Keep Customers by Keeping it Simple. A few years back I attended a start-up funding competition as an exhibitor with my company TheStoryArchitect.com. A young, passionate founder of a tech startup caught sight of my booth, walked over, asked what I did and then exasperatingly went into great detail about his ongoing struggle for attention from his target audience. He was...

I had a meeting with a client who was having quite a difficult time pulling together a simple way of saying all of the things she does.  This is a person who consults with other businesses and works with them on a wide range of people issues and there isn’t one specific problem that she deals with. They all relate to the concept of “culture” and “leadership”.   In short, she works...

There’s a taxi company in my town that I refer to as Rabid Taxi.  They earned that name after one really bad experience with one of their drivers.  I had a work trip to present our virtualization strategy to customers in Ottawa and I was taking the train.  I called for a cab, and when the driver picked me up, he offered me a flat rate to the station and we agreed on $25. I told him...

The number one rule in marketing is to be where your buyers are. But you have to know who they are first. I have had a number of clients that I’ve worked with that were not able to at first identify who they were really selling to. WHO IS THE BUYER YOU ARE SELLING TO? I have a client that sells medical software and when I asked them to identify their buyer they said clinics. I had...

With the Pan Am Games just beginning Toronto should be on edge with excitement. Instead what is making the news is a man who was charged for driving with two mannequins in the High Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) lane and when Twitter exploded with news of a terrorist attack on the CN Tower that turned out to be a surprise fireworks demonstration. So how did Ontario stray so far from the...

Hint – it’s not to sell $17,000 watches. The reviews are in and the Apple Watch is predictably getting a wide range of reviews typical of Apple products from both fan boys and haters alike. But most curious is the Apple Watch Edition. A number of reviews I’ve read have panned the watch as too expensive for a device that will be obsolete in a year(HBR gives it a D for pricing...

I didn’t intend to go into marketing. It kind of happened by accident, which is how many of my career shifts have occurred. I tend to keep myself open to possibilities and I’ve had good intuition about when to make a career pivot. It was early 2006 when I first made the pivot into marketing. At the time I was trying to become a Systems Consultant, which was part outside enterprise...

I went to the Startup Grind conference in San Francisco earlier this year and it’s one of the better ones that I’ve gone to. After a day of meeting some colleagues in the valley I got settled in for the opening keynote. Once the main sessions were done, Derek Anderson the founder of Startup Grind did something unique. He gave the microphone to the audience and asked a few people in...