Category Archives: Management

October 6, 2011

Ask Your Customers for a Favor

Ben Franklin’s Marketing Tip When you like someone, you do nice things for them, right? Not necessarily. Psychologists tell us that it can work the other way around: we like people more when we’re nice to them. (The reverse is also true: we come to hate those we treat badly.) This doesn’t seem to make sense until [...]
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April 5, 2010

The Virtues of Brand Guidelines

Ignore them only if you have money to spare. As a consciously documented representation of your company, branding is the foundation of your communications. Marketing, PR, and sales are how you tailor the brand to specific people and groups. Refining your brand is an ongoing process, but in general major changes in brand happen less frequently [...]
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March 31, 2010

Triangulation Tour de Force

Neuromarketing works best when cross-referenced with other research. When I was in the Peace Corps, our bible, so to speak,was Where There is No Doctor, the most widely used health-education book in tropical and subtropical countries. (It’s been translated into more than 100 languages!) This testament to better health provides valuable advice, such as: if a variety of [...]
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February 18, 2010

Beware Marketing and Creative Superstars

Stop your fawning, and invest in process as much as in people. A few weeks back at a CIA base in Afghanistan,  a lone Jordanian doctor/double agent managed to blow up seven highly trained CIA operatives, including the base chief. How did he get so close to so many important people? There appear to be several [...]
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January 19, 2010

We Must, We Must, We Must Improve Our Trust

Build it and they will pay attention Scientists have discovered the “trust molecule”: oxytocin. One whiff of this hormone and even people you were specifically told aren’t trustworthy will suddenly seem like Boy Scouts. But until the day we can purchase Parfum de Confiance, we are left inducing trust the old-fashioned way: we have to earn [...]
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