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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Filed under Productivity, Strategy

by | May 30, 2014 · 6:19 pm

Facing Marketing Burnout and Getting Through It

burnout

Second probably only to the President himself, the White House press secretary has to be the toughest, most stressful job on Earth. We’ll probably never know exactly what tipping point finally drove Jay Carney to step down today, but it isn’t hard to guess. Anyone in the public relations or marketing game – for an entire nation, a small business or somewhere in between – has to keep a lot of plates spinning at once. And they have to do it with a relaxed smile.

It’s not hard to see why Fast Company in 2007 called the CMO the “most dangerous job in business”.

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Filed under News, Productivity

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

by | May 19, 2014 · 2:32 pm

The Most Important Question That Is Rarely Answered

longliveplanU

The typical case study story structure is pretty basic. It is simple Aristotle, a three act play of crisis, complication and resolution. Beginning, middle and end, a narrative built out of interview questions that are also pretty basic.
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by | June 24, 2013 · 5:08 pm

The Keys To Telling Great Marketing Stories

When was the last time you really felt engaged by technology marketing?

From writing whitepapers about virtualization to developing case studies about modular building systems, folks like us are called upon by our clients to tell their stories. That’s our job. It’s not always the easiest one, but it is a critically important one, and we’re proud to do it.

Story is the human element – and at the risk of sounding all warm and fuzzy, when you’re selling machines, you really need the human element to be there. Someone, somewhere is getting out of bed this morning with a problem weighing heavily on their mind, and their stress is impacting the quality of their day. Other people around them are feeling it. The plots of life are rising, cresting, falling, crashing and lifting off again. And we turn those plots into meaning.
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by | May 7, 2013 · 5:01 pm

The Engineer-to-English Translation

Most of our clients, in some way, are engineers. They make things: electronics, bridges, heavy industrial components, nanoceramic polymers, telecommunications equipment. To a one, these people are highly intelligent and educated, and they know their businesses and fields very, very, very well.

They know them so well, in fact, that they’ve virtually lost the ability to communicate their expertise in a way that can be quickly grasped by someone relatively new to the subject.

You’ve probably seen it before. Probably, this week. It happens a lot.
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Filed under Writing

by | May 1, 2013 · 12:11 pm

The Invisible Advantages Of Effective Copywriting and Design

A very great portion of the work we do here at Load Bearing Creative is copywriting or graphic support for copywriting – the words, and the pictures that go with them.

Much of that work is in support of technical products and services, white papers and case studies for companies great and small. As writers and graphic designers, we see our roles as essentially communicators. We are there to tell the story, not star in it.

There are any number of articles and even books out there about how sharp, well-written copy can make you money. And effective communication can certainly do that. It can also cement your reputation, crack open an important market, and clarify your prospect’s problem into a decision to move forward.

But instead of rehashing the marketing-makes-money argument that everyone already knows by heart, I wanted to take a moment this week and look at the flip side: how it saves you money, and actively contributes to the strategic success of your business.
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Filed under Strategy