Groundhog Day Resolutions
Do you make the same New Year’s resolutions year after year, only to give up or forget about them a few months later?
Every year starts off with the best intentions. Then sometime around February (or maybe April or even June if you have more staying power than most) your resolve starts to wane. It becomes a never-ending cycle, like a scene from the movie Groundhog Day…
Read More»Image Usage for Visual Marketing: Avoiding Copyright Fines
If you purchase stock photography (or use legally-procured free stock photography) to enhance your website, blog, and social media or other content marketing efforts, you’re not alone. As the importance of visual marketing grows, more and more small businesses are creating memes, branded graphics, infographics and other visual marketing assets.
Needless to say, there’s a lot of stock photography being purchased to accommodate this visual marketing trend. And a lot of — often inadvertent — copyright infringement going on too.
Read More»Bells & whistles are nice, but sell me on primary value first.
Thankfully I don’t go shopping for a new car very often.
My last experience at an auto dealership left me baffled, and also a bit perturbed. After narrowing the search down based on meeting my overall desires for mileage, price-point, etc., the salesperson and I then moved on to various pros and cons of different makes and models. A seemingly logical next step…
Read More»Do Everything Differently: Goal-Setting for the New Year
A friend of mine recently shared her New Year’s resolution with me: “Do everything differently.”
I must admit at first I was a bit skeptical. It seemed a lot like “throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” as my grandmother used to say. But as I reflect back on 2015 and begin the process of solidifying 2016 business goals and strategies for BRANDgfx, I realize “do everything differently” is absolutely perfect in so many ways.
Typically the end of year business review begins with
Read More»To Date or Not to Date (your blog posts)
To date or not to date your blog posts, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler for blog posts to suffer
The slings and arrows of becoming “outdated”,
Or to take arms against a sea of information
And by date-stamping end confusion.
Okay, well, I’m no Shakespeare, but you get the gist. The question of “Should you date your blog posts?” continues to be a big debate in marketing and blogger communities. There are pros and cons on both sides of the argument, so – as most things in marketing – it really it comes down to
Read More»Stop Sponsoring Food Eating Contests
Companies who sponsor or support food eating contests don’t get enough bad PR.
Even associated deaths don’t seem to dampen the enthusiasm from sponsors (did you hear about the man dying from a cockroach eating contest?)
Here’s a past-time (sport?) where people eat disgusting amounts of food only to throw it up – while people are starving in the world; in America, in our own communities – and then are given a trophy and money for it!
Read More»Disconnect occasionally for cryin’ out loud.
When’s the last time you were in a meeting and absolutely no-one was checking messages or tweeting on their cell phone?
Or the last time you went out with friends and at least one of them didn’t start texting or uploading a photo to Facebook right in the middle of your sentence?
Maybe it was even you. (“Guilty as charged” myself, so I’m not casting any stones here.) Maybe you’re reading this right now while in the midst of tuning some other conversation out? [Sidebar: By all means keep reading this one though because
Read More»Sell it like it is! (Does Walgreens think I’m an idiot?)
A recent purchase at Walgreens got me thinking about product packaging…
I was bewildered to find that no matter what quantity of “Wal-itin” I wanted to purchase, Walgreens packaged them all in the same size pill bottle. This wasn’t so bad, but for some inexplicable reason, the product box packaging was three times the size of the pill bottle. And, why on earth should the same size pill bottle come in multiple box sizes depending on the quantity of pills in the bottle if the bottles were all the same size?
On one hand it’s genius:
Use the same size package (bottle) to hold different quantities of pills. This reduces overhead