How to Determine Whether You Have a Winner or a Loser Before You Invest a Dime in Product Development
by Dominic Wright
In this article, I am going to show you how to precisely determine if your campaign will be a success before you invest any money in the development of your new product. And exactly how much profit you should expect … precise up to one decimal point.

Six Bull Riding Lessons For Businesses
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
What does bull riding have to do with business?  The most dangerous and probably most popular rodeo event, bull riding is an exhibition event designed to demonstrate the cowboy's prowess and ultimate superiority.  As any bull rider knows it takes mental toughness to outsmart the bull. This article outlines six fundamental steps deployed by bull riders that any company can apply to improve their success in today’s dynamic environment that can make all the difference in whether a business" stays in the money" or “lands in the mud.”

Message to Marketers: Get Real!
by Claire Ratushny
Strong brand managers anticipate where the marketplace is headed. More easily said than done these days, isn’t it? Recent events have set off a chain reaction of unprecedented economic downturns all at once. Still, the consumer is delivering a clear message that should clue us all in, but is it being heard? Maybe there’s a way to become more proactive now that the initial recessionary shock wave has been absorbed.

There is A DEVIL in Your Advertisement
by Dominic Wright
"Only a devil can suck money out of your wallet every time you try to make some... each time you publish your ads." Dominic Wright reveals closely-guarded insider information of the most successful, most respected and the richest entrepreneurs on how to make your advertisement wickedly-effective. Find out one major strategic shift that will enable you to turn ads that suck into ads that rock. Starting today.

Bolster Revenue with Win/Loss Analysis
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
In today’s environment something any company can do to bolster revenue efforts but many fail to do is conducting win/loss analysis.  When done well, win/loss analysis provides clarity and insights into customers’ perceptions, experience, and expectations and contributes to product development, marketing, and sales strategies and initiatives.  This article explains the value of win/loss analysis and the steps associated with conducting win/loss analysis as way for any organization to improve its competitive advantage.

Four Processes to Supercharge your Marketing Organization’s Performance
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
As the chief executive officer for your company, you play a critical role in changing the way your marketing organization manages and measures its performance.  A focus on marketing performance and the rigorous assessment and measurement of marketing investments impacts your company’s ability to achieve its business results.   This article outlines four processes any organization can deploy to supercharge marketing performance.

Benchmarking to Improve Marketing Performance
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
Nearly every CEO we’ve worked with is interested in improving his/her organization’s performance in two key areas:  effectiveness (the ability to produce the desired result) and efficiency (reducing waste). The economic environment makes these efforts even more top of mind. This article explores the value of benchmarking, identifies marketing capabilities and processes that can be benchmarked, and outlines the five phases associated with a successful benchmarking initiative.

Pre-thinking Recycling: the New Eco-Consciousness
by Claire Ratushny
A new consumer trend has been slowly evolving and it’s one that companies and their marketers should take note of. Especially since it seems to be trending, and all indications given the shift in consumer mindset is that it’s here to stay. This new trend has been dubbed “precycling” in some quarters. That’s because it’s all about “pre-thinking recycling”.

Embracing Sustainability to Boost Sales and Increase Loyalty
by Laura Patterson and Jay Thabet
Sustainability.  Green. Environmentally-friendly.  Whatever we call it, it is top of mind.  This article identifies eight steps a company should take to make sure its “green’ efforts are successful in terms of increased sales and customer loyalty.  The article recommends metrics associated with these two business outcomes that will help a company monitor whether their sustainability efforts are paying off.

Tune Your Marketing Organization for Peak Performance
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
For the corporate leadership team, especially the CEO, the rubber hits the road when it comes to achieving performance targets.  This is why performance management is so important to the CEO and leadership team. Without performance management, the organization will not understand how success is measured.  The time is right to apply performance management to marketing.  This article offers insights and suggestions for how the CEO can tune the marketing organization for peak performance. 

The Role of Values in Marketing
by Dr. Katalin Eibel-Spanyi
A deeper understanding of personal values enables marketers to craft key messages that reflect what customers’ value and position these messages in their advertising, product packaging, Web sites and blogs. This can assist in making the right emotional connections at each ‘moment of truth’ – the key points of interaction with your customers.

CEO as the Top Data Dog
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
Fact-based decision making enables a company to shift from intuition and emotion driven decisions to data-driven decisions. By deploying a systematic approach to data and data analysis, the CEO and the leadership team can acquire the necessary information and insights needed to understand the challenges and opportunities facing a business and use these insights to enhance decision making and set a course of action.

