What kind of Halloween personality is your business?

Does your business resemble any of these Halloween personalities?:

Spiderman - Your company is super-human and does all it can to be a hero and make a difference.
Frankenstein - After the many merges and silos of departmental solitude, your company is only a massive heap of mismatched parts that are poorly woven together to somewhat [...]

Going backwards to keep going forwards

First, if you haven’t watched this amazing college football video of Division III Trinity College vs. Millsap, go ahead and take a little break and watch this video.

The great thing about laterals is that they seem counterintuitive - you go backwards in order to keep going forwards. In reality, there are [...]

Seinfeld on Marketing: Excuses

It’s Friday! Congrats, you made it to the end of the workweek. In this episode of Seinfeld, Jerry is discussing with Elaine his ideas for not hanging out with Joel Horneck, a guy that he’d rather not spend time with:

ELAINE: (Reading from Jerry’s notebook left on the coffee table.) “Picking someone up at the [...]

What do you call it?

In an excellent poem by Mary Oliver, she says:

[A]re you breathing just a little and calling it a life?

In the same vein, couldn’t we ask ourselves:

Are you tweaking your logo just a little and calling it a brand strategy?
Are you playing it safe just a little and calling it smart business?
Are you advertising just a [...]

Humanness

The family and I recently watched The Jungle Book together. We got out the required popcorn and snacks and settled in for a nice evening together. Within minutes, I remembered why it is one of my favorite Disney movies of all times.
Do you remember King Louie, king of the orangutans? He [...]

Seinfeld on Marketing: Having a feel

Happy Seinfeld on Marketing day to you all! In this episode, there really is no need for a setup, so jump on in the pool:

KRAMER: What’s today?
NEWMAN: It’s Thursday.
KRAMER: Really? Feels like Tuesday.
NEWMAN: Tuesday has no feel. Monday has a feel, Friday has a feel, Sunday has a feel…

Does Tuesday not [...]

The Interdependent Group

In the last Seinfeld on Marketing, I only briefly touched on the three types of groups. Today we’ll discuss more in depth the last group, The Interdependent Group.
If you ever work in groups (and who doesn’t), The Interdependent Group is the Holy Grail of groups. In this type of group, each member is independent [...]

The Frankenstein Group

In the last Seinfeld on Marketing, I only briefly touched on the three types of groups. Today we’ll discuss more in depth about The Frankenstein Group.
The Frankenstein Group tries to mix and match a variety of ideas into one idea. The problem though is that the ideas are not cohesive and sometimes are blatantly [...]

The consensus group

In the last Seinfeld on Marketing, I only briefly touched on the three groups. For the next few days we’ll go into greater detail about the Consensus Group, the Frankenstein Group and the Interdependent Group.
First, the Consensus Group. The Consensus Group only produces ideas where all of the rough edges have been [...]

Seinfeld on Marketing: Groups

In this episode of Seinfeld on Marketing, George is discussing with Jerry, Elaine and Kramer a comeback line (remember jerk store?) that he wants to use on a coworker that was rude to him. The gang offers George some alternative comebacks, but George likes his comeback better(”The jerk store called and they are running [...]