure out what you should do differently and try again. That's practice. And according to recent studies, 10,000 hours of that kind of practice will make you an expert in anything. No matter where you start.

The next class I did with Calvin, I doubled the weight I was using. Yeah, that's right. Unfortunately, that gave me tendonitis in my elbow, which I'm nursing with rest and ice. Sometimes you can even fail when you're trying to fail.

Hey, I'm learning.

Source

Over one-third of Americans (37%) say TV ads are most helpful to them in making a purchase decision, while nearly half say they ignore Web Banners

2009-07-02T18:58:00.001+03:00

Your name matters to your prospects. Or does it?

2009-06-30T14:50:00.001+03:00

By Jeffrey Gitomer

Here is a question I’ve received more than a hundred times in one form or another: How do I make a (better) name for myself?

Here is the premise, the definition, and the answer: In sales it’s not who you know, in sales it’s who knows you.

The challenge is not just making a name for yourself or building your brand; it’s building the components that generate that name. How do you achieve more recognition, more notoriety, and a better reputation in your market and your community? Those are the elements that lead to a better name.

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Why CMO Role Is Not as Important as You Think

2009-06-26T13:54:00.000+03:00

Study of Fortune 1,000 Finds Post's Authority Is Limited at Most Companies
by Natalie Zmuda
Published by Advertising Age: June 18, 2009

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- As if average 28-month tenures weren't enough of a disincentive for marketers to seek the chief marketing officer hot-seat, a recent assessment of SEC filings of Fortune 1,000 companies suggests that the post remains low on the priority list at many organizations, and CMOs' authority remains limited.

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Stats about "Word of Mouth"

2009-06-22T16:20:00.002+03:00

Amazing Read: Our Plastic Brain

2009-06-21T18:37:00.002+03:00

The Plastic Brain
New research shows that our least-understood organ has a remarkable ability to retrain and even regenerate itself

By Sarah Scott - Readers Digest

On a fine day in September 1995, Howard Rocket, a driven 48-year-old entrepreneur, leaped for a pass in a friendly touch-football game in downtown Toronto. He slipped and fell, hitting the back of his head, and a minute later came to with a wicked, ever worsening headache. Then, dark spots floated into his field of vision. He ignored these things until three weeks later, when he was home alone and suddenly lost control of his arms and legs. A sharp, deep pain pierced his head and darkness closed in. He groped his way to the phone, slowly tapped 9-1-1, then collapsed.
Rocket's brain had been attacked by a basilar thrombotic stroke, in which a clot blocks blood flow to the brain stem. This kills most people, but Rocket was saved by doctors who injected him with a clot-busting drug. In the days that followed, though, their prognosis was grim: Rocket would never regain the use of his left arm, leg or foot. His muscles were fine, but the parts of his brain that directed them were seriously damaged. In other words, he'd better get used to a wheelchair.

Determined to prove the doctors wrong, Rocket began rigorous physio-therapy. If he made his left foot move over and over again, he figured, eventually the undamaged cells of his brain would find a way to tell the foot what to do. After he learned to stand, he strapped his left foot to the pedal of a stationary bike at the gym, then started pedalling. On the first day, he lasted only 30 seconds - but he persisted. It was like doing sit-ups for the brain. Twelve years later, after thousands of hours in the gym, Rocket danced on both feet. His doctors were amazed.
"It was dramatic," says Dr Robert Willinsky, the neuroradiol¬ogist who saved Rocket's life with the clot-buster. "He's a poster child, for sure."

It turned out Rocket's hunch was right: It is possible to retrain your brain to make up for the part that's out of order. A generation ago, that idea was dismissed as folly by most medical practitioners. They thought the adult brain was like a machine: It couldn't change or grow; all it could do was break down. But over the past few decades, brain scans such as the PET and functional MRI (fMRI) have allowed scientists to observe this organ in action. Now they can see that the conventional thinking about the brain was wrong.

