By Charles Gold, Demand Metric member
By Jerry Rackley
For all that Ralph Waldo Emerson was, he was no marketer. He famously said, “Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door.” I’d love to debate Ralph about this: what if you can’t sustain your mousetrap innovation rate? What if competitors lower their prices? How will you communicate your mousetrap differentiation to the world? Why will they care? My debate with Ralph will never take place, but this thinking persists.
By Jerry Rackley
Word of Mouth is perhaps the marketer’s favorite promotional channel. We could even say that achieving a meaningful level of Word of Mouth communications is the holy grail of marketing. So how do we as marketers get more of it?
By Jerry Rackley
Whatever the sophisticated definitions are, marketing is a form of communication. We should spend time figuring out how to integrate our marketing campaigns, segment our markets, position our products and all the other specialized things we do. Sometimes, however, we just need to pay attention to how we write. Regardless of where our messages end up, most of them start in written form. Writing, therefore, is an essential marketing skill.
By Jerry Rackley
I once had a boss who taught me the meaning of the phrase, “when someone asks you what time it is, don’t provide instructions for building a watch.” I confess to being rather impatient. For most communications, I don’t want the War and Peace version of something when the Cliff’s Notes version is available. What this impatience really represents is a style of communication that marketers should care deeply about: brevity.
Editors note: this is the third post in a series we have invited some of our partners and members to contribute.
By Jerry Rackley
I caught a recent NPR interview of Dr. James Pennebaker, social psychologist and professor at the University of Texas. He has done some research on how we use language, which is described in his book, The Secret Life of Pronouns.
By Jerry Rackley
As marketers, we make a career out of learning what customers value, and then trying to persuade them that our respective companies are the best at providing it. The channels and technologies involved in this work have changed, but the core strategy of trying to herd as many customers as possible into the corporate corral has not.
