Tippingpoint Labs

Sears Catalog

After speaking at the New England Mail Order Association Spring Conference and having conversations over lunch and dinner with talented marketers from brands like Sony, Hyatt, Gardeners Supply, Home Shopping Network Interactive, Stony Creek and L.L. Bean, I pondered the future of the printed catalog. Print catalogs will not die, but they must evolve.

Media Modality

We’ve been working on a concept called ‘media modality.’ Our hypothesis is basically this: people consume content in a variety of modes often defined by the medium used to deliver the media. So, if you use the right medium with the right kind of content you’ll capture the consumer (audience.)

Here’s a quick example: (more…)

In the age of transparency, marketing is not about crafting artificial or half-true brand stories for consumer audiences. Marketing is about uncovering, fostering, sharing, and engaging with employees and consumers around the true stories that make your brand unique. Let’s take a look at how a few of the departments in your organization are the real marketing departments.

Product design and development is marketing

If your marketing department and the agencies it’s hiring are not taking a deep and genuine interest in your product development team and their methodologies, you’re headed down the wrong road. Your messaging around a product cannot be spun on some “me too” approach to a product. Marketing needs to be genuinely rooted in the problem that your product development team set out to solve.

For a ton of ideas and examples on this topic go read Bogusky and Windsor’s Baked In – Creating Products and Businesses that Market Themselves.

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