A Video Letter to Detroit, from Two Marketing Guys in a Pub in New York City

Dear Detroit, Sitting in a pub in downtown Manhattan over the weekend, pal Rich and I were mouthing the lyrics and bobbin’ our heads to the Four Tops, Reach Out and I’ll Be There. We, of course, got talkin’ ’bout our love for Detroit. Its music, the Tigers, cars, Shinola ...

Featured FIVE CREATIVE MINDSETS (TO SHIFT).

FIVE CREATIVE MINDSETS (TO SHIFT). Mindset #1 (to Shift): Create for Gen Z, Millennials, Tech, et al. Please, no. In trying too hard to be au courant or category-conscious, you can fall into the rut of pigeonholing and demagoguing on demographics. Human beings tend to be a beautifully messy, mixed bag ...

Featured THREE MARKETING MINDSETS (TO SHIFT).

  THREE MARKETING MINDSETS (TO SHIFT). Mindset #1 (to Shift): Write Marketing Plan Before Getting Brand/Creative Involved. Great marketing doesn’t just happen by opening the lid of a creative box, throwing in the plan and hitting an “On” button. The creative fire that forged the brand keeps sparking right into the marketing plan. Creatives are ...

Featured THREE BRANDING MINDSETS (TO SHIFT).

              THREE BRANDING MINDSETS (TO SHIFT). Mindset #1 (to Shift): Place Your “Message Stack” Above All. No, not “above all.” The message stack is vital and valued to your marketing and sales. Indeed, it is the bathwater you keep fresh, clean and healthy, tracking ...

The Name Came to Us Pretty Quickly.

Maybe it was the sunset and balmy evening on the rooftop bar in Manhattan… …but the name came to us pretty quickly: The Exit Brand. Based on the common value thread of our client success stories — $3.14B in sales and investor growth — and our way of exiting the ...

The Branding Process I Used to Help Create $4.1B Shareholder Value for Three Companies

The $3 billion represents the global hyper growth for Grapeshot, Sprinklr, and GlobeOp, where I headed branding, respectively, from 2009 to 2018. The $3,14,000,000 Result ✓ Grapeshot, purchased by Oracle, $320,000,000 (million) ✓ GlobeOp, by SS&C, $1,000,000,000 (billion) ✓ Sprinklr, currently valued at $1,820,000,000* (billion) *valued at $80 million when ...

Featured My Father’s Day Ride to Somewhere, Something Incredible

I get a lot of inspiration from my sons. No matter how fast and far they fling themselves into the space of their lives, they crave being back here on Earth with family and home. So, for Father’s Day, I take these two space-age adventurers on a ride with their grand- and ...

Your “To Be or Not to Be” List

Try not to become a person of success but rather to become a person of value. ~ Albert Einstein To be or not to be, that is the question. ~ William Shakespeare To Be or Not to Be. Before all your To Do’s, check or create your To Be list ...

Market Like Water

People seek not just to buy, but to buy into a feeling, a sense of trust that “you took the time to really know me.” These are the cases that clients like to discuss when rethinking their branding to better connect with customers. Like water for a parched soul. *** GRAPESHOT: The “Get to It” ...

Write This Down (on paper): TRUST

THE TRUST TEST. Email or phone or….? Which tool do you use to win the trust of your customer, and a sale? Forty-eight graduate business students were given $89 in a study on lying online. They had to tell their partners about the money — and how much they were going ...

Shifting from Purchaser to User

Shifting From Purchaser To User. Imagine there’s no purchaser. It’s easy if you try…. Try to think of your customer as someone you care about (brother, mother, friend) in the act of using your product or service. Rather than a faceless data point you’re trying to get to purchase. And ...

Shifting from Loyalty to Relevance

                SHIFT FROM LOYALTY TO RELEVANCE. Ok, so you want customers who are loyal to you. Well, you can’t always get what you want., but, as you know, if you try sometime, you just might find… You get what you need when you ...

How Your Customer Sees You (or Doesn’t) and Trusts You (or Not)

Isn’t it weird how this works? You’re on an overcrowded street in the city, in a sea of people, when you suddenly, unexpectedly, out of the hundreds of faces in your visual field, see the one face of someone you know. Not only do you recognize them immediately, you also ...

An Unexpected Way to Successful Purchase Behavior

My team and I were sitting at the pub, rethinking an approach to a client’s customer-rewards program. So, we looked at a seminal study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It validated our counterintuitive notion of loyalty and compensation. And, ah, inspired another round as we brainstormed with crayons on ...

