Category Archives: Marketing

Creativity Thoughts from my Tweets

Creativity thoughts from my tweets

Creativity starts with having fun trying to meet a real need.

Thinking of others improves creativity since usually it benefits others or society.

Creativity peaks in the morning when fresh, in the shower, out for a run or a walk in a new place. Complaining keeps us from moving forward, but Use adversity to stimulate creativity.

Creative people guard their time, sometimes say no to new projects.

Seeing patterns and making connections lead to insights and ideas.

Negative thoughts impair creativity, but sometimes the negative tension can urge us on to a new creative solution.

Creativity is thinking up new things.

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People Purchase on Emotion

Feelings speak loader than thoughts and reasonings….so its not the product that is better, but the one that feels the best. Even comparison charts help in sales, but understand then the user pulls out the credit card for a purchase, it was most of the time where the emotions have dictated.

 

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Technical Books that have helped me…

Here is a list of books, at least have helped me in creativity, leadership and marketing:

  • Creativity, Inc by Ed Catmull (Pixar story)
  • Good to Great by Jim Collins
  • The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs by Carmine Gallo
  • Win by Frank Luntz
  • Blue Ocean Strategy
  • Only the Paranoid Survive – Andy Grove
  • EntreLeadership by Dave Ramsey
  • The Steve Jobs Way by Jay Elliot
  • Emotional Design by Donald Norman
  • The Essential Drucker by Peter Drucker
  • Jack Welch and the 4E’s of LEADERSHIP by Jeffrey Krames

Here is a full list including ones from my current research project.

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Programming and Marketing

Programming is all about logic and mathematics.  Marketing is all about ‘feelings’, it just has to feel right to sell.  So use ‘logic’ to design and build a product that ‘feels right’ so it will sell.  Marketing and branding is all about connecting to users emotions. In branding how it is worded and how it looks is BIG.

Beauty helps us in creativity

Beauty helps us in creativity

Its all in the Feelings

Just a little tip from Steve Jobs:  People usually forget what you say, but remember how they “feel” when you said or presented something. What is the lasting impression of your marketing campaign.  What do they remember in 2 weeks, what do they “feel” about it in 4 weeks.

Build a New Technology Company

My quick thoughts:

It is hard for an east coast culture to build a billion dollar tech company. (but not impossible)   They think too much financial and not what would users want and fun to build.

Some people are great managers, but don’t know how to take a company to the next level.  We all have our place.

Like Steve Jobs, in marketing use 5th to 6th grade language with three simple points.  In many campaigns one has only about 2-4 seconds to capture attention. People make purchase decisions based on EMOTION, not logic. So how does the campaign “FEEL“.

Priest Lake, Idaho

Priest Lake, Idaho

 

The “Gut” Feeling – What is This?

Many top CEO’s from General Electric to Walmart to Army generals have these “gut” feelings about things, sometimes called “seeing around the corner”.  Is it real or fake.  Most of the time they seem correct in hindsight. I understand that psychologists have studied this and came to the conclusion that the sub-conscious brain is looking at trends, data, past history, competition, user complaints and finances and coming up with certain predictions.  It usually comes as a feeling, but if ones takes time to think about it the data is also available.

For example a CEO may say:  “that marketing campaign is wrong”, maybe a correct feeling, but why. Maybe it does not connect with users, too wordy, wrong words or just boring.

Here is a reference: When to trust your gut feeling by Jack Welch (General Electric)

Also look at these quotes from BrainyQuote.

Why are you doing the wrong analysis

Sometimes when we are building a generic platform we make the mistake of spending too much time analyzing a single product.  We want to know how an article, title or product did so we can decide if we should do more of the same on the platform.

 

But remember in establishing a platform many items need to be added so:

1.  users can get almost anything, so they come back looking for more of anything.

2.  the “long tail” effect works.

3.  we get lots of search traffic (Google SEO) from many items that draws in many possible users and customers.

 

Yes, but what we promote in marketing could use some analysis, but not necessarily what we put on the platform.  This assumes the cost of a product, article or title is low.