As the employer of numerous millennials and proud parent of two, I'm quite conscious of a generational tendency to change jobs with frequency. Various research studies back up my first-hand observation of this trend. Deloitte reports that younger millennials ages 20-24 are on the job for an average of 1.3 years and according to Gallup: Millennials most likely generation to...
Category: Interviews
An Insider's Look at Driving Change via Marketing
Last Friday, I was in one of my "oh we've nailed it" gleeful moods as we contemplated a new business plan to focus on "agents of change." Our logic was airtight, or so we thought. If we could just figure out how to isolate change agents as a personality type via a line of questioning, then we could narrow both the...
How Brands Do Good in School
Both of my older brothers learned to diagram sentences from Mrs. Armitage, an unforgettable 7th grade English teacher at Heinz Kaiser junior high in Costa Mesa, California. Not I. By the time my turn came around, this diminutive Southern-born chain-smoking firecracker with the gravelly voice that turned a-r-m into "airem," was already suffering from lung cancer which meant we had a...
How to Make Agency Partnerships Work
As chief Renegade for the better part of two decades, I’ve witnessed first hand the innumerable variations client-agency relationships can take. Some have been multi-dimensional like our phenomenal 15-year partnership with Panasonic. Others have been more focused like the BankCab guerrilla marketing program which drove customers to HSBC for 13 years. Some clients have given us a clean slate to...
How to Make Agency Partnerships Work
As chief Renegade for the better part of two decades, I’ve witnessed first hand the innumerable variations client-agency relationships can take. Some have been multi-dimensional like our phenomenal 15-year partnership with Panasonic. Others have been more focused like the BankCab guerrilla marketing program which drove customers to HSBC for 13 years. Some clients have given us a clean slate to...
Helping Your Customers is Always a Good Strategy
Waiting in the lounge area for my flight back to New York City on American last week, I overheard a fellow passenger grumble that "I have a zillion upgrade credits but can never use them." Having not been upgraded either despite my lifetime Platinum status and early check-in, I thought for a moment about my loyalty to American -- why did...
Want to Understand Influencer Marketing? Become an Influencer Yourself
Every once in a while you meet someone who seems to be so much more productive than you are that you just have to stop and tip your hat. The recipient of my admiration most recently is Martin Jones of Cox Communications and as you will see in our interview below, Martin is a man who wears many hats from...
Marketing Clean Water, A Career Journey
My son asked me the other day, "Which superpower would you prefer Dad, teleporting or flying?" I knew my answer right away but I was surprised when he told me most of his friends choose the other option. As it turns out, these folks just want to get to where they want to go which makes the idea of teleporting...
How Mobile Social Local Transformation Begins
If you're currently working for an organization that needs to pull itself into the MoSoLo (mobile social local) era, you're going to want to read this extensive interview with from start to finish. Such a transformation is neither rapid nor guaranteed to work without a number of factors coming together: An internal catalyst Senior management buy-in An external expert /...
Keeping the Customer Front and Center
Gripping tightly to the lifeless plastic handle I could only muster a fainthearted "hit it" to the speedboat skipper 50 feet away. This was to be my third and final attempt to rise above my skis and frankly I was already drained and shivering. The first effort had ended in a face plant with skis scattered across the surface like an old-fashioned yard sale. The second...