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…
Category: Interviews
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…
CMO Insights: How Rebranding is Done
Reinventing your brand is a lot harder than it sounds. Legacy perceptions, perhaps one’s that you worked for years to engender, are extremely hard to dispel. Xerox spent years trying to convince us they weren’t just a copier company with modest success. Then there’s the need to get both management and employee buy-in which can be as hard as changing customer perceptions….
CMO Insights: How to Use Marketing to Help Your Customers
Jim Collins famous “hedgehog” concept proposed that great businesses were greater still because of their profound focus, doing one thing better in their marketplace than anyone else. Recently, a number of service companies have taken a not so obvious way to become better at their core business and that’s by operating businesses in other areas. Stay with me as I…