Getting Into Your Customer’s Head – A Reading List

Getting Into Your Customer’s Head – A Reading List
One of our newest clients at Argentum is a super sharp life-long learner. As the co-founder of a business that is breaking ground in a brand new category (and kicking butt), and she’s interested in understanding more about consumers and human nature in general. So I put together some resources to help her. In addition to being a skilled...

Book Launch! Marketing Your Book By Working Your Network

Book Launch! Marketing Your Book By Working Your Network
Occasionally I get asked for recommendations for marketing a book. This email, from my business school friend Sheryl O’Laughlin, is a great example of leveraging social media and your connections to spread the word about a book or anything else you’re personally passionate about. It was written by Sheryl to spread the word about her...

Favorite Tools: Breakthrough Marketing Plans

Favorite Tools: Breakthrough Marketing Plans
While I have little patience for business books, I frequently refer to Breakthrough Marketing Plans, by Kellogg Professor Tim Calkins, and I often suggest that my clients purchase a copy (or two). Both Tim and I spent 10 years at Kraft Foods in brand management, and Tim’s book essentially teaches the Kraft methodology that we learned there for...

Maximizing Your Brand’s Word of Mouth Potential

Maximizing Your Brand’s Word of Mouth Potential
A few months ago, we went to hear Professor Jonah Berger talk about his book, Contagious. The book is a useful primer on how to make your product/service more likely to receive word of mouth (WOM) advocacy from your customers. Having spent time consulting for Procter & Gamble’s groundbreaking WOM group, Vocalpoint, we know the importance of...

Leveraging The Power Of Habit

Leveraging The Power Of Habit
Understanding customer habits opens a window into better aligning your product or service with your customers’ regular behaviors. Charles Duhigg’s latest book, The Power of Habit, provides a fascinating glimpse into the way habits influence human behavior. An excerpt from the book regarding Target’s marketing to pregnant women...

Making Marketing Lemonade From Business Lemons

I spent 11 years of my adult life living down the street from various Waffle House restaurants. Granted, if you’re living in certain parts of the south, it’s practically impossible not to live down the street from a Waffle House. Most especially if you’re a college student, which I was for four of those eleven years. The...

How Marketing and Sales Evolve at Companies

How Marketing and Sales Evolve at Companies
I often mention Phil Kotler’s Harvard Business Review article Ending The War Between Sales and Marketing when talking to clients and potential clients. It’s a great piece about the evolution and co-existence of sales and marketing in an organization. Most importantly to me, it lays out the key responsibilities of each function and how...

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...

Book Review: Switch – How To Change When Change Is Hard

Book Review: Switch – How To Change When Change Is Hard
DON’T BE AFRAID OF CHANGE Last month, Dan Heath lectured in Chicago about the premises behind Switch, the new book that he and his brother Chip have written. Their first book was the terrific and useful Made to Stick, and they also write a monthly column in Fast Company magazine. Switch, like Made to Stick, is an engaging read with great,...