When my daughter was little and learning to read, she had a book that was composed of very simple words and short sentences. Pictures were interspersed within the sentences as stand-ins for the more complex words. To this day, our entire family remembers one sentence in particular. It comes up on a regular basis at family gatherings, and it always makes us laugh, just because it’s so silly and it reminds us of a special time. A (banana) is not a (lunchbox). That’s it — hey, our family’s an easy laugh.
Anyway, I was reminded of it while reading a blog post
Continue reading A Banana Is Not A Lunchbox
I used to direct the annual strategic plan for a weekly news magazine. If you’ve kept even half an eye on media news, you can just imagine how some of those planning sessions went. At various times everything about our business would get dissected, analyzed, attacked or defended. It got down to such introspection as, “What are we, why are we here, and what is news?” Media Philosophy 101.
With the knowledge that we were an advertising-based business in print, online and with events, one person said we were a media company. Another (probably a marketer, though I don’t recall) chimed in,
Continue reading It’s News To Me!
A friend recently asked me to explain integrated marketing. I told him how a good strategic marketing plan worked, how it defines a coordinated way to go to market and creates a plan that all departments could refer to. I talked about the essential elements of a plan. But that got me to thinking, “What brings a good plan to life?”
A good strategic plan is essential to the success of a business. That plan can take the form of volumes of work containing SWOT analysis, portfolio analysis, segmentation studies, financial reports, forecasting, and the like, all painstakingly developed over the course
Continue reading Marketing 101: The Essence of Integration
An ad agