Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 91

3 Ways Dumb Phones Might Save Nokia

Last month Nokia quietly missed the opportunity of the decade.

It wasn’t easy to spot. Amidst all the news about the mega-implications of the Microsoft-Nokia merger this week, some critics are adding up the failures of two doomed brands while others see it as proof of Android’s projected growth. Just about every article looks at the deal through the lens of smartphone market share. There is only one financial question everyone is asking: who will dominate the smartphone market?

That might be th...

What 7 Masters Of Persuasion Can Teach You About Behavioral Marketing

This past weekend one of the first ever conferences onconsumer psychology and behavior focusing on marketing, sales and business strategyquietly took place in Stamford, Connecticut. Before the September craziness of business events and corporate summits … Behaviorcon was intentionally different. Created by best selling author Ramit Sethi and marketing and branding advisor Michael Fishman – the event brought together a renowned collection of marketing experts, academic researchers and entrepre...

36 Quick Tips And Examples Of Great Content Marketing

Last week a wonderful piece of curated content marketing advice from 36 experts was published in advance of the largest global event dedicated to content marketing – Content Marketing World (CMW) in Cleveland, Ohio on September 10th. To create this collaborative book, my friend Lee Odden and his team reached out to a group of speakers from CMW to gather their best content marketing tips in a single location. As I was reading through the collective advice from 36 very smart marketers, there we...

How To Position A Product Like Don Draper

The marketing team for Viagra doesn’t use email newsletters. You can probably guess why – but I have often thought for some time that anyone who can figure out a good marketing strategy for a product like that could probably promote anything. If that person existed in real life, he or she would probably resemble the character of Don Draper from the popular AMC show Mad Men about the wildly creative, alcoholic and chauvinistic advertising industry in the 1960s. In the pilot episode for the ent...

How To Write An Open Letter Like Jeff Bezos

The open letter is an art form that not enough companies have learned to use effectively.

This morning after the announcement that The Washington Post would be taken over by Amazon – one of the first commentary pieces to emerge was an open letter from Jeff Bezos to Amazon employees (published on The Washington Post website, of course).

In it, he shares: “The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners. We wi...

7 Ways To Get Marketing Agencies To Work Together In a Mega-Agency World

Today two of the biggest communications holding companies, Omnicom and Publicis, announced they will be merging to form the world’s largest advertising company. For anyone familiar with the common in-fighting among agencies for limited client budgets, one of the immediate concerns will be the challenges that these new found partners in this “merger of equals” will face in the coming months.

It will certainly take teamwork and the setting aside of egos – but more importantly, the merger is brin...

3 Strategic Ways To Use Hashtags For Marketing

In 2009 a candy brand launched a campaign that would scare marketers off from using Twitter for years.

Skittles decided to tap into the growing popularity of Twitter and engage their youth audience with an idea that probably seemed brilliant on a whiteboard. They replaced their usual brand homepage with an automated stream of Tweets from anyone who mentioned their brand name. It was unfiltered, bold, risky … and a huge failure. Predictably, their page was overtaken by social media pranksters w...

7 Tips To Win A Business Competition Or Pitch Contest

There’s a few things they don’t tell you about being on The Shark Tank.

One of them is that every pitch on the popular reality business TV show starts with a silent 10 second staring contest. I spent an afternoon talking to a former (winning) contestant from the show, and one of the the insights he shared was that the first moment you walk into “the tank” on the show is highly scripted. The cameras are rolling to capture that perfect one second facial expression that will be edited into the fi...

Content Curation: How To Use Content Marketing Without Being A Creator

There is a creation myth that we often hear when it comes to content marketing. It tells us that in order to provide value with the content we produce, we need to create answers to questions. We need to create continually updated events, articles, videos, or images. Create, create, create. But creation is hard. Not everyone is a great writer. No one is born with the ability for powerful photographic composition. And despite more and more tools making previously complex tasks like video editin...

Domino’s Proves You Can Simultaneously Have Great Advertising And Bad Marketing

Great advertising appeals to emotions. In the world of marketing pizza, this usually leads to some new “innovation” in pizza making that might induce cravings and cause people at home to pick up the phone and place an order for delivery. The formula is so time tested, that the latest series of ads from Pizza Hut follows the cliche perfectly … promising a new line of flat bread pizzas with “brick oven flavor” (odd since most Pizza Huts don’t actually have a brick oven).

For a few years now, Dom...