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 ...

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 ...

GlobeOp: Be Confident, $1B Confident

Result AuA (assets under admin) 71% to $187B. Revenue 41% to $221.3MM. Stock value 142% $1.0B acquisition by SS&C. Business Challenge At 10 years of steady growth, GlobeOp leadership, including BOD, was not satisfied with its marketing-sales synergy…nor how it was positioned to maximize value for acquisition. Customer Insight Technology ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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Top Dance Routine Ever?

Imagine a dance routine in a 2082 version of Dancing with the Stars. Think it would blow you away compared to today? Now, check out this from the same 70-year time span…going back in time. Think it could possibly still be one of the greatest dance routines ever? You decide. ...

Nice vs Wow

Next time you’re considering a visual for, well, absolutely anything representing your brand, consider the difference between the two responses: “Nice”       or “Wow”     Ask yourself, will it: 1. Stand Out from the 1,000s of images they will see today? 2. Stop+Engage them in feeling, thinking, and supporting ...

CEO: Know Thy Social Self

It’s not “social  media” that CEOs need concern themselves. It’s more a common sense leadership thing about knowing one’s self and one’s company’s Social Self.  A company’s Social Self can be a revenue-influencing metric that shows a CEO the comparative values between its company and its competitors when and how ...

Gladwell’s Secret Sauce

I have to bring us back to this classic Gladwell. It remains deliciously relevant to seeking a universal answer for making customer X satisfied with product or service Y. Don’t fret over the length of this talk. Malcolm Gladwell makes it fly. ...

Brand Takeaway #1

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” ~ Maya Angelou ...

Define Brand Strategy and Strategist

Strategy is the single driving cue. With this cue, you have a clear direction. It lights the way. Sets your tone. Ensures the feel. Drives nuance. It changes habit and creates craving. There is only one strategy. All else are tactics that support it. You can decide to revise a ...

Diving for Happiness

I don’t just want to be where my prospects are. I want to make their experiences there better.   ...

Fake Brands Kill Real People

How does an “innocent” public keep drug cartels and terrorists in business? By thinking it is doing no harm when buying counterfeit brands. So, when Prada, Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Ray-Ban, Coach, Gucci, et al, gathered in Washington, D.C. for the Anti-Counterfeiting Coalition, they were presented the problem, and marketing ...

I Love My Dad

A boy tells the story of his father returning to work after battling cancer. And a hospital emerges as a friend, neighbor, and hero. ...