..This one has nothing to do with business … unless you’re a squirrel. Check out this video showing how tenacious a squirrel can be when there’s food at the other end. All I can say is “GO NUTS!”
Posts from the The Junk Drawer Category
WOWZA!, Those Squirrels Are Smart!
January 13th, 2008 by Chief Nut
Why Use KickA$$ Headlines? …
December 1st, 2007 by Chief Nut“On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
…€” David Ogilvy, Confessions of an Advertising Man
Thank You Graphic Avenger!
August 29th, 2007 by Chief NutOn behalf of Graphic Designers EVERYWHERE! Your message should be heard far and wide … shouted from the mountains … whispered in back alleys … passed as notes from person to person on little scraps of paper … etched in granite … OK, you get what I’m saying.
Trust your graphic designer. DOWN WITH COMIC SANS!!!
A Mish and a Mash
June 17th, 2007 by Chief NutEmily Bloss with Excelsior Computer Services, shares this web site with us; www.Oddee.com…. Areas I found interesting were;
- Most Unfortunate Logos Ever (Caution … some of these are pretty risque!)
- 20 Chinese Fake Brands and Copycats
Enjoy…. Thanks Emmy!
Creative Branding … Dilbert Style
April 19th, 2007 by Chief NutCreative branding, for sure, includes the first (and hardest) step …�� coming up with a fabulous name … a corporate name, a product name, or a service name. A LOT of your branding potential rides on the back of how creative and “on brand” the name is. My question to you is, “WHO should do the heavy lifting of name research and brainstorming?” Probably the best group would be the brand/marketing people. That is their job, is it not?
The trick is to give this task to the people with the right mindset and the right creative skills… somone who understands the process of how to creatively build brand. It certainly shouldn’t be the engineering team. Definitely not the line workers. Not the sales folks. These are all pretty obvious but what about the thousands of companies who have a C-level person (usually due to control issues) dip their hand into the name-game a little too deeply at the expense of brand effectiveness? Or, now my favorite, how about when you let your corporate attorney do the naming?
Read this hilarious Dilbert strip by Scott Adams!
When the wrong people are involved in this critical process, the brand suffers. When a process allows personal opinions and “design by committee” to overide and squash a well thought out creative plan, the brand suffers. BE PICKY PEOPLE! The committee should be 3-4 hand picked individuals who understand:
- the creative branding process
- the importance of indirect, lateral thinking
- the direction and the mission of the company
- great brainstorming session rules
Online Advertising Will Change …
March 31st, 2007 by Chief NutClickZ’s expert on Rich and Streaming Media and Tribal DDB’s SanFran Executive Creative Director, Dorian Sweet, posts a beauty about the clash between online and offline agencies. Most laypeople don’t even know the battle is heated or what the relevance is to their own marketing strategies. The most important comment (IMHO) in the post is:
Online advertising will change. And three things will lead the way: measurement, the idea, and the user.
Dorian continues to point out that we’re focusing now on the “idea” component and that the other two will quickly follow. I’m a product of 1960’s and 1970’s traditional advertising so I wasn’t around in the hay-day of early television advertising. I suspect the process was similar. The ideas shifted, evolved and changed direction as the industry matured. So goes the world of online marketing. Now in its infancy, there are few tactics that can be considered “mature.” And, although we’re still in the honeymoon phase of development, it won’t be too long before we’re back to the real world …€” and that world will be completely different than the one we left behind just a few short years ago.
In support of this view of change, Dorian points out Nike’s recent decision to ditch Wieden + Kennedy, it’s LONG TIME agency, for some of its running shoe business because they’re just too traditional and are not embracing this shift to the digital/online world of marketing. This is a VERY big deal folks.
At the Global Marketing Summit in Myrtle Beach last month, almost every EVP-Marketing that we spoke to had specific inquiries about how we could help them become braver in this new world of online marketing. Questions about blogging, vlogging, social networking, forums, etc., were the flavor of the day. Even the presenters were orienting their material to this dynamic.
Sooooo, what does a business owner do with all of this? The quick answer is “ANYTHING”. This is the new frontier … boldly go where no man has gone before! (sorry about that … I couldn’t help it.) Because there are few rules, the opportunities are boundless. GO NUTS!
