Wreathian

If you are going to mount a traditional advertising campaign, follow the rules completely. 1. Have panache. Assert some personality. Your company has one (hopefully), so what better way to show it than cleverly crafted advertising art? 2. Deliver your message. Enforce the brand image. Show the product. Make them want you. 3. Connect with the audience. Show it at the right time, in the right place. Make sure it is seen by the right people and that it is designed to impact them. No denture ads with buxom young models during Saturday morning cartoons. 4. Follow up. Have a plan to involve your new, interested, taking-time-out-of-my-day-to-wander-around-your-website prospect. Really good offers, thoughtful partnerships, or a payoff are particularly effective here. All that being said, congratulations to J. C. Penney for their campaign during the MTV Video Music Awards . It exuded persona, showed they can be hip, had interesting and alluring commercials, and was well integrat...

Check out this great article about why manuals should be more like the brochures that have the customers reading the instructions in the first place.

The Sports Authority, nationwide retailer of everything athletic, has horrible artistic and symbolic judgment. On the doors when exiting their stores are photos of a catcher tagging a runner at home plate. Over the photo is a balloon with the words "Thank You!". Directly above the photos are those generic "Out" signs with the green circle and the arrow. Get it? "You're out!". Thank you for being out? Goodbye! Leave! Could you hurry, there is a line! Surely, most people would prefer to be "Safe!". At the least, they want nothing to do with being congratulated for being out. Some smarmy retail environment genius probably had a great idea on the drawing board but it lacks thoughfulness and consideration for the customers' frame of mind - not to mention that the marketer was probably clueless about the out sign above his clever graphic. All the positive merchandising and astute customer service so well crafted and trained into ever...

Richard Feynman , populist physicist, Nobel Prize winner, and contributor to the atomic bomb, used to be fond of telling a story about helping out a friend in the psychology department at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology . His friend was conducting behavioral experiments with rats. She had set up a corridor with several doors on each side. On one side, the rats would be let into the corridor. On the other side, there would be food behind one of the doors. She wished to see if the rats could be trained to go in the third door to the right every time, with or without the reward of food and regardless of the door at which they began. The rats would immediately go to the door where they had found food the time before. Which door they had started from or how many doors away it was appeared to be meaningless. Making the realization that there had to be some clue instructing the rats toward the door concealing the food, she decided to meticulously paint each of the doors to be...

You need to be a leader. You need to rise up and assert your vision of yourself, your world, and those around you. And if it is a good enough assertion, people will follow you toward your vision. Along the way, those who are uncomfortable or incapable will fall away and other passionate and adept people will materialize to fill in the voids. You will become the head of a momentum that moves your vision into the white hot spotlight of realization. It is your determination which will propel you into success.

Ever wonder what the rest of the world (or at least the internet) finds interesting, relevant, or topical? Now you can find out in real time. (Suggestion: Bookmark the site and look at it for a few days in a row.)

When you come into (or more accurately, are brought into) the booking room at the Orange County Sheriff's Department, there is a prominent sign in front of the administrative officer's desk. It reads... "THIS IS THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE." Sometimes it takes a big, shocking event to catalyze positive change. It is usually uncomfortable and almost always full of unknown outcomes. Fear and uncertainty will abound. All that apprehension does not mean change should be avoided, because until change comes, the problem will still exist - whether it is locked securely in the closet or is traipsing unyieldingly around the office. Of course, winding up in the Orange County Sheriff's Department may be too big of a change....