This post is the first in a series relating lessons from popular Aesop’s Fables to strategic communications and marketing.

The Ant and the Grasshopper:

“The ants were spending a fine winter’s day drying grain collected in the summertime. A Grasshopper, perishing with famine, passed by and earnestly begged for a little food. The Ants inquired of him, “Why did you not treasure up food during the summer?’ He replied, “I had not leisure enough. I passed the days in singing.” They then said in derision: “If you were foolish enough to sing all the summer, you must dance supperless to bed in the winter.”  Read more...

By Josh Cline

As technological innovations occur at an ever-increasing rate, marketers often develop unrealistic expectations because they think that each new gadget or medium has made all of the previous communications strategies obsolete.

Far from it. For example, social media is a form of public relations and not some heaven-sent technology that has changed everything, and as such, it and other online-marketing methods need to incorporate traditional best-practices from the beginning. It is crucial not to throw decades of communications knowledge out the digital window. Companies today need to ignore the so-called “hype cycles” that occur in all new marketing mediums and methods, instead understanding that classic communications theory never changes.  Read more...

By Josh Cline

Over the past five years, many public-relations professionals (some have called them publicists) became “social-media gurus” overnight, writing books and helping to spin what social-media marketing and SEO allegedly really are. Then, they became “digital-marketing specialists” or gave themselves other titles. Eventually, many woke up and realized again that, in the end, they are still marketing and communication specialists. Several have written three or more books since 2007 to regain their places as true marketing professionals.  Read more...

Note: This is the second part in an ongoing series. Part one and three.

By Samuel J. Scott

In the first part in this series, I introduced how I have been using holistic, integrated marketing to build and market a personal, hobby website of mine at night entitled Buffy the Vampire Slayer Online that aims to sell advertising and merchandise. (Yes, it is a website of the 1990s cult-television show because I have been a fan ever since I first saw it in college.)  Read more...

We’ve got marketing management all wrong.

We’re defining the tactic – email, social media, trade shows, conferences, PR – without clear goals.

As The Cline Group’s Josh Cline wrote, we’re putting the cart before the horse – running forward before we have the goals or a plan.  Read more...

The following is sixth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Geoffrey Moore’s Crossing the Chasm.

In order to win the battle for customers and revenue, you must define the battle.

One essential component to building a market is positioning.

Positioning is the image or identity in the minds of their target market for its product, brand, or organization.

Despite common misconception (and Wikipedia’s own entry), positioning is not a process but rather the market position itself.  Read more...

The following is the fifth in a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm.

One of the most important functions of marketing isn’t viral and it isn’t advertising and no, it’s not creative slogans. Rather it’s in the fundamental 4Ps taught in every Marketing 101 class: Product.

In order to win the marketplace, you must wire the marketplace. According to Moore, “For a given target customer and a given application, create a marketplace in which your product is the only reasonable buying proposition. That starts… with targeting markets that have a compelling reason to buy your product. The next step is ensuring that you have a monopoly over fulfilling the reason to buy.”  Read more...

By Daniel Goldstein

If your business would have had a mobile-marketing campaign during the holiday season, your sales may have increased by as much as eighteen percent.

That is the opinion of Razorfish Vice President of Mobile Paul Gelb. “I think the biggest takeaway from 2011 holiday marketing was the emergence of an enormous mobile-marketing gap amongst retailers,” he told Mobile Commerce Daily. “Retailers that are not ready are ceding high ground to their competitors and may have trouble leveling the playing field in the future.”

And Gelb is not alone. Hipcricket CMO Jeff Hasen observed that:  Read more...

The following is the fourth part of a series of posts about high tech marketing strategy based on Crossing the Chasm by Geoffrey Moore.

Moore opens with a quote from Yogi Berra: “If you don’t know where you’re going, you probably aren’t going to get there.”

The fundamental principle to cross the chasm is to pick a specific niche market and focus all your resources on achieving the dominant position in that segment.

It sounds simple but most organizations fail.

Why?

According to Moore, it’s a high risk, low data decision.  Read more...

By Samuel J. Scott

When I was a kid, I loved “Alf” – an NBC comedy that ran from 1986 to 1990 and was about a lovable, sarcastic space-alien living with a suburban California family. I even had an “Alf” stuffed animal that my mother had bought for me when I was six or so.

So, when I was bored one day, I scanned Facebook pages for TV shows, saw one for “Alf,” and “liked” the page. I had forgotten about the “like” until much later, when I saw this item in my Facebook news-feed earlier today while catching up with the latest news from my friends and family:  Read more...