marketing

Your style guide is your most loyal brand protector.

Marketing is the perfect blend or art and science. But more than that, marketing is a craft.

We have put our words on steroids and amped the language up so high that unless we communicate in overdrive and hyperbole, we believe--perhaps correctly--that nobody will hear us. In the process, we've sacrificed nuance and judgement and distinction, and thereby cheapened the conversation.

What you say is not as important as who you are when you're saying it.

What people intuitively grasped was the new efficiences in distribution, manufacturing, and marketing were changing the definition of what was commercially viable across the board. The best way to describe these forces is that they are turning unprofitable customers, products, and markets into profitable ones. Although this phenomenon is most obvious in entertainment and media, it's an easy leap to eBay to see it at work more broadly, from cars to crafts. Seen broadly, it's clear that the story of the Long Tail is really about the economics of abundance - what happens when the bottlenecks and stand between supply and demand in our culture start to disappear and everything becomes available to everyone.

Perhaps one of the more creative promotions of all time wasin 1969, when a marketer with the Procter & Gamble Companycame up with the idea of giving away goldfish with each purchaseof a king-size box of Spic and Span.

Real-time marketing is not for everyone. To take advantage of it, you need to have a clear idea of what it is you want to achieve through it.

When people can't handle your light, it's because they haven't yet discovered their own, and you are a reminder of that. Don't take it personal, and don't shrink or hide. Either they will choose to shine or grab a pair of shades.

In the six degrees of separation, not all degrees are equal.

So why was Kim Kardashian famous? Because she was very good at marketing herself, that was all - and today, that was enough. Corporations are now people and people are now products, known as "brands". At a time when the 1 percent was getting richer, the 99 percent was suddenly trying to Keep up with the Kardashians.

What we're now starting to see, as online retailers begin to capitalize on their extraordinary economic efficiences, is the shape of a massive mountain of choice emerging where before there was just a peak.... By necessity, the conomics of traditional, hit-driven retail limit choice. When you dramatically lower the costs of connecting supply and demand, it changes not just the numbers, but the entire nature of the market. This is not just a quantiative change, but a qualitative one, too. Bringing niches within reach reveals latent demand for noncommercial content. Then, as demand shifts toward the niches, the economics of provided them improve further, and so on, creating a positive feedback loop that will transform entire industries - and the culture - for decades to come.

If it touches the customer, it's a marketing issue!

Five minutes in an old book quickly reveals that most of what is being sold today as new insights into human behavior is merely the rediscovery of knowledge we have had for centuries.

Networking is not a part-time or occasional exercise. Everywhere we go, we haven an opportunity to network with others.

If the New Marketing can be characterized by just one idea, it's this: Ideas that spread through groups of people are far more powerful than ideas delivered at an individual.Social change, education, new-product launches, religious movements... it doesn't matter, the story is the same. Movements are at the heart of change and growth. A movement - an idea that spreads with passion through a community and leads to change - is far more powerful than any advertisement ever could be.As you consider what to do next, you're faced with a difficult choice. It's difficult because it represents giving up something you may be quite comfortable with, and it's difficult because it requires an all-or-nothing commitment.

Some will, some won't. Look for the ones who will.

The notion of carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain innerstrain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. It entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who - with the help of advanced and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth - dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right.

Service Marketing delivers when great communication meets great service design.