creative

Fabulous!

Revlon reminescence

What marketers sell is hope.

By Seth Godin.

bad bosses' classes

I'm now in reading deeply to compensate the reality imperfet conditions by ideas of how grat this reality can be and what should i do to change it. This is very much aboout Covi's book. And from ChangingMinds I've got a good article.

1. A bad boss can be a walking textbook on behavioral psychology. Working with a bad boss is your golden chance to learn the "do's and don'ts" of management. In all probability you can learn more about people management working with a bad boss in six months time than working with a good boss for five years.
2. Bad bosses help you learn harsh realities of human nature and make you better prepared in life's countless encounters. You swim better when you learn swimming in a rough river or sea, rather than in a calm swimming pool.
3. Every growl, rude remark, goof up, threat, cover up, charm switching, etc., can be a good lesson that is going to pay rich dividends to you at a later stage. They help you become a better manager at a later stage, because you will now have a rich experience in the pitfalls of bad management. It helps you to instantly remember and avoid the wrong things when faced with similar or equivalent situations.
4. And bad bosses help you in many other ways if you study their lives carefully. For example, it will help you understand how and why many employees erupt like a volcano at home due to work related problems.
5. Worldwide many ordinary people have become great leaders because they were subject to various degrees of insults or extreme forms of harassment by someone. So, directly or indirectly, every great leader will have to thank their tormentors for their current greatness. Similarly it can also perhaps make you great someday.

This is more self-comforting. I prohibited myself to complain about the work situation until I do the most I can. And the goal is to implement all my projects to be proud when leaving for a better company or for my own business.

I really like the straihtforward message of the song.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTFNPHb71Z4

consistency

People have a deep need for consistency, and when they do something they need to have consistency and alignment between their actions and their beliefs. When there is inconsistency, they must either change what they are doing or what they belief in order to restore consistency. If they have already started doing something, then they cannot change what has been done, so they must change what they believe, particularly 'Why I am doing this'.

Source

advice vs implementation

I can see the same pattern in behavior of any business that seeks for a consultant advice - they all whant to know what to do and they all want to do nothing with that.

Consultancy companies provide the solution - implementation part is up to the client. And the very implrementation part makes the difference between a successful company and a loser.

Well, I vote for implementation. Still having the consultant career in mind.

Sequence

Normal: Product - Promotion
If you want to include a product into catalogue, first ensure that you know the product, the supplier, the terms.

Preverse: Promotion - Product.
A company decides to act like others and includes first positions into catalogue without thinking out the supplier and terms. Result - a holy crap for communication dept to find pics, and then for buying dept to find this f#$king supplier... In the end clients want the damned product and the company still doesn't have it.

The preverse scheme occures when the CEO wants something to be included and other depts (sales, buyers) don't want to loose their time for preparation. When a smart decision comes - to make a last step to push others to act.

As to me I hate this reverse logic. Especially when I'm the last step executor.

Seth Godin on expensive logos:

I guess the punchline is: take the time and money and effort you'd put into an expensive logo and put them into creating a product and experience and story that people remember instead.

Key lessons for marketing in a recession

Coachie has written a list of notes from a report "Key lessons for marketing in a recession".

I can't say I agree in full, there are some typical marketing self-esteem lies to approve marketing existence. But for sure I agree that companies which cut marketing budgets are long term marketing losers. It was always easier and cheaper to maintain customer relationship rather than building them from scratch.

And of course, crisis is a great time to search for an opportunity and to use new alternative media which is cheaper than traditional one.

crisis behavior strategy

It's almost official - we're in crisis. At least now we can feel it by reconsidering payment periods for our clients, managing cashflows and thinking out our future possibilities in terms of both personal salaries and marketing budgets.

Now we have several possible behavioral patterns.
1. Making efforts to act if there's no crisis at all. Painfull and we're not sure if we have enough resources.
2. Doing nothing hoping to survive somehow until better time.
3. Reconsider our marketing policy, take our time to create all we can create by ourselves, communicate with our clients, choose strategy to do our best in terms of maket activity without spending much money - and get it all when economics gets out of recession.

We can use low-cost marketing still to ensure our clients to get enough attention.
We do.