Rohit Bhargava's Blog, page 96

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...

Why Great Brands Don’t Have Obvious Answers

What problem are you solving?

It’s one of the most basic and fundamental questions in business … and one that most brands believe they need to be able to answer. The best ideas solve problems, right? There is a problem with this logic. Ideas that make money don’t just solve problems. Obvious problems are often addressed with obvious solutions. The biggest challenge in this model is to find the problem.

Healthy food often does not taste as good as unhealthy food. The obvious solution is to try a...

What 5 Fake Ads Can Teach You About Great Marketing

Sometimes clients don’t buy great ideas. And sometimes creative people have great marketing ideas for brands they don’t work on. I have thought for years that the greatest marketing idea for Crayola would be to create their own series of coloring menus and crayons for kids, and sell them to restaurants on a monthly basis as a subscription. But I never worked with Crayola, so that idea has just been sitting in my head for years.

Thankfully, the people behind the collection of ads in this post d...

15 Big Brand Lessons From The 2013 Corporate Social Media Summit

There are all kinds of ways to judge the quality of a conference. Some people look at the venue, or the number of attendees. Other look at the list of speakers, or the keynote presenters. Across the dozens of events I attend every year, I have seen or used almost all of these metrics myself. But yesterday I discovered a new metric while networking with speakers and attendees of the Corporate Social Media Summit.

People brought their bosses. Some speakers from last year invited their bosses to...

How To Get Better At Networking: 7 Questions With Porter Gale

Recently I had the chance to sit down with Porter Gale and pick her brain about some smart tips that can help anyone get better at networking. Her new book Your Network Is Your Net Worth features a cover quote from Sir Richard Branson. As if that weren’t impressive enough, she is the former CMO of Virgin America and someone who I’ve crossed paths with a few times at events over the past few years.

As you’ll see in the interview below, she’s also one of those people who happens to be gifted at...