Argentum Blog

Argentum's blog, Marketing Op-Ed, highlights interesting, real-world examples of marketing with a little bit (okay, a lot) of opinion thrown in.  It's written by Susan Silver, President of Argentum Strategy Group, with the occasional guest blogger added to the mix.

I Want My Brand To Be Like Intel Inside

If I only had $5 for every time I heard a client say “I want [insert brand/company name here] to be like Intel Inside.” While I wouldn’t be rich, it would certainly buy me a nice dinner or two. In fact, I was hearing this so much, and from one client in particular, that I finally decided to do some research into how much my...

3 Inexpensive Ways To Enhance Your Marketing Efforts

It seems you can’t turn around these days without bumping into another article about why smart companies are increasing their focus on marketing. There are a few easy, relatively inexpensive steps that any company can take to enhance its marketing efforts: 1. SINGLE MESSAGE Decide what the most relevant value proposition of your brand or...

Entrepreneurs Think Differently

Not surprisingly, successful entrepreneurs approach problem solving very differently than do their equally successful large company peers. It all boils down to something called effectual reasoning. In plain English that basically means that entrepreneurs are “brilliant improvisers” and create their goals along the way, based on...

LinkedIn Etiquette

I’m an old-fashioned girl. Because of this, I try to only “LinkIn” to people I actually know. My philosophy is grounded in the spirit of LinkedIn which is all about being a network of trusted connections. How can I trust a connection if I don’t know them? And why would I unleash a stranger on the network that I have...

The Value Of Fresh Eyes

My friend Joe Hallinan has just come out with a new book Why We Make Mistakes, and he has a related Op-Ed piece in the New York Times this past Sunday. He talks about how fresh eyes bring really do see things that others more familiar with the material miss. In the Op-Ed piece he provides some great examples of how experts failed to see glaring...

Three Common Marketing Mistakes

BASICS EVERY BUSINESS SHOULD TACKLE As part of Washington Business Tonight’s Consulting series, I was asked to talk about three common marketing mistakes that small to mid-sized businesses often make. These can be summed up by “Do, Reach, Say.” Watch the interview here and let me know if you agree!

You Don’t Need Marketing (yet)

B2B companies under $2M in revenue don’t need to hire a marketing person, much less a Chief Marketing Officer This is a reprint of a post I wrote earlier this month as a guest blogger for the Entrepreneurial Execution Project run by Professors Waverly Deutsch and Craig Waitmann of the University of Chicago Booth School’s Polsky...

Communicate To Your B2B Customers Visually

Words Aren’t The Only Way To Communicate To Your B2B Customers Recently, one of our B2B clients decided to invest a significant part of their marketing budget to exhibit at the Licensing Expo in Las Vegas. The client is essentially an engineering company which produces a piece of equipment used to execute in-pack and on-pack consumer...

Lessons from Orabrush’s Giant Talking Tongue

I read an article in this week’s New York Times about how Orabrush has been successfully selling its product via YouTube videos. Click Here to read article. One of the key points of the article is how smaller companies like Orabrush are using YouTube to advertise. Orabrush has its own YouTube channel and many of its videos are hilarious,...

It’s Free Only If Your Time Is Worthless

I was belatedly going through way too many old Sunday New York Times sections recently, and I came across this terrific piece in the Business section by Damon Darlin from July 11. His point can be readily applied to my favorite soapbox topic: social media and the content generation it requires are most definitely not free. The article is called...