If one part of the brain is injured, especially the cerebral cortex (the outer layer, which processes the signals for perception and movement), often another part can be trained to take over. It takes dil¬i¬gent practise, sometimes over years. But scientists tell us that thinking and engaging in activity can physically alter the brain, a concept they call ''neuroplasticity.'' ''We now know that when we have thoughts, we rewire the so-called hardware in our brains,'' says Toronto psych¬iatrist Dr Norman Doidge.

And from these physical changes come functional changes. In his book, The Brain That Changes Itself, Doidge writes, ''I met a scientist who enabled people who had been blind since birth to begin to see; another who enabled the deaf to hear. I met people whose learning disorders were cured and whose IQs were raised; I saw evidence that it is possible for 80-year-olds to sharpen their memories to function the way they did when they were 55. I saw people rewire their brains with their thoughts, to cure previously incurable obsessions and traumas.'' These changes were brought about by repeated mental exercise.

In other words, thinking can change the way the brain works.

A neuroscientist from the University of Wisconsin, Richard Davidson, demonstrated this very theory with his experiment on meditation – a prime example of ''mental sit-ups.'' He measured the brain activity of novices and highly practised Buddhist monks, and found that, unlike the novices, when the monks meditated on ''unconditional loving-kindness and compassion,'' they generated powerful gamma waves – the type involved in higher brain processes like perception and consciousness. Thus, the repeated mental activity of meditation altered brain functioning.

Meditation can also have a powerful effect on how we deal with phys¬ical sensations like pain. Melissa Munroe, a former national-champion bodybuilder, learned at the age of 30 that the egg-size lump in her throat was Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Her condition was so advanced that her doctors told her, ''You have cancer everywhere, from your head to your toes,'' and gave her three months to live. She chose to fight, but the pain from the tumours pressing on her organs was excruciating, even for an athlete accustomed to pushing her physical limits. So she turned to a psychiatrist, Dr Tatiana Melnyk, who taught her how to use her mind to ease the pain.

Pain is a physical sensation, Melnyk explained to her, but Munroe's emotional response to it was amplifying it. So Melnyk advised her to focus only on the physical aspect of the pain: ''Don't judge it; just sit with it,'' she said.
By thinking in this disciplined manner, Munroe could manage the way her brain dealt with the sensation of pain: She'd feel it but wouldn't be controlled by it. ''It was something I was experiencing,'' she says, ''but it wasn't me. Defining the pain helped me to compartmentalise it and therefore not be overwhelmed by it.''
Munroe defied the odds: Thanks to intensive chemotherapy - including a dose so heavy that she collapsed in her apartment and was revived with CPR by her sister - as of 2006 she was cancer-free after six years. And she still practises meditation.
How, exactly, can repeated thoughts or activities alter the brain? For one, they can affect DNA. Research, mostly done in the 1980s and 1990s, shows that thinking, learning and acting can turn our genes on or off. No-one knows for sure how this occurs, but, Doidge states, ''when you think thoughts repeatedly, you turn on genes to make proteins that change the structure of the neurons and increase the number of connections between brain cells.'' In essence, neurons become better communicators.
The brain can also produce new neurons. In his lab at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, neuroscientist Bryan Kolb demonstrated this ability in rats by bringing on strokes to cause brain damage. He and his colleagues showed that if growth factor was given to the rats, their brains could not only make new brain cells but could also use these cells to help rebuild the physical and functional aspects that were damaged.

And the researchers made another stunning discovery: In the two weeks following injury, a rat's newborn brain cells migrate to the damaged site and wait for orders. If these cells are then properly stimulated, they can start functioning and help the brain regain its ability to do things - such as direct a leg to lift.
Kolb's work underlines just how important rehabilitation is for the injured brain. Now scientists are investigating whether the stimulation that rehab provides might increase the production of new brain cells and speed up recovery.