Can Short-Term Brand "Candidate Obama" Transform Successfully into Long-Term Brand "President Obama?"
by Dr. Dan Herman
A spate of articles about the Obama brand have, in my view as an expert on marketing, neglected the brand's strategy and focused its verbal or visual expressions. But far more important is the distinction between the short-term brand, "Candidate Obama," and the long-term brand, "President Obama." To win against Senator McCain, Obama will have to more distinctly shape the "President Obama" brand as well as its promise to Americans in a strongly persuasive manner. 

Marketing Today - Electrifying is the New Satisfying!
by Dr. Dan Herman
Electrifying Marketing is the new marketing philosophy I want to offer you. Its roots stem from the realization that marketing today is no longer about satisfying unsatisfied needs. More often than not, it is about re-satisfying already satisfied needs - with better, more exciting solutions.

Every Blue Ocean will Eventually Turn Red; Create an Unfair Advantage Instead
by Dr. Dan Herman
Once your Blue Ocean Strategy works, sooner or later someone will copy or even improve your already successful model, and your ocean will become red again. The critical question is: what can be done which is immune from imitations? Apparently the principle is simple. Introducing the Unfair Advantage.

Marketing’s New Imperative – Engagement
by Laura Patterson
As products become more commoditized, switching costs decrease, and differentiation based on product features becomes more difficult, companies are exploring how to use customer engagement as a competitive advantage.  This article defines customer engagement, outlines three steps for creating engagement, and offers six elements that should comprise the foundation for measuring customer engagement.

Test Yourself: Are You An MBA Clone?
by Dr. Dan Herman
Standardization in MBA programs results in a similarity in the professional approach and managerial thinking of their graduates. Thus, many executives today turn into "MBA clones." In our hyper-competitive markets, MBA clones pose an imminent and tangible threat to the competitiveness of the companies they work for. What about you? Do you have the symptoms?

Dr. Herman's 10 "De-clone Yourself" Tips for MBA Clones
by Dr. Dan Herman
Are you an MBA Clone? I challenge you to read my article titled: "Test Yourself: Are You an MBA Clone?". Take the short test and find out if you are an MBA Clone. If you've been diagnosed as one, I strongly suggest that you consider de-cloning, ASAP. De-cloning is possible, painless and very lucrative.

Marketing's Critical Role in Pipeline Growth
by Laura Patterson
Today's big challenge is to reduce the ever-increasing length of the sales cycle. As the length of the sales cycle increases, so does the demand for a larger pipeline. Marketing plays a critical role in contributing to the pipeline. This article outlines four steps marketing organizations can take to effectively and efficiently contribute to pipeline performance and the generation of revenue.

Ten Marketing Measurement Questions Every CEO Should Ask
by Laura Patterson, President, VisionEdge Marketing
Marketing has a better chance of success when the CEO takes a role in insuring that the marketing function is aligned with the overall direction of the company. This article explores the role the CEO plays in the establishing the success factors and metrics for marketing and provides 10 questions CEOs should ask their marketing leadership.

The Difference That Makes the Difference!
by Rick Sidorowicz
Jeffrey Fox has written many excellent books and his “How to Become a Marketing Superstar” is one of my all time favourites. This is a quick study that every CEO should read before every single marketing presentation from this day forward. And if you’re in marketing making those presentations, you should read it weekly and then once again before you present anything to your CEO, especially if she’s read it lately.

Making Demand Generation Measure Up
by Laura Patterson, VisionEdge Marketing
Marketing must design demand generation initiatives that help businesses attract better customers. This article offers five immediate steps any company can take to improve its demand generation prowess and suggests marketing metrics that should be monitored to ensure demand generation programs measure up.

Product Portfolio Management
by Laura Patterson
When implemented effectively, product portfolio management improves organizational alignment and performance, reduces waste, and improves customer satisfaction and loyalty. Product portfolio management gives the leadership team valuable insight into how existing and new products are positioned to increase their company’s revenue.

Applying Six Sigma to Marketing to Grow Revenue
by Laura Patterson
By applying Six Sigma to marketing, you can develop an efficient marketing workflow, identify leading indicators of growth and become proactive about performance improvement. Six Sigma provides both a methodology for process improvement and a way for marketing to prove its value.

Improve Marketing and Sales Alignment and Your Company's Revenue
by Laura Patterson
This article explores how to integrate the traditional sales funnel with the customer buying process to create customer-centric opportunity management, improve marketing and sales alignment, and ultimately your company's revenue.

Marketing's Pivotal Role in Innovation
by Laura Patterson
The ability to develop products and services that offer fresh ideas and are relevant to customers is no easy task. This article explores the role marketing plays in innovation and how marketing can lead the innovation charge.

CABs and TABs: Market Research Vehicles Ideal for Every CEO
by Laura Patterson
How to create customer and technical advisory boards - CABs and TABs. These boards, can provide the necessary insight into broader issues and critical forces affecting the market.

