I spent a day this week in Detroit – a city much of the country seems to have written off. Violent crime is three to five times the national norm. Average home price is just north of $18,500. City unemployment stands at 21 percent. Foreclosure announcements recently took up 137 pages of the Detroit Free [...]
In a downturn, it’s a bit daunting trying to create new marketing and fundraising messages. But it’s possible, especially when you harvest the stories that are already living in your organization. You can find these stories just by taking the time to engage your constituents and dig a little deeper into what they see as [...]
This button, inspired by a remark that Dean Martin supposedly made about his Rat Pack buddy, reminds us of the value of a strong brand personality. A brand personality isn’t a nicety — nor is it a color palette, a logo or guidelines for photographic style. Think of how human personalities you’ve known have inspired [...]
The following are three sites I visit as sources of interesting stuff and flashes of inspiration. Some have marketing relevance others have talks and presentations given by the most creative minds of our generation. But whatever the content, they never fail to reveal something interesting about the human psyche, marketing of social campaigns, good design, [...]
I met last week with Gary McCullough, President and CEO of Career Education Corporation. Gary came up through the Procter & Gamble brand marketing group, and is the former chief marketing officer for Wrigley. He shared with me how he took “a page straight out of the P&G handbook – fewer brands with better differentiation” [...]
How did we come to treat “charitable giving” as one homogenous phenomenon? And what’s lost when we gloss over the nuances of a sector as large, complex, and vital as ours?
These are important questions in the midst of the largest economic downturn in decades—and they go to the very heart of how well nonprofits will [...]
1776 by David McCullough
While this part-biography of George Washington/part-historical account of the most pivotal year of the Revolutionary War, has little to do with marketing and communications, it’s a book that I’ve recently finished, which falls in the brain-maintenance category. But in reading it, as well as ‘Truman’, by Pulitzer prize-winning McCullough, there are some [...]