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Customer Engagement Defies Definition!!
I recently attended a dinner with 10 senior marketing executives (CMOs and a couple of agency heads). The topic of discussion was customer engagement. We didn’t compare notes about how best to engage customers, though. Why? The group couldn’t get past the definition! There were as many definitions of customer engagement as there were dinner […] Read more »


Holy Troika!
There’s a holy troika for those of us with professional marketing careers: your customer, your company, and your self. They form a three-legged stool upon which everything that matters in your business and your career sits. Always come back to these three, and ask yourself: Are they being taken care of? Are things the best […] Read more »


When the Telltale Signs Can Lead You Astray
I just got off the boat from a three generation — father, son, and no, not the holy ghost, just me — sailing trip on the Long Island Sounds. Sailing tends to inspire deep reflection, as metaphors for life abound: the biggie being the reminder to focus on what we CAN control (the boat’s lines, […] Read more »


Eyes Wide Open, Wide Awake, Never Close Our Eyes: A Marketer’s Mantra?
Eyes Open. Wide Awake. Never Close Our Eyes. These are all names of popular songs on the hit charts today. But they also remind me of the roused and restless state marketers are in right now, and how they are dealing with the pressures of being a 21st century marketer. I was driving two teens […] Read more »


Perfection Gets in the Way of Effective
Marketers have been trained to get things “right” before the big reveal or launch. Best practices preached that we test our concepts with our audience until we receive minimal to no negative feedback. We agonized over getting the color on the ad campaign just right. We wrote and re-wrote copy until it was “perfect.” And […] Read more »


What You Focus on is What You Get. Really.
We marketers have slowly and unwittingly allowed ourselves to evade greatness. Because of all the market commotion, distractions and disruptions, many of us now tend to do a LOT of things in a mediocre way; we don’t do the super valuable things in the brilliant way we’re capable of, and in the manner our customers […] Read more »


Marketing is Dead?! Hah. Marketing Has Never Been More Alive!
You’d think marketers and those who study them were necrophiliacs, metaphorically speaking, of course. In the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen at least a handful of articles and posts using the title framework of “[BLANK] is dead.” Marketing is dead. The CMO is dead. Digital is dead. PR is dead. SEO is dead. Provocative […] Read more »


CMO tenure: Up, up and away!
The pity party is over for CMOs. While it’s still popular sport for CMOs to gather and complain about the short tenure of a CMO (urban legend puts it at an exaggerated 18 months), silently more and more CMOs have been staying on board longer and longer. The latest Spencer Stuart study shows that within […] Read more »


I Strive for “Marketing Moksha”! Say, what? Moksha??
People say the world “moksha” reminds them of “moxie” or “mojo.” My neighbor says he thinks of “milkshake.”  These are all good things, especially for marketers (except, of course, milkshakes – moderation is advised there). Moksha (pronounced MOKE-shah) is a Sanskrit term that means to liberate, release or free. You can think of it as […] Read more »