Mad Men is AMC’s brilliant television series that revolves around the world of advertising executives in the early 1960s. It is rich with atmosphere, full of compelling story lines, stocked with complex characters who behave badly and sometimes admirably.
The main character is Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm), the thirtysomething executive who heads up the [...]

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In Part One of this series, I discussed the first marketing steps a new company should undertake: naming and positioning. In Part Two, we move on to every creative person’s favorite – logo development, which is the visual foundation of your branding strategy.
Here’s the assignment: Create a logo and visual identity that reflects the essence of your company’s market [...]

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I’m always talking to my clients about the need to create more marketing content. But what exactly is content? Information, yes, but more than that: it is water for customers and prospects who thirst for knowledge, it is sustenance to fuel the marathon process known as the sales cycle.
Content consists of web pages, white papers, articles, [...]

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Some companies tend to scale back on marketing investments when economic conditions are difficult, yet history is rich with examples of companies that gain advantage by maintaining or increasing marketing during challenging times.
What at first may seem like a bold or risky strategy – funding a variable cost such as marketing during a time of financial [...]

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You’re an entrepreneur launching a new start-up. When and where does marketing fit in? The short answer is that marketing fits in from the beginning, but in small, staged increments.
By the beginning, I mean you have a product or service that’s already passed the first hurdles of market acceptance: you’ve conducted market research, you’ve had [...]

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