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What’s So Special About FREE?

IT GETS YOUR ATTENTION It’s kind of like being on vacation with your wife and stumbling upon a topless beach. Even if you have no interest, you gotta look when you see the word FREE. WHY DOES FREE STILL WORK? Nothing has been more overused in ads than the word …

20 Things Research Will Tell You. Two Things It Won’t.

If you don’t conduct research, if you don’t ask the “dumb” questions…YOU are dumb. Ordinary organizations don’t ask the questions they should be asking. Why? Because they believe they already know the answers, or the answers are not important, or it’s too difficult to get answers, or it’s too expensive. …

The Clendenin Combination Theory

I was on the therapy table of my favorite chiropractor, Dr. John Clendenin. He was helping me with an injury I sustained during one of my athletic “misadventures.” This kind of injury is common among males who get older but never actually grow up. One of my vertebrae was out of …

The Message Is Still the Master

MEDIA SCHMEDIAI’m as guilty as any communicator out there. Everyone is all lathered up about Social Media, WOM (Word of Mouth) and other buzz-word/new techie tools of the day. All the focus is on MEDIA. Somewhere along the line, marketers have forgotten that the MOST IMPORTANT element in a campaign …

Your Website Will Rock, Your Business Will Roll

Big Shot Beat Down So I’m showing a prospective client some streaming video on a website we built. “That’s cool,” she says. “Who built the website?” Ha ha…we did, of course. “You build websites?” she asks. I stare. I’m shocked. For once in my life, I’m speechless. She beat down …

A Marketing Man’s Perfect Day

Someone asked what I wanted for my birthday. “One perfect day,” I replied. 5:00 a.m. Alarm radio comes on playing my favorite jingle. I smile, then I smash the alarm and go back to sleep softly singing, “If I were an Oscar Mayer wiener, everyone would be in love with …

What Are We Doing?

So we’re heading toward the office of a client for a meeting. We were in the historic Halle building in Cleveland. It was a beautiful fall day, and Jeff Mamula, our Director of Business Development and I had just walked up to the third floor on the open sweeping staircase …

I was thinking….“What If?”

Maybe the time for these ideas has come. Or maybe not. What if we had no limits? I was watching the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebrations on TV. Everyone was wearing top hats that had a huge NIVEA logo on them. They were being interviewed under a NIVEA banner …