Category Archives: Strategy

by | March 13, 2015 · 12:41 pm

Making Design Work

designEverybody has a different idea of what design is – and that’s most of the problem. When you’re trying to wrangle the conflicting opinions and priorities of your creative team, your sales people, your product managers and your customer support staff, it’s only natural that consensus is going to be hard to find. We all agree that good design works. What we disagree on is how to make it work.

Most of us tend to notice design only when it fails, or when it suddenly meets all of our needs at once. Unfortunately, most projects have to aim for somewhere in the vast territory that exists between catastrophe and catharsis, and as a project manager your job will be to arrive at that destination safely and securely.

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Filed under Design, Inspiration, Strategy

by | March 10, 2015 · 12:00 pm

Practical Marketing and Deliberate Sales: Tips For Reality-Based Business

We’ve all heard it before. The many voices of professional marketing, each touting a different buzzword as this year’s great revolution in business. Frankly, we’re as tired of them as you are.

blueprintsAt Load Bearing Creative, we do our best to avoid terminology and strategy that doesn’t really mean anything. You won’t hear much from us about the dynamism of permission-based channel relocations, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Your business doesn’t need that. What it needs is a practical plan for building sales and developing markets, and buzzwords aren’t going to get you there. Continue reading →

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by | March 3, 2015 · 3:43 pm

Things That A Case Study Isn’t

storytellingOn the face of it, a corporate case study is about the simplest type of technical collateral there is. Structurally, a case study is the basic three-act dramatic formula that we are all familiar with: set out a problem, struggle with the challenge, race towards a solution. Case studies present this basic storytelling format in context of a successful customer engagement, telling the tale of an everyday company that solved an important business problem with this wonder product or service.  Continue reading →

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Filed under Story, Strategy, Uncategorized, Writing

by | February 20, 2015 · 11:05 am

RSS Is Dead, Long Live RSS

Looking back, it’s easy to remember forms of webtalk in days gone by and think, that’s quaint.  Geocities comes to mind.  MySpace.  Even – as much as I hate to admit this – UseNet newsgroups.  And one day, Facebook and Twitter will likewise go the way of Gopher, supplanted by some new and more efficient way of getting info out there.

stock-photo-23131934-internet-news-and-rss-conceptWhen we talk with clients about their social media presence, occasionally we’re still asked about RSS feeds.  RSS isn’t nearly the hot marketing medium today.  Should we care about ensuring that our website has an RSS feed available?

And to that I say, absolutely yes.

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Filed under Productivity, Strategy

by | February 11, 2015 · 9:44 am

The Real Magic of Following Through

istock_000019867979xsmallWhen I was a little kid, I had a fascination with stage magic. I’m sure a lot of kids do. My father indulged me, with visits to local magic supply stores to buy colored scarves and interlocking metal rings and fake cup and ball tricks. One trick that I still remember very clearly, nearly forty years later, is the Magic Money Machine.

The Magic Money Machine was an astoundingly simple, nearly foolproof magic trick. Anyone could do it. It was a small plastic box with a slot, a roller and a crank. You opened the box to show the audience that it was empty inside. You closed it. You waved your wand. You inserted a blank piece of white paper into one end. Said the magic words. Finally, you turned the crank and WOW! A crisp, beautiful, absolutely legal dollar bill made its way out of the slot. Money from thin air!

Of course, the trick isn’t hard to figure out. You roll the dollar bill in beforehand, and the crank and roller are designed to carefully hide the bill until it is needed. But to a five year old, it was great – particularly if you dress it up in some dramatic showmanship, make the effort to sell it as real magic.

I tell this story to clients sometimes to try to make a point.
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by | July 7, 2014 · 4:36 pm

The Question of Me

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“To be, or not to be. That is the question.” – Shakespeare, Hamlet

In most tech businesses today, life revolves around the Gadget.

The Gadget can be anything from toasters to next generation telecommunication satellites. Gadgets can be thrilling. They often make great media stories. They are steps forward and bold promises. For those of us in technology marketing, pushing the Gadget’s many virtues – faster, cheaper, more efficient, more strategically aligned – is what we do. We work to sell the better mousetrap.

But truly effective tech marketing today goes well beyond the Gadget, because as a society we are reaching a saturation point for innovation. Last year, Mike Elgan over at Forbes wrote something particularly profound that highlights this evolution, pointing specifically to the growing BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) movement.

“The reason BYOD is here to stay is psychological. It’s less about technology and more about culture—or even anthropology. It’s about a belief of what is ‘me’ and what is ‘not me.’”

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Filed under Inspiration, Strategy, Writing

by | June 18, 2014 · 3:17 pm

Time Is Money – Except When It Isn’t

time_is_moneyWhen a major marketing campaign is built around only a few words at a time, you can bet good money that those words were chosen with care.

The social human mind is full of fault lines, conceptual interfaces that represent the meeting of important forces. Successful marketers today work hard to find those pressure points and exploit them. There’s nothing necessarily manipulative in that – it’s just how effective communication works, and that’s the business that we are in. A single word matters.

One of the more interesting fault lines is where the value of time meets the value of money. Benjamin Franklin coined the phrase “time is money”. Psychological studies of recent years, however, suggest that this isn’t exactly true. We tend to value money and time very differently, and presenting value statements based on either money or time will produce different results.
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by | June 13, 2014 · 11:23 am

The Transformative Power of the Bad Idea

good idea inspirationSo in my travels this morning, I crossed paths with this article over at Indiewire about a professional conflict between Steven Spielberg and special effects master Rick Baker back in the early 1980s. It is an interesting story about never-before-seen photos of intricate alien creature sculptures that Baker designed for a dark Spielberg sci-fi film that never ended up being made. The long, weaving tale casts some light on Hollywood business dealings, professional mistrust and the various legal maneuvers behind some of the biggest films of that decade.

The part I found most fascinating, however, was the light it shed on the messy aspects of the creative process.
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Filed under Inspiration, Productivity, Strategy, Writing

by | June 5, 2014 · 3:53 pm

Building a Content Development Plan That Works

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I was talking this morning with an old friend, and we were commiserating about the lives of busy people – busy marketing managers, specifically. The average marketing manager today seems to be single-handedly juggling what would have required a full team just five years ago. Deadlines are shorter, emergencies are more common, and stress levels are higher than ever. For every one marketing professional who loves their job, twenty others seem trapped on the hamster wheel today.

One major downside to all this busyness – besides, of course, the eventual burnout of good people – is that the great opportunities that advance careers and markets are easily overlooked.

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by | May 29, 2014 · 3:32 pm

Boost Your Marketing Signal By Better Communicating Tension

vagueness

Ambiguity is at the root of most marketing – and business – problems. In casual speech, we often use various words interchangeably when they mean very different things, and in the process we diminish the effectiveness and sharpness of what we’re trying to say. The subtle nuances get lost, and with them our ability to coherently craft complex arguments.

In a world of noise, the signal vanishes into dead air. And ambiguity is to blame.

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Filed under Story, Strategy, Writing