I just got off the phone with Danica Patrick. Her friends (that would be me) call her Dani. OK, it wasn’t really her…it was a recording. It seems that the team at Go Daddy thought it would be a good idea to robo-call customers and thank them for their business. Which is disappointing, because they’re much better marketers than this act [...]

Last week, I ran into someone I hadn’t seen in a while. We stopped on the street, spent all of 20 seconds talking, and then he ran off. “I’m buried at work!” he told me. “I need to schedule my days with a stopwatch.” We reconnected today. Our conversation went like this: Him: Sorry I [...]

No doubt you’ve heard that consumers will tell an average of six people about a bad experience. But do you know how long they’ll keep telling people what happened? Twenty years. Twenty years ago I walked into a Radio Shack to return a new phone. I had the box; I had the receipt. What I [...]

Great screenwriters know the importance of the logline – the one or two sentence pitch for their film. So do great marketers. The corporate version of the logline is known as the mission statement. And when you get the logline or the mission statement wrong, everything else falls apart. Here’s what I mean: It’s Saturday [...]

I’ve never had much luck finding a good plumber. But I’ve certainly tried. The cycle normally goes like this: the new plumber arrives to diagnose a problem. He quotes a price, and promises that his solution is the best one. Then he completes the job, collects payment and goes on his way. A short time [...]