How Small Lives Large

  The “Pale Blue Dot” photograph captured by the Voyager 1 (NASA/JPL). Seen from about six billion kilometers, Earth appears as a tiny dot (the blueish-white speck approximately halfway down the brown band to the right…your eye will see it if you let it). The image, composed of 640,000 individual pixels, depicts Earth, a mere 12% ...

Seeing the Extra in the Ordinary

    Emotion plays a larger role in customer experience (than effectiveness and ease): Harvard Business Review’s and Forrester‘s respective seminal studies are still rock solid in showing us why emotion is the most influential of the three e’s of Cx quality — effectiveness, ease, and emotion. Customer Satisfaction (isn’t good enough): Former ...

The Sweet Round of Her Thumb

Riding a relentless conveyer belt of people on Fifth Avenue in midtown Manhattan, I had to stop and step aside to stare at a reflection on a storefront’s glass window. It was of a woman lifting her child playfully on a beach — mirrored from an advertisement on the side of a bus ...

Where the Wild Things Are (and Still Speak to Me)

It’s a rare treat to  listen in on one of the seminal voices of creativity and literature.  The voice of Maurice Sendak,  speaking http://www.npr.org/2011/09/20/140435330/this-pig-wants-to-party-maurice-sendaks-latest ...

The X Factor of Trusted, Effective Content: ConteXt

          The thought bubbles above your customer’s head at every touchpoint: Do you even know who I really am? How is this relevant to me right now? Context, not content, is the new king. What do you think is more effective for your sales: If your ...

The Grand Canyon (a Reminder in a Forgetful Time for Love)

Maybe you’re right: Love ain’t, or ought not to be, about this one designated day that feeds the greeting card-restaurant-chocolate-roses-silk sheets industrial complex. But, for me, it serves a good purpose today: a reminder in an otherwise forgetful time for love. I was rummaging through boxes of memorabilia in the basement when ...

Pair of Hands (Not)

“What we need around here is a pair of hands.” Have you ever heard that casual, intellectually and emotionally detached comment to describe the need for an art director or designer (implicitly, cheap and fast)?  To the creative being — art director, designer, et al— reducing their process to just that, ...

Irresistible at First Sight

Hmmm, what’s wrong with this picture that makes it so right? So irresistible to the eye and brain? Is your brand saying, Hey, check this out, something different!? Or are you signaling, Been there, done that? Are your customers seeing, feeling, something different about you? Compelling, intriguing them at first sight, to know more? Engaging their imagination ...

Until We See It Together

 I was holding my cup of hot coffee with both gloveless hands on a cold late afternoon in Manhattan, looking into a storefront window.  Standing next to me was a young mother and her little daughter with a physical disability. They were both looking at the “perfect” body of the ...

How Your Sales Depend on the Story of Ben

You know things. Like how storytelling is the way we’re wired to learn. To communicate. To empathize.  Yep, to sell, our ideas, our dreams. You can’t sell it if you can’t tell it. It’s just part of our human DNA: 1. We learn (far faster) 2. and retain (far longer) 3. Through ...

Work to Do

while attending to my to-do list at work i saw a message on social media that a company teammate’s father had died she was devastated ….and, yet, it was the middle of the day and i had work to do so i did the work that needed to be done: ...

A Promise Kept One Summer Night, Leaning Against My Pontiac LeMans

{ One summer night out front of 5008 Adrian Street, Rockville, Maryland } You: “Think you need to wash this bad boy.” Me: “So, you’re really going through with this…?” “My father got the final transfer papers today.” “Can’t believe you’ll be playing for our crosstown rival.” “YOUR crosstown rival.” “Up ...

Sons of the Torch

                  my torch holders, no the flame is memory is moment is motivation not to hold fast to past form but to reshape the world in yours as you see to see to know it that is peace to me that is ...

The Strong That Is You

You stand strong at 30 With a voice all your own And it wasn’t always easy coming But something fierce and loving Always spoke to you from your core Telling you that what’s true and good in you Can be what’s true and good in the world Now, here you are At 30 ...

Pizza Verdi

How will you change my world? The suspense is killing me… A pizza, a knife, and a little opera. A seemingly routine pizza delivery escalates into a tense game of cat-and-mouse. A quintessential New York tale. And the art of remarkable storytelling.  A short film by Gary Nadeau.   Pizza ...

Sprint’s Death+Life Customer Experience

Throwback Thursday: In 2007,  Sprint decided its best solution for decreasing customer complaints was to send service termination letters to its most frequent, costly complainers: 1,200 of its 53 million customers. It’s one of the greatest hate-love letter stories in brand-turn-around history. The Thinking at The Time: Company’s old leadership felt ...
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