I knew I had to buy a copy as soon as I saw it on the magazine stand: the issue of Time Magazine with Presidential temperament as the front cover story.  They even had four presidential faces on the cover, which, before examining them, made me think of previous explanations of temperament using the Four Presidents on Mt Rushmore:

Dutiful George Washington for Sensing-Judging / Methodicals Philosophical Thomas Jefferson for iNtuitive-Thinking / Competitives Rambunctious Teddy Roosevelt for Sensing-Perceiving / Spontaneous Idealistic…

...continue to read "Presidential Candidates, Temperament & Website Copy?"

The financial crisis is here. It’s not a matter of if it will affect you and your company, only a matter of when and how much. Clients and friends are checking in with varying reports, some are watching their growth plateau, others are watching sales trend downward.

Overall, conversion rates are starting to trend downward.

Almost everyone I speak with is looking for areas to cut expenses in and approaching spending from a more frugal mindset. Some are beginning to make drastic…

...continue to read "Online Marketers Can Weather the Financial Crisis"

Jenny Craig has just announced their new celebrity spokesperson, and they haven’t disappointed me. But they did throw me for a loop.

Remember a few weeks back, when I wrote about the perceived marketing strategy for the Jenny Craig weight loss centers? At the time, I ruminated over the possibility that the marketing and advertising execs at Jenny Craig were either consciously or unconsciously using personas to drive the success of their celebrity spokespeople campaigns. (To read the original post, traverse…

...continue to read "Jenny Craig Does Me Proud… and Throws Me a Curveball"

Yesterday Susan Greene wrote this comment to my previous post:

Great video, great message.  Now imagine that the guy in the suit worked for a corporation, and his boss asked him to come up with the words for the beggar’s sign. 
 His sentence would have been made into a paragraph by Corporate, watered down by Legal, and politically corrected by Human Resources.  I’m thinking it would be a completely different message by then. 
 Uh oh, I think my cynicism is showing again.…

...continue to read "Do you share Susan’s Cynicism?"

With annual revenues for the weight-loss industry estimated at $60 billion a year, competition is fierce. Food-based programs like Nutri-System and Weight Watchers account for hundreds of millions of dollars, so getting the right message across to potential customers is critical.

While other companies have featured real-life success stories in their advertising, Jenny Craig has chosen another route: the celebrity spokesperson. While I’m not a big proponent of celebrities as an effective marketing tool, Jenny Craig has applied the use of…

...continue to read "How Jenny Craig Uses Personas for Successful Marketing"

If you were to walk through the offices of FutureNow, you would get a sense that while we were in college any one of us could have been cast in the movie Revenge of the Nerds. A few of us got made fun of for being socially-awkward “bookworms.”

While it may not make you popular with cool kids, fancy book reading does have its benefits. So I couldn’t help but laugh when I read about a new study published in the…

...continue to read "Harry Potter and the Secret of Conversion"

What’s hot and exciting in customer research? A neurological breakthrough? A fancy new psychological tool? Nope - Analyzing text. That’s right - analyzing what people say.

A recent Advertising Age article, What All That Chatter Is Really Saying, talks about how text analytics can turn customer feedback into more meaningful insight.

Today it is marketers who are increasingly turning to text analytics to mine information from the mountains of customer data they’ve accrued from customer-service surveys, e-mails, online forums, hosted feedback sites…

...continue to read "New Customer Insight Using Oldest Form of Communication"

Dave Young’s post about Microsoft’s “Inspiration, anyone?” video, and your comments, inspired a few thoughts about how to get a proper return on investment with viral videos.

Viral videos are, by nature, non-targetable. The message can be targeted, but the delivery is meant to spread in an out-of-control and, well, viral manner. But that’s OK since optimizing the message (e.g., with persona-based messaging) is usually far more effective than trying to control who actually ends up seeing your viral video.

We also…

...continue to read "3 Things Viral Videos Must Do to Make Money"

Bryan Eisenberg did a fabulous post on how to get buy-in for conversion rate optimization. It’s a must read for anyone who is trying to get their company or client to do optimization testing.

I’ve heard from some folks who got initial buy-in, but whose companies quickly lost the stomach for testing. They ran some tests that did well, but they ran some tests that actually hurt conversion. The tests that hurt conversion are especially painful for smaller companies, where that…

...continue to read "Give Yourself a Winning Chance with Testing"

What ever happened to “You”?

You were on a roll. Just two years ago, You were Time magazine’s person of the year. When Web 2.0 changed everything, You were there. You did it. You turned the Web into the “interactive” medium we always knew it could be.

You changed the rules. You took control.

So what happened? Lately, it seems that marketing and advertising executives are either blind optimists or furrow-browed skeptics about social media marketing. Are we — the marketers, the bloggers,…

...continue to read "How to Avoid Marketing to Yourself"