By Leo Valiquette
There was an interesting story in the Globe and Mail last week that got me thinking about the distinction between product marketing and brand marketing.
The Globe’s Susan Krashinsky was writing about Newfoundland and Labrador’s tourism industry and how the province’s efforts to brand itself with a memorable advertising campaign has provoked the best form of flattery possible – plagiarism.
By Caroline Kealey
The word “strategic” is used so often that we’ve lost track of what it means. You might think it’s nothing but another bit of corporate-speak tossed around to make things sound fancier. In fact, something real and utterly important is at stake in this word.
A strategic state of mind is one that directs a systematic plan of action toward a specific result. It’s about looking at the big picture – what outcomes you’re trying to achieve – before working out the detailed tactics that might be taken to get there. This is the state of mind that makes communications activities work in the service of larger corporate goals. Being a strategic thinker demands always holding yourself to a standard of acting based on strong evidence and a logical progression of planning steps. That’s no easy thing when you’re frazzled by the day-to-day demands on your time.
By Leo Valiquette
As a regular feature, we provide our readers with a roundup of some of the best articles we have read in the past week. On the podium this week are MarketingProfs, TechVibes, Forbes, Inc. and Dan Barker.
What’s next in marketing: 29 bold predictions for 2013
MarketingProfs’ Veronica Maria Jarski makes the rounds to find out what we should expect in 2013. We of course are particularly pleased by the prediction that content marketing will continue to gain prominence this year. However, there is a diversity of ideas in her article and we will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide which are insightful and visionary or just so much buzz word-ridden bombast.
By Francis Moran
This is a word cloud of the more than 200 blog posts we published here in 2012. In one fell swoop, it graphically illustrates our preoccupations over the past year, the subject matter we returned to time and again as we looked at the unique challenges of bringing technology to market.
Not surprisingly, the most frequently mentioned word — and by a significant margin — in all our content last year was”marketing.” We are, after all, marketing strategists, and we created this blog as a resource where technology companies, both startups and more established ventures, could find solid counsel on how to master this mix of art and science. This will continue to be our main focus this coming year.
By Tara Hunt
It usually starts something like this:
“Hey! Everyone I know is on Instagram! We should start an Instagram for the company!”
The suggestion in itself isn’t wrong, per se; it’s just not made with much of an understanding of how these social platforms work. It takes less than five minutes to set up an Instagram account (if you have an iPhone or an Android device). That’s the simple part. But then the real work begins.
People who rarely use social networks love platforms … even when they, themselves, admit to not having enough time to use them. That’s pretty much what they see: Platforms and the numbers. “Why aren’t we on Pinterest/Foursquare/Tumblr/Google+/You Tube/Instagram/etc?” they’ll ask. They’ll tell you about all sorts of other companies that have set up multiple accounts on multiple platforms and how they read about it on Mashable. They’ll hint at being concerned about your expertise or ability to execute because you haven’t created accounts everywhere. They may even say, “It takes five minutes to set it up!”
