About this blog
I write about communication, leadership and change, drawing on a 30-year career in journalism, public relations and management.
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Category Archives: Marketing
Please, no more faux customer service!
Have you ever been the recipient of faux customer service? It’s service with a saccharin smile—plastic, mechanical and insincere. Not genuine, not caring and certainly not the kind of service that makes you sit up and say, “Wow!” I recently … Continue reading
Roy Rogers and ‘good’ brand incongruence
I didn’t make it up—“brand incongruence” is an actual term. It’s when a company or organization does something that is incongruent with its brand attributes. To put it in the parlance of brand storytelling, your brand is acting out of … Continue reading
Posted in Marketing
Tagged brand awareness, brand incongruence, brand promise, customer experience, Roy Rogers
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The magic of great branding
Who can explain why an Apple customer is willing to stand in line for hours for a new iPhone or why coffee drinkers will drive miles out of their way to find a Starbucks? It’s the magic of great branding. … Continue reading
Posted in Marketing
Tagged branding, BrandTrust, Daryl Travis, NAFCU, PRSA-NCC, public relations, The Federal Credit Union
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Note to self: write a personal branding statement (now)
Is it asking too much to expect a high school student to know what career she wants to pursue? Probably. Okay, what about an adult? Shouldn’t adults know what they want out of life? What path they want to follow? … Continue reading
What business are you in? Or how not to be a railroad man
In his 1960 essay, “Marketing Myopia,” Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt famously asked readers to consider what business they were really in. He argued that the railroads lost their market share (and nearly disappeared) because they incorrectly thought they … Continue reading
Posted in Leadership, Marketing
Tagged business, customers, HBR, Marketing Myopia, Theodore Levitt
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Don’t be a ‘dunce’ when it comes to blogging
Imagine that you’ve written what might well be the next great American novel. You submit it to Simon & Schuster, and they seem interested. They ask you for some rewrites, but ultimately they drop it. Your novel languishes. That is, … Continue reading
Posted in Careers, Communications, Marketing
Tagged A Confederacy of Dunces, Blogging, John Kennedy Toole, Social media, Thelma Toole, Walker Percy
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Evaluating Vine and other social media
I had lunch last week with my friend and former NAFCU colleague John Zimmerman, who showed me a clever 6-second video he made on Vine—a social media app that has gotten a lot of attention lately but one that I … Continue reading
Protecting your good name in the digital age
From time to time I have tried to help out a small business owner in my neighborhood with marketing ideas and advice. Lately, we have been looking at Yelp and pondering how to mitigate the damage to her reputation from … Continue reading
Posted in Management, Marketing
Tagged bad reviews, branding, Google, reputation management, small business owner, Yelp
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Brand relevance and the art of finding your sweet spot
Reblogged from The PRSA-NCC Blog I recently invited D.C. marketing expert Bob London to speak to the Independent Public Relations Alliance. He gave some great pointers on indie branding, which I wrote about in this post for the PRSA-NCC Blog. … Continue reading
The Wayward Journey 