One of the brain's ''neuron nurseries'' is in the hippocampus, which plays a key part in memory function. In one study, scientists at the University of Toronto used chemical ''tags'' to trace naturally occurring newborn brain cells in healthy mice, then taught the animals to swim to a platform. After plenty of practise, the mice ''remembered'' where the platform was. When the scientists later examined the animals' brains, they found that the new brain cells had been recruited for the memory task - that is, the chemically tagged newborn cells were concentrated in the hippocampus ''nurseries.''

And they found that newborn brain cells started boosting memory after only one month. According to Paul Frankland, the Toronto neuro¬scientist who led this research, studies show that the environment affects how many new brain cells arise. Cocaine and stress, for instance, cut the rate of neuron creation; running and educational activities increase it.

What the scientific world calls ''neuroplasticity,'' 21-year-old Ian Bradley calls ''hope.'' When he was in his first year of high school, he could not read and his spelling was of Year Four level. ''I thought I was a dummy,'' he says. His mother, Mary, pushed him through primary school by spending four hours a night reading textbooks to him and writing down his answers to homework questions.

Then Bradley's father discovered Arrowsmith School. Founder Barbara Arrowsmith Young was at one time a student with profound learning disabilities that made it hard for her to understand what she was reading or what people were saying. So she devised mental exercises to help retrain her brain - and overcame her disabilities. She developed more of these exercises to help others with learning dysfunctions; the programme is now offered in schools across North America.

Bradley spent three years at the school in Toronto, doing cognitive exer¬cises such as tracing letters and matching symbols, over and over again. ''It's so tiring, it just kills you,'' he says. But by the end, he could read at a Secondary Two level. And now, the recent high-school graduate - whose performance improved so much that he made the honour roll in his final year - is aiming for a career as a pilot. ''Before, life was so bleak,'' he says. ''Now the sky's the limit, literally.

New discoveries about the brain give tremendous hope to many: victims of stroke dealing with the loss of brain function, those struggling with chronic pain, young people with learning disabilities. ''We are just scratching the surface of the mechanisms through which the brain can change, and how areas of the brain can take on new responsibilities,'' says Dr Andres Lozano, the neurosurgeon who helped to save Howard Rocket's life.

Now doctors and researchers are beginning to understand that a go-¬getter entrepreneur in Toronto was right, after all. Repeated exercises - mental and physical - can change your brain. And your life.

The 10 Most Creative People in the Web Business

2009-06-18T15:14:00.001+03:00

New iPhone 3G S Video

2009-06-18T14:42:00.000+03:00

Innovating Innovation: The Best Ideas Can Come From Anywhere

2009-06-18T14:36:00.000+03:00

Traditionally, new product development has been a linear process. The "new product" team creates many alternative versions of the core idea, winnows them down in various stages of testing and re-development until a winner emerges and gets launched.

And then expect 4 out of 5 to fail.

Things are changing.

The Twuth About Twitter: Its Impact on Businesses and Communications

2009-06-17T17:27:00.001+03:00

Twitter may well be struggling in its search for a profitable business model, but the company has made an impact on multiple levels of the marketing chain.

As the real-time web service gains steam, more entities - from big-time corporations to grassroots-level nonprofits – are starting to benefit from its enormous reach.

Most people are not particularly interested in reading what others had for breakfast – the stereotypical tweet - but Twitter's reputation as yet another social media site with real-time news is gradually evolving toward one as a valuable source of information across the media horizon. Some examples:

The news of the Mumbai terrorist attacks was first spread via Twitter, as was the landing of the UA plane on the Hudson River.
Twitter delayed its planned maintenance this week week in support of heavy coverage of the Iranian elections by Iranians themselves.
Governments have used it to promote both transparency and direct communication with their constituencies.
Academics have used it as an online tool to follow up on research and expert opinions.
Doctors used it as a didactical device detailing every step of a brain tumor operation for students to follow.
Corporations use Twitter for sales pitches.
Small businesses find Twitter useful to keep customers updated.
So far, Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want customers' immediate reactions to a product:

Amazon quickly responded to a tweeted outcry about their censoring of so-called adult books.
Starbucks did some reputation damage management after it was rumored that the company would stop serving the troops in Iran as a protest against the war.
Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop - they fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.
Recently, Dell claimed Twitter helped make it some millions of dollars in sales. With 600,000 followers, it is one of the Top 100 most-followed accounts on Twitter.

