You can see my rants on the subject in the related links below, but suffice to say that I think most of these things are a pretty poor excuse for marketing, and we’re egged on by sales because, when all the booths, celebrity look-alikes and, heaven help us, popcorn machines are put away, all we really have is a bunch of names. will grant you that a good show is also a wonderful place to build credibility, discredit your competitors, and launch a product, but I would challenge you to drop one show from your calendar this year and try doing some other lead generation with the budget. MORE >>

Make sure you have a live chat support service so the customer can multi-task while you help them. Build a website that’s easily navigated from a smart phone or a tablet. Welcome, small business owners! Hard to believe it’s Small Business Week again! Come in, sit down, enjoy your eggs. We’ve got a great morning planned for you! We’ll start off with an address about how important you are from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of State for Bingo Halls, Hosiery and Small Business. Guess who won’t be in the room? Small business owners, that’s who. MORE >>

But hidden in this final bit of the book is a wonderful pitch-building technique called Yes-But-So. If you need help writing positioning statements and core messages, you will find it here. Interesting things happen when we tidy up. recent attempt to dissuade certain loved ones from calling the producers of Hoarders turned up an Economist magazine so old it was saying nice things about Merrill Lynch, a copy of The Marketing Playbook and, ironically, an article about personal organization with three pages missing. So naturally I stopped cleaning and sat down to read the Playbook. MORE >>

Trout argues that these are seen by customers as table stakes and not something on which you can build positive differentiation. The second book (siphoned out of Bottom Up Marketing  - - affiliate link) is where he gets around to competition, and this is where it gets interesting, especially the bit on page 70 where he asserts his bottom-up thesis about starting with tactics to build strategy. So if we start with tactics we end up with Trout’s concept of bottom-up marketing: “Find a tactic that will work, and then build it into a strategy. And why? affiliate link).  MORE >>

My advice (especially if you’re having trouble staying up late these days) is to skip everything up to page 86, which is where the authors finally get down to being helpful. The FLIRT (focus, language, incentives, rules and tools) elements that build a wikibrand are really the meat of this book. The diagrams are pretty good and could be a big help if you need to throw Finance off the scent with an over-complicated view of what you do. I was very excited when Wikibrands : Reinventing Your Company in a Customer-Driven Marketplace popped onto my radar in the Spring. Seriously? MORE >>