By Leo Valiquette
I love Tom Kumagai.
As a spokesperson for Toyota, that is.
He is the modest building inspector from Chatham, Ont. who has appeared in television commercials for Toyota with his 1998 Rav-4. His mileage on the vehicle is well past the 600,000-kilometre mark. Previously, he owned a 1980 Toyota Corolla that he took to more than 400,000 kilometres.
Kumagai attributes the reliable performance to the fact that he keeps to the manufacturer’s recommended service schedule and only trusts his local Toyota dealership to do the work.
There is nothing boastful about these advertisements. There is no need to be. The facts speak for themselves. And while not all Toyota owners have the same experience, and the automaker itself deals with quality issues and recalls like any other, the understated tone of these advertisements gives them weight and authority.
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By Daylin Mantyka 
Compliments of the folks over at Duct Tape Marketing, Marketo, Social Media Explorer, and Fast Company, this week’s roundup is marketing heavy with a little bit of entrepreneurship.
First up, why a mission statement is critical for content marketing, followed by lessons learned from a seasoned marketing VP. Third, we’ve got some advice on measuring the impact of social media and conclude with two articles on entrepreneurship.
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By Hailley Griffis
This week’s article roundup is all about marketing, courtesy of Huffington Post, CopyBlogger, Forbes and ClickZ.
First up, why marketing campaigns are bound to failure and the mistakes you might be making. Next, we see the importance of providing relevant content to your audience and look at the winning difference this content can provide. We follow that with the lessons one founder learned going from the corporate world to the startup world and how he has improved his marketing. Finally a very detailed post goes over how to create an inbound marketing strategy.
Why your marketing campaigns are destined to fail
Jun Loayza is very familiar with the classic mistakes a lot of marketers make. Drawing on the hundreds of marketing campaigns he has implemented, Loayza recaps what he’s learned from his failures. The first is being too focused on traffic, and not giving enough thought to conversion. He then talks about properly pitching the product and whether or not people can talk about you with ease. Read More
By Francis Moran
Angel investors, that group of high-net-worth individuals who are often the first source of external funding for new companies, were a great deal more active in Canada in 2012, making nearly twice as many investments as the year before. However, the total value of those investments rose by only 13 percent, suggesting that individual investments, while perhaps easier to secure, are getting smaller.
That was one conclusion to be drawn from the annual report on angel investing published earlier this week by Canada’s National Angel Capital Organization. The survey of 20 out of NACO’s 24 angel group members revealed that a total of 139 investments were made last year, up 96 percent from the year previous. Just over 100 of these were new investments, 30 were follow-on and the balance were not specifically categorised. However, the total amount invested in 2012 was $40.5-million (all values in Canadian dollars), up only 13 percent over the $35.7-million that angels put into young companies in 2011.
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This is the next entry in our “Best of” series, in which we venture deep into the vault to replay blog opinion and insight that has withstood the test of time. Today’s post hails from November 2007. We welcome your feedback.
By Francis Moran
Canada’s national broadcaster, the CBC, is airing a special series on its national radio news programs called, “How may I help you?” I caught the first in-depth piece yesterday evening and I so badly wanted to call in and share my endless stack of customer service horror stories. Many fellow listeners obviously felt the same way; as of late this morning, fully 279 (!) individual stories of lament had been posted to CBC’s web site.
The issue put me in mind of an article, authored by Graham Technology’s Frank Kirwan, that we secured in Customer Management magazine earlier this year.
As I was listening to the radio piece last evening and reading some of the horror stories posted online this morning, the key point that kept coming back to me from Kirwan’s article was “Dissatisfaction is a greater driver of (customer) defection than satisfaction is of retention.” And judging from the number of CBC listeners who wrote that they would never again do business with that bank, telephone company, travel agency or whatever, clearly it takes just a single outrageous example of lousy customer service to trigger that defection.
It really doesn’t have to be that way.
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