A brilliant PR colleague of mine, Susan Elford, recently lent me a book on “Gamification” called “The Gamification Revolution” by Gabe Zichermann and Joselin Linder which she picked up at a recent PR conference. At first, my brain was asking, how could games really be that important in the entire sphere of marketing? After all,…
Category: Strategic Planning
Why Strategy Comes First
Strategy: Plain and Simple We’ve written many times about the importance of good strategy coming before marketing, and it’s more true today than ever. The problem with strategy is that it is a broad word, and one which confuses many people. So they often skip doing strategy and just dive in and start churning out…
Media Buying
What Does a Media Planner / Buyer Do? As a marketing consultant, one of the most frequent questions I often get is, “What kind of marketing really works?” to which I, of course, will have to respond, “That depends on what kind of business you have, and who you are trying to target.” And further,…
Market Positioning
How to Find your Market Position Marketers often talk about “Market Positioning” – but what does it really mean? And do you really need to know what yours is? When some people say “market position” – they mean “share of market” – i.e. are you #1 or #2, in terms of having the largest share…
Marketing Predictions 2014
It’s January, and after having read through a plethora of expert predictions on what’s to come in the field of marketing over the next year, I thought I would offer my own “crystal ball” — educated prediction! 1. A Return to Strategy In the past couple of years, we marketers have been told to pump…
10 Point Strategic Marketing Plan Guide
Back when I was a student, marketing plans (and even entire business plans, for that matter) were something you had to “write” for marks. I assumed that this was kind of an academic exercise – and that in the real world, such formalized documents wouldn’t really be overly relevant. But once I began marketing in…