Dell posted 6 to 10 times a week to its Twitter-based DellOutlet account for the last two years, and tracked the sales with proprietary software. Every post includes a coupon or a link to a sale and half of the posts are Twitter-exclusive deals.

It reportedly chalked up more than $1 million in sales over the past 6 months. And on Thursday, Dell said it made over $3 million in total from Twitter followers that clicked through its posts to its websites to make purchases.

Three million in sales over two years may not be impressive for the world's second-largest PC maker in the first quarter of 2009 (Dell posted $12.3 billion of revenue in the first quarter of this year, alone), but the PC maker has become one of the first public examples of how companies might profit from Twitter.

Twitter does not charge companies for such benefits, but does not rule out doing so in the future.

Twitter had approximately 17 million unique U.S.-based visitors in April, and about 24 million worldwide, according to Nielsen. Its number of users has grown by more than a thousand percent over the last year.

A recent study indicates that more than eight in 10 Twitter users, most of which represent small businesses, expect their company's use of the popular microblogging tool to increase in the next six months.

Food mogul Nestle recently turned to Twitter for an ad campaign to promote JuicyJuice by creating an ad that features real-time tweets within its borders.

Source

Buy an Online Ad in Canada, Get Rest of World for Free

2009-06-17T16:57:00.000+03:00

NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- Don't look now, but the biggest U.S. websites are getting less and less American. What's a conundrum for some of the best-known web properties as they try to turn their growing international user bases into ad dollars is an opportunity for marketers. Big brands can do global online campaigns on the cheap.

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Time to Write Twitter’s Tombstone?

2009-06-17T16:44:00.002+03:00

Twitter made the June 15, 2009, cover of TIME magazine.

In a lead article, the publication predicted the microblogging site, consisting of tiny 140-character messages, would have a huge impact on businesses:

“As Twitter grows, it will increasingly become a place where companies build brands, do research, send information to customers, conduct e-commerce and create communities for their users. Some industries, like local retail, could be transformed by Twitter—both at one-store operations that cater to customers within a few blocks of their locations and at the individual stores of giant retail operations like Wal-Mart.”

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Great leaders get there partly by telling great tales

2009-06-17T16:35:00.001+03:00

Our lives are a series of stories woven together--our own stories and the stories of those around us.

Great leaders--religious, political or business--realize this and are good storytellers. Jesus spoke in parables. Krishna and Rama came to life through the stories they told. The Torah, Judaism's founding legal and ethical religious text, the first five books of the Old Testament, is not a boring list of rules but a set of moral lessons and commandments intertwined with a wealth of life stories.

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If You Want Your People To Perform, Don't Give Them Permission...Give Them Intent

2009-06-16T11:11:00.001+03:00

David Marquet graduated at the top of his class from the Naval Academy. After serving aboard submarines in the Atlantic and the Pacific, Captain Marquet finally earned something many officers dream of - his own command. Marquet was handed the keys to one of the finest boats in America's fleet - the fast attack submarine, USS Santa Fe. Stationed at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, this was a great honor indeed. But there was a catch. The crew Marquet inherited was the lowest performing crew in the US Submarine fleet.

But it didn't stay that way. Read Full

Truth in advertising Part 2

2009-06-16T09:59:00.001+03:00

Marketing Execs Should Get Closer to the Local Level

2009-06-15T16:17:00.000+03:00

BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) -- Beginning July 1, the largest advertiser in the world will integrate all brand functions at the corporate level. That means Marc Pritchard will add design and PR to his control and the moniker of global brand-building officer to his title. Here Mr. Pritchard talks about how Procter & Gamble organizes itself globally and what it asks of its agencies.

