In marketing, knowing your audience is the first step to making most decisions. Without awareness of who you are appealing to, any campaign can become a chaotic shot in the dark, with little substance and even fewer results to show for it. The broadest two categories of marketing are B2C…

When most marketers think of content in all its many forms (copy, graphics, etc) they tend to think of shapes and colors first and sounds second. And nothing else. This isn’t unreasonable. Graphics are an exclusively visual interface. Direct Mail and Direct Response are read-only. Video format ads are seen…

Happy Friday 13th, everybody! I thought this would be a fun time to talk about some of the the most cursed campaigns in branding and business I’ve seen. 1. Lays WOW Chips. Wow, oh wow. The marketing was great. The idea was great…in the 90s, fat was branded as the…

Mascots have become an unpopular choice of copy these days. They are associated with the previous century, with unscrupulous attempts to market to children, and with a laziness that is unbecoming of the modern, cynical consumer. But many of those older mascots are still around, and flourishing. Colonel Sanders has…

Just as people often confuse branding with general advertising, I often see a mix-up with slogans and taglines. That seems like as good a time as any to dissect slogans and taglines, as they are very important to branding. …

Writers really take words seriously. Sometimes I can become so fixated on the proper word for a particular circumstance that it becomes my sole focus until satisfied. The only time I’ve seen singular words matter this much to people who don’t write for a living is when it comes to…

As I’ve mentioned several times by now, branding means to burn with hot iron, and is also a very important concept in visibility and selling effectively in any market or industry. What’s less often (by which I mean not at all) used in describing corporate or even personal development is…

This Monday is the closest to July 4th, so early Happy Independence Day, my fellow Americans. I thought this most patriotic of days would be a good time to analyze what I call (without malice and hopefully minimal bias) Jingo marketing. Jingoism is defined as an overtly aggressive, even warlike…

There’s a lot of overlap between Viral Marketing (and disastrous consequences as mentioned in my Viral Marketing post) and Guerilla Marketing. That’s because Viral Marketing is a subset of the much broader Guerilla Marketing, named in the eponymous book Guerilla Marketing by Conrad Levinson, the Creative Director of my personal…