Email Marketing That Misses the Mark

I received an email this morning from a woman named Ophelia, who works for an SEO company that offers “professional link building” services.*Excerpts follow: Hello, my name is Ophelia  and I am an Internet Rankings Engineer. I performed a Google search for the keyword pedicure portland oregon and upon perusing past the first page, i […]

SuperBookDeals and the Limits of Crowd Power

Alternate title: “Some Companies Just Don’t Care” People in the customer-service advice-giving business love to tell the story of United Airlines and Dave Carroll. It’s a very entertaining tale of a customer who, having felt mistreated, used the power of the internet to do an enormous amount of damage to a large company’s reputation. It’s […]

Why Facts Alone Won’t Always Persuade

“Facts tell, but stories sell” — Jim Doyle It’s interesting to watch the political left and right — especially those at the extremes — shout past each other. Each has its own set of facts, and each is firmly convinced that if the other side just accepted these facts the argument would be over. And […]

Reducing Choice, Increasing Revenue

According to the Toronto Globe and Mail, some major retailers and consumer product companies are experimenting* with reducing the choices they offer. The results are often positive: Several months ago Wal-Mart  Canada Corp. decided to overhaul one of the staples of its grocery business – the peanut butter aisle. It dropped two of its five […]