Regions and Cities too …
March 19th, 2007 by Chief NutMartin Lindstrom writes in the Branding Strategy Insider, “Country of Origin as a Branding Statement.”… In his post he, insightfully argues that the “Made in …” label on a product can dramatically affect a consumers perception of quality.
Let’s take it to the next level…. What if the only thing you knew about the product was it was made on the West Coast, the Mid-West or the South?… If the product was manufactured in these regions, would it affect your perception of the product itself?
Up another notch! … What about States? California vs. Alabama
And again! … What about Cities?… Los Angeles vs. Missoula
AGAIN! … What about Sections of a City?… East L.A. vs. Hollywood
Locale definitely plays a big part in establishing brand perception and creating the right “tone” for the connection with your target audience.
So, here I sit in the beautiful Lakes Region of Central New Hampshire…. What are YOUR perceptions of Acorn Creative’s branding and creative design services? Will we ever be compared to a Manhattan Agency as ’similar’? … possibly not, but that’s part of our brand.
Squirrels On Planes
February 18th, 2007 by Chief NutThis has nothing to do with marketing or branding. BUT, it’s about a squirrel, so I couldn’t pass it up! From the Metro UK online edition; “Rogue Squirrel Forces Down Plane“
I see a movie in the making … Starring Paris Hilton, with love interest Dustin Diamond and Erik Estrada as the courageous pilot!
This Post Isn’t a Coincidence
February 8th, 2007 by Chief NutFive or Six years ago, I read The Celestine Prophesy. I’m not a terribly religious guy, however, there was one very interesting thing that I picked up in the first reading of the book. (BTW, I’ve read it several times since). That is; the universe will continually throw “coincidences” at you until you take notice. It was that one insight that has had the most profound effect on my life since then …€” especially in business.
My wife, her sister and a good friend of ours ALSO believe that if you don’t take notice, eventually you’ll get hit in the head by the “universal frying pan” …. OUCH! Been there a few times. In retrospect, if you think you’ve been hit by the frying pan a few times in your life, PLEASE heed this advice;
TIP: If you stay open minded and actively keep an eye out for these “coincidences” and NOT shrug them off as meaningless but, instead, take action on them, the positive effect is an amazing thing. The more you open up, the more you notice. The more you take action, the more momentum the effects have.
There’s also a big movement right now surrounding the “Law of Attraction” … same thing.
Seth Godin posts about “Coincidences” here. In one story, he sat next to a “sort of weird guy” on an airplane and then ran into the same gentleman in a hotel gym later that evening. Spooooooky. In days gone by I would have brushed off this coincidence with a “…hmm, that’s odd” sort of remark. NOW, I’d go out of my way to engage this person in a conversation to find out what the connection is …€” why the universe is so clearly shoving us together. I’ve not once yet been disappointed in what I’ve discovered in that type of encounter.
Final advice: Open up … but avoid that frying pan!
Unreasonable Goals
February 4th, 2007 by Chief NutWhen we created a freebie 18 page report on how to make your marketing “Go Nuts in 2007″, we vaguely had an idea that we’d extend our efforts by writing an info. product or two and promote the report online in various ways. We sat down and set some unreasonable goals;
- Create FOUR info. products, not just one or two. A total of over EIGHT hours of audio!
- Launch a PPC campaign
- Point clicks to a series of new website landing pages
- Program a one time offer to those that download the free report
- Send out multiple press releases
- Script and broadcast a radio spot
- Develop bonus materials
- … AND have all of this done during the Holidays, over a four week period
All of this on top of a full schedule of other business duties, AND knowing that our Word-Wizard (Allen Voivod) and collaborator on the project would be out of town for a full week in the middle of the project.
Sound “unreadsonable” to you? It did to us at the time … but an amazing thing happened! WE GOT IT ALL DONE!
Robert Middleton writes about his ideas of setting unreasonable goals and details his “pretty bad acronym” - I.T.O.C.A. Hey Robert, if you add “unconventional thinking” and “never-say-never” to the pool, you get “C.A.U.T.I.O.N.” …… On second thought, neverrrr minnnnd.
Use us as an example and heed Robert’s advice. Set some unreasonable goals today!!
Feeeed Meee
