The blog.

Lazy, incompetent marketers have less places to hide.

As a sculptor removes the superfluous, your marketing must remove the unnecessary in order to reach your target audience. Keep your messaging short, sharp and to the point.

People like watching moving pictures more than static ones.

The fact remains: your industry and customer expectations will change. You can either lead that change, or follow it.

Your text-only website was fine five years ago. But today, customers expect more.

How you present something is at least as important as what you present.

Seth Godin’s “Permission Marketing” was ahead of its time.

There has to be buy-in at every company level in order for any marketing initiative to truly work.

Your in-house marketer is great at social media, but their web design chops aren’t all that? That’s perfectly normal.

If you don’t have a marketing budget, you don’t have a marketing plan. Which means you’re going to fail.

Customers will resist marketing sales and messages that do not resonate with their own way of thinking.

If all you have to go on is your pricing being lower, you’re on a one-way ticket to irrelevance.

Dear Middle-Managers: Stop being part of the problem.

Blasting messaging without a clear content marketing strategy is doomed to failure.

Are you selling price, or customer value?

The reason your PowerPoint sucks is because you’re expecting the software to do your work for you.

If conventional marketing is dead, it actually died a long time ago.

If you’re marketing this decade like you marketed the last decade, you will most likely be disappointed with your results.

Think you control your brand? Think again.

Business process outsourcing hasn’t just changed the way companies of all sizes operate and deliver their business value. Its presence can be felt in pretty much every level and department.

Don’t be afraid, or in denial, about your business competitors. You know they exist, so do your customers. So stop pretending.

Selling to new customers is great. But selling to existing customers is easier and cheaper.

Marketing without targeting is like a broken pencil: pointless.

Customers are looking at every touchpoint they see of your business – and judging you accordingly.

Know your market. Existing customers need different collateral to new ones.

Customers like to categorize brands in order to make sense of them. That can restrict your offering.

Every industry has their unique set of external influences that govern the validity of your business value. Make you that you know the factors that influence your business – and keep an eye on where they’re heading.

Integrating video into your sales and marketing messaging, collateral and customer engagement activities is taking on ever-greater importance. Video captivates audience attention far better than text and/or images alone, and also helps differentiate your company.

Customers don’t always know what they want. That’s your job.

Promotion often means rising to the level of incompetence.

Underestimating the value of creativity in your business sets you on the road to becoming seen as a commodity.

If your business isn’t innovating, it’s going backwards.

Some thoughts on Microsoft’s latest ad campaign.

The birth of a new product segment – and its soon-to-be rapid, untimely death.

Customers find your business in a variety of ways, via numerous channels. It’s important to be where they expect to find you – as well as not in places where you’re not welcome.

If your company occupies a space that could conceivably be embraced by your current customer base, then why should they continue to buy from you?

When you have the gall to charge an extra $500 delivery on a $30,000 automobile purchase, the only thing the customer remembers is the insult of having to pay the hidden extra.

Are you being too extravagant in your textual messaging? Just the facts, ma’am.

Even once the economy bounces back, we’re not going back to ‘the good old days’. The climate will be different. Customers will be different, so business will need to be different.

If you’re sending holiday cards out by email, you’re totally missing the point.

Your business needs to stand out. It needs to shout about how great it is. If it doesn’t, don’t expect anyone else to.

Exhibiting at a tradeshow can be a very effective sales tool. But today, so can many other things.

Blogging isn’t dying. But the quality and depth of blog articles must increase, in the light of increased competition for reader attention.