As my partner, Art Saxby, is fond of saying, “The best marketing takes no marketing dollars.” What he means is that the stuff that makes marketing work—and work most efficiently—is done before a dollar is spent. After working with nearly 1,000 mid-market CEOs to capture or recover growth, here’s what we’ve learned:
Thu, Mar 30, 2017 — My wife has always been a huge Bob Dylan fan. Me too, but not like her. Years ago she bought Dylan tickets in the center section for his last concert at the State Theater in Minneapolis. When we arrived at the theater, the usher said, “Oh, there’s a problem with your seats. We had to put the soundboard where your seats were. But, no worries, we gave you better seats.” And they did—two rows from the front of the stage, right in the middle.
Tue, Mar 29, 2016 — For those of us knee-deep in the startup world, we’re inundated by Unicorn noise – first their rise and more recently their fall (or, at least their right-sizing). Any number of factors have played into this trajectory: from FOMO venture capital activity that drove unsustainable valuations, to startup growth hacking techniques that indicate initial hyper-scaling, but often run out of steam - exposing the startup’s gap between product and promise.
Mon, Feb 22, 2016 — When it comes to understanding the function of Marketing, there are often common words that enter the equation like “website”, “brochures”, or “sales collateral”. While these are tools that typically originate from the Marketing department, they only scratch the surface of what Marketing encompasses in total. A wise person once characterized the poorly understood function in the terms of “there is a big 'M' in Marketing and a little 'm'”. Wow, that is profound. So, what do we mean when we say the big “M” of Marketing?
Mon, Jun 4, 2012 — With our CEO study from The University of Texas, McCombs School of Business now published, we're getting feedback from executives regarding the connection to our Demand Chain discussion. Excellent. These two subjects go together like peas and carrots.
