Reading Time: < 1 min Throughout Henry Ford’s life, he always pushed to make things simpler. The Model T was an engineering marvel when it was first produced, but that’s in part because Ford was constantly finding things to remove. Every item he took out would reduce the weight, and it would also leave fewer items that might break. Steve […]
Marketing
Information asymmetry no longer exists
Reading Time: < 1 min Over the last 20 years, most jobs based on being a gatekeeper have disappeared, as shared a few days ago in Tell Your Story Yourself. Access to information is similar – if you try to hide information because you think you can, you’re only lowering the degree to which you’ll be seen as an expert. […]
Marketing is not interrupting people
Reading Time: < 1 min Marketing is about building and promoting a brand that attracts people to what you do. It’s everything your company does and how the world views you. Advertising is about interrupting people at expected times. Running TV commercials or Facebook ads are great ways to spend some money to interrupt people when they are expecting it. […]
It intentionally doesn’t scale
Reading Time: 2 min Last year I shared some thoughts on doing things that don’t scale. In that case it was about invoicing, but I’ve seen this idea continue to pop up. Lumpy Mail The first is the idea of sending “lumpy mail”. It’s easy to send 1000 emails, and rather easy to send 100 letters in the mail, […]
Visceral responses matter
Reading Time: 2 min Generally speaking, I’m not a fan of AI. There are some great things coming from it, but I generally prefer the old way of doing things, and wish that all creativity came directly from human minds. However, it’s not something I can control so I’m digging in deeply to understand AI as well as I […]
There is no average person
Reading Time: < 1 min While building audience personas is a vital piece of any marketing campaign, it’s also a bit strange. We build this very specific idea of who the customer is, knowing that this exact person doesn’t exist. In his book, “The Design of Everyday Things“, author Don Norman says: There is no such thing as the average […]
Always build the foundation first
Reading Time: < 1 min I love the processes behind the work we do at GreenMellen. By taking things in the right order, the results are far more likely to be successful. However, there is a downside to this approach; you can’t just jump into the middle of a campaign and hope to be successful. In the book “The Dichotomy […]
Yes, that’s spam
Reading Time: 2 min As time goes on, my definition of spam has gotten larger and larger. If you’re thinking about sending something and wonder “would this be considered spam?”, yes, it probably would be. My definition of spam has grown to simply include any cold contact. A cold email, a cold LinkedIn message, a cold phone call — […]
Thought leaders are everywhere
Reading Time: 2 min Depending on your marketing goals, one approach might be to reach “thought leaders” so that they can spread the word about your product to their audience. It sounds good in theory, but determining who a thought leader is can be nearly impossible. There are well-known authors and celebrities, for sure, but the people that others […]
Your real customers are a level or two deeper
Reading Time: 2 min In any kind of marketing it’s essential to know who your real customers are, but it’s sometimes a little trickier than it might seem. As I shared earlier this year, the people that we build websites for aren’t the ones that we’re actually building them for. When we build a site for a client, we’re […]