“Are you ready to rumble? Well, you’d better be if you’re in charge of your company’s marketing effort this year. The days of innovating new approaches are over. All the techniques have been tried, and it’s your responsibility to pull the right levers to attract customers, build brand value, and ultimately generate revenue.”

“2001 was a very important year for marketers. We faced a number of challenges and a changing perspective on the role marketing plays in business. Here are the drivers that I found most influential [last] year…”

“Almost as quickly as CRM rose to the top of corporate agendas it has come under fire — too much pain for too little gain, critics scoff.”

“The rational rules of management don’t apply when it comes to fostering creative types. In this Harvard Business Review excerpt, the author explains why you should, among other things, encourage creative workers to defy superiors.”

“…before we get lulled into thinking ‘02 will be business as usual, let’s be honest with ourselves. It’s going to be a tough, challenging year. The best strategy for content developers and marketing communications pros is to set some hard goals and live up to them. Here are a few ideas…”

“Do people really want to buy what you have to sell? Even though the dot.com era has taken a welcomed sabbatical from our computer screens, we still need to look at what caused the massive failure (other than way too much money being pumped into the industry) and assess our own business models. There were too many companies that had the perfect solution for a problem that did not exist, or a sales strategy for a market that was saturated. Having the latest state-of-the-art technology is wonderful, but as a friend of mine always asks, ‘Who is going to buy the darn thing?’”

“In these days of budget cuts and profit woes, even the most hardened of advertisers are wondering about whether to invest in advertising. Hesitancy stems not only from leaner profits making advertising expenditures less viable, but lack of insight into whether advertising really works, and if so, when and why.”

“Companies have access to more information about their customers than ever before, and customers aren’t exactly jumping for joy. Purchasing habits, medical information, financial reports, favorite music groups, and millions of other bits of personal information are being captured by companies. In Making It Personal: How to Profit from Personalization without Invading Privacy, Bruce Kasanoff teaches businesses how to get closer to customers without violating their trust.”

“Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that her two daughters weren’t listening when she asked them to clean their bedrooms and do their chores. So, one morning, she sat down at her computer, opened Microsoft’s PowerPoint program, and typed…”

“A while back, I wrote about how I was going to use the term ’search engine marketing’ rather than ’search engine optimization’ to cover the wide range of activities involved in obtaining traffic from search engines. Apparently, readers like the idea. Over 30 people sent emails to me on the subject, with the vast majority of them in favor of the change.”

“The best way to make a project successful is to start well. Bringing your project in on target is challenging, but certainly possible if you know how to go about it. If you can learn to communicate your value effectively to project stakeholders, you’ll produce more successful projects and advance your career. Your credibility is crucial, and the best way to gain credibility is to show that your projects are well grounded, well executed, and contribute materially to your company’s success. This article outlines a set of tools that will put you in a leadership position, make sure your projects meet business goals, increase the support for your work, and, in the end, improve your credibility.”

“Don’t react rashly to falling sales by cutting your ad budget. See what deals you can get first.”

“There is a tendency in marketing to think mostly about what customers care about. That is, what benefits customers really want. But there is another important part that should be deeply appreciated by anyone who markets products, and that is customer perceptions, or how customers view (or perceive) the different products on the market. One technique that clearly depicts these customer perceptions is ’snake-plot.’ It is a technique that falls under the umbrella term of ‘perceptual mapping.’”

“Think fast. Think under pressure. That’s how you win in business — and in chess. Here is a master class from Bruce Pandolfini, one of the world’s great chess teachers, on how to think like a champion.”

“There is a tendency in marketing to think mostly about what customers care about. That is, what benefits customers really want. But there is another important part that should be deeply appreciated by anyone who markets products, and that is customer perceptions, or how customers view (or perceive) the different products on the market. One technique that clearly depicts these customer perceptions is ’snake-plot.’ It is a technique that falls under the umbrella term of ‘perceptual mapping.’”