The Marketing Hits' Formula
by Dan Herman Ph.D.
The Marketing Hits' Formula and its implementation method allows for marketing innovation that will be accepted with immediate enthusiasm by the target consumers and will spread virally.

Breaking Through at Retail with “Pizzazz”
by Gary Grossman
Smart marketers are learning to start the product development process with the consumer’s viewpoint. They use their understanding of what consumers need and want but can’t get, to help guide design strategies.

The New Market Segmentation
by Dan Herman Ph.D.
According to the conventional segmenting method, people in each segment should differ - to some extent - from the people in the other segments. I'm convinced that you have already found out that it does not work. Here is what does.

Boomer Insights
by Cheryl Swanson
Marketing to boomers - don't treat them as old; and they're downsizing for a fuller life.

"Perplexity Poll" Reveals American Consumers Befuddled by Business Documents
from Siegel & Gale
Confusing information leads to the deterioration of customer relationships, reduced brand loyalty and potential health problems.

About Marketing Creativity
Q&A Session with Drew Neisser
Marketing competes with every creative thing in the communications universe simultaneously, not just other ads or other TV or print, but every divertissement imaginable.

Auto Pilot
by Drew Neisser
You know you've been in marketing too long when you are disappointed by its absence. But that's exactly what happened at the recent New York Auto Show that rolled into town with much fanfare attracting well over a million New York area tire kickers.

Marketing’s Altered States
by Cheryl Swanson
Trends for the projectable future reunite us with the myths and fantasies from which we’ve become disconnected in our sleep-deprived “Survival of the Fastest” era.

A Conversation with Mary Lou Quinlan, Author of Just Ask a Woman
from Mark Fortier
The founder and CEO of the premier consultancy dedicated to women's marketing, Quinlan has personally interviewed 3,000 women -- uncovering profound and enlightening truths that can't be learned from traditional research.

Lost in Transition
by Drew Neisser
Prestige brands risk getting lost in transition, hanging onto traditional marketing approaches while their younger target leaves them behind.

Retailing in the 21st Century
by Pam Danziger
It's not about selling more "things" but delivering a shopping experience.

Hispanic Advertising Trends
by Luis Garcia
Marketers will increase their hunger for Hispanic insights and community outreach, and lifestyle will begin to set the trend of what's to come for Latinos in advertising.

Gender Blending, Marketing to the “New” Man
by Cheryl Swanson
Inherent is an aesthetic that blends both the “linearity” and “logic” of masculinity with the organic, fluid forms and brightness of femininity, for a truly human aesthetic.

The Faithful Marriage of Guerrilla and Online Marketing
by Drew Neisser
In successful marriages, each partner carries their own weight complementing the other while bringing something unique to the table.

Holiday Trends Predictions
by Robert Passikoff
Despite a less than stellar economy, consumers indicated that they intended to spend more this year than they did last year.

Ten Retail Tactics to Guarantee a Great Holiday "Gifting" Season
by Pam Danziger
As retailers finalize plans for their most important selling season, holiday gift shopping will play an even more important role as retailers work to make up for the year's weak first and second quarters.

The "Liberteens"
by Nicki Gondell
Forecast to be the largest, most influential group in history, eclipsing even the Boomers by 30%, generation Y has been the subject of numerous studies and much conjecture. We recently looked at this group as an emerging market for a major consumer electronics manufacturer.

Market for Self-Actualization: The Ultimate Luxury
by Pam Danziger
We need to view our product offerings through a new lens, to see beyond the physical manifestation of our goods to the metaphysical meaning that our goods embody for the consumer.

Face-to-Face, One-to-One Marketing and Hispanics
by Luis Garcia
What does it mean when someone tells you Hispanics are a "relationship marketing" population? If your current Hispanic marketing program does not include a relationship marketing component, you might want to have a little face-to-face with your ad agency.

Five Things About the Hispanic Market
by Luis Garcia
Hispanics are what has traditionally been considered a "niche" or minority population, but with some 36 million people, they account for 13% of the U.S. population. (One must wonder if the term "niche" market still applies).

Drop in Consumer Spending on Home Furnishings Signals Cocooning's Demise
from Unity Marketing
Capping a year of anemic performance in the home furnishings industry in 2001, American consumers are sending a clear message that continued heavy spending on their home is no longer a priority.

Bubbling Hubris
by Robert Passikof
Coming soon: your brand advertised on Coca-Cola bottles!

You Spent How Much!
by Robert Passikoff
Another inquiry into whether Super Bowl commercials are worth the expense?

Today's Jewelry Market
by Pam Danziger
To grow sales jewelry companies must reach out to the self-purchasing woman and meet her in shopping venues where she is inclined to think about buying jewelry.

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