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HSBC Shows It Understands Customers With Global Message

2009-06-15T16:14:00.001+03:00

YORK, Pa. (AdAge.com) -- At HSBC, London-based Alex Hungate has a unique job in that it combines oversight of global marketing with the business leadership of personal financial services, but he expects that to become more common. "Going forward, particularly in service organizations, customer experience will come to be seen as another marketing discipline that top marketers need to understand. Understand how to measure it, and of course understand how to manage it. That's not always the perception today."

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Word-of-Mouth, Quality Focus Keep Pricey Brand Thriving

2009-06-15T16:12:00.001+03:00

LONDON (AdAge.com) -- Bugaboo is a brand synonymous with the good times, when spending $1000 on a stroller seemed like a reasonable investment. The products' distinctive design and branding have served for a decade as a badge for proud parents who want the world to know that their child was worth the best.

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How 10 Self-Made Titans Launched Their Empires

2009-06-15T15:21:00.002+03:00

Truth in Advertizing

2009-06-15T13:34:00.001+03:00

Funny: Vendor Client Relationships

2009-06-15T13:27:00.001+03:00

Dell Tweets Up $3 Million in Revenue, While Twitter Still Searches for Profit

2009-06-15T12:26:00.000+03:00

While Twitter struggles to prove it can be profitable, Dell is showing that even if the social media site can't cash in, companies that use Twitter certainly can. Dell is reporting that it pulled in more than $3 million over the past two years from its 600,000 Twitter followers who clicked through its posts and purchased products.

For Dell, $3 million is a drop in a multibillion-dollar bucket. But Dell's success in driving traffic through Tweets to its Web site, coupled with the purchasing follow-through of customers, hints at the marketing potential Twitter possesses.

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Should I become an iPhone user?

2009-06-15T11:47:00.002+03:00

iPhone users are richer, younger, and perhaps even more productive at work than those who use competing smartphones, according to a new study released

Smoke Signals: Why a Tobacco Giant Is Backing a Tough New Antismoking Bill

2009-06-15T11:08:00.001+03:00

The U.S. Senate on Thursday struck the most devastating legislative blow in history to Big Tobacco, giving the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) authority over the industry. The new bill, which passed in the House in April, includes tough new restrictions on advertising like allowing only black-and-white text ads in magazines with substantial youth readerships, mandates that manufacturers prove or stop using claims like "light" and "low tar," bans flavored cigarettes (except menthol) and makes provisions for large, graphic warning labels. So why, then, is tobacco giant Philip Morris, unlike its industry brethren, celebrating the unprecedented oversight?

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Vintage cigarette propaganda

2009-06-15T11:01:00.009+03:00

Latest Online Marketing Stats

2009-06-15T09:56:00.003+03:00

Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It?

2009-06-14T15:19:00.002+03:00

By Jeffrey Kluger
Wednesday, Feb. 11, 2009

Bosses may be an overbearing breed, but more often than not, you've got to admire their business chops. Wouldn't you love to have that same sense of competence and confidence, that ability to assess tough problems and reach smart solutions on the fly? Guess what? So would they. If you have ever suspected that your boss isn't actually good enough at what he or she does to deserve the job in the first place, a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology suggests that you might be right.

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Where have the Problem Solvers gone?

2009-06-14T14:54:00.003+03:00

I'm continuously amazed yet saddened by some people I come across who have no clue how to solve problems. What's even sadder, is that some of them make more money than me. I have 3 questions:

1) Why are there so few of us who can really solve problems at work?
2) What can we attribute this to? Fear? Education? Genetics?
3) How, how, how, how can some of them hold important positions? HOW?

This video (although hilarious), perfectly illustrates this problem.

Assessing your Marketing Capabilities

2009-06-14T12:55:00.002+03:00

This is a Model I use to assess all the capabilities within Marketing Departments. It's like the Skeleton of the marketing body. Just like Doctors do a health check for each organ, we do the same thing for your marketing body.

Need a New Job?

2009-06-14T11:20:00.001+03:00