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March 27, 2008
I remember listening to a Zig Ziglar tape (yes, this was a while ago, college perhaps...~10 years ago) where he brought up the terms "automobile university". I've never forgotten that term and as I'm speaking to more and more diverse groups of marketers who tell me that they 'simply don't have time to read', I'm inclined to recommend that they too enroll in Automobile University.
Motivational speaker Zig Ziglar coined the term "Automobile University" to describe how time spent in traffic can be used to educate yourself on a variety of subjects. Using audiobooks in your car is a great way to learn almost anything from finance to philosophy, literature to languages. In a year, the average driver can learn about as much as a college student attending a year's worth of classes.
What's that, you ask? Well, if you're looking for the how-to, you can certainly read this super-helpful piece in e-how. Although, I think that by stating books on CD or podcasts and books on iPod are the likely the best learning devices for time-starved marketers and that listening to any of these in your car on the way to work, to a client or in the airport/on the plane is the best way to keep up on what's new in marketing.
The next question I get is "what should I be listening to?" Well, here's a few ideas:
1. Why don't more marketing authors release their books as audiobooks? Now, I'm not sure about the market dynamics of this (perhaps it's cost prohibitive?) but when you look for books with "Marketing" in the title in the audiobooks section of iTunes, you find only 39 titles. So, that's one place to start. Now, not every great marketing book has "marketing" in the title, but look at that list of books you should read that you've been sitting on for a while and see if you can't find a few of those in iTunes and download them.
2. There are GREAT marketing podcasts out there. There are over 200 podcasts on iTunes that are some how related to marketing, business or PR. You can only choose a few and still keep up a sane listening schedule. Here are a few good ones:
.....Joseph Jaffe's podcast
.....Duct Tape Marketing with John Jantsch
.....any of the other 200 or so podcasts in iTunes that trip your fancy
3. The AMA Marketing Matters Live radio show and podcasts. Great guests, a great host and solid interviews. Always timely and always helpful. A must listen!
August 7, 2006
Hey folks, I'm looking for some help on a project that I'm kicking off in a couple of weeks.
I'm going to do a series of 50 posts on the "50 greatest thinkers in modern marketing" By modern marketing, I mean in the last 40 years...give or take. I want the list to encompass folks like Ted Levitt who wrote Marketing Myopia in 1960, to modern-day word-of-mouth marketing mavens like Jackie Huba and Ben McConnell.
Please pass this post around and leave your favorites in the comments section. Oh, and teams of marketers like Peppers & Rogers and Huba & McConnell will likely be considered as a 'team' as separating them takes too much away from the list, while listing them separately doesn't give the whole picture.
The purpose of this is to something similar to the Personal MBA but for marketers. As a sponge for everything marketing, I figured this was a good project to take on to help share the best marketing knowledge and wisdom written over the past four decades.
The take away from this list will be a solid resource for current and up-and-coming marketers to sink their teeth into to get the best that the field has to offer!
The posts & profiles on the marketers will include some of the following:
- Links to major published works
- Long standing or impactful ideas that they've espoused that have stood the test of time
- Google mentions, Technorati mentions and their presence in the blogosphere
- What they're doing now (such as retired academics who've gone dark...)
- The key points that all new marketers should know about how they contributed to the profession
- References to their work in Wikipedia
Thanks to those who can lend their help on this project.
Just for starters, here's a few names to throw out:
- Ted Levitt, Marketing Myopia
- Richard Branson, audacious stunts & brave marketing plans
- Mark Granovetter, Strength of weak ties & social network theory (huge impacts in marketing today)
- Jay Conrad Levinson, Guerrilla marketing
- Martha Rogers & Don Peppers, Return on Customer, one-to-one marketing
- Everett M. Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (huge in tech marketing strategy)
- Robert G. Cooper, the father of modern product management & marketing
- Jagdish Sheth, one of the earliest thinkers on Relationship Marketing and a leader in consumer behavior research
- Seth Godin, permission marketing, among other things
- Philip Kotler, author of many of the current ideologies in modern marketing
- Dr. Walter Carl, leading authority on modern word of mouth marketing thinking
- Jackie Huba & Ben McConnell, authors and leading authors on customer evangelism
- Steve Rubel, high profile blogger and innovator at the crossroads of new media & public relations
Who are YOUR greatest marketing thinkers? We've go a lot of ground to cover. Research, CRM, channel marketing, sales & promotional mix, advertising, etc...
June 28, 2006
The July issue of Business 2.0 (not yet on the web) has an article on how Gamal Aziz of the MGM Grand in Las Vegas is reinventing the property for maximum profitability. I think his idea on working backward was worth the price of my B2.0 subscription for the month...
Aziz's secret is a counterintuitive management practice - nicknamed "working backward" - that he invented on his arrival at the Grand. The strategy breaks down an operation into constituent parts, then calculates the maximum potential revenue that each business or space could generate in a perfect world - that is, if every customer spent the most the market could bear and if traffic reached its physical limits. Aziz then subtracts the actual sales from the hypothetical number and calls the difference a loss, even if the venue is making money.
His strategy is paying off. His projects featured in the magazine have all seen revenue improvements ranging from a 40% increase all the way to a 786% increase.
Think of the implications of applying this to your website properties, including RSS feeds, email newsletters and other potential revenue generating real estate. Is the real estate on your site generating max revenue? If you were to break down each section and extrapolate it's full potential from ideal figures, how much money are you leaving on the table?
March 2008 (1) August 2006 (1) June 2006 (2) February 2006 (1) October 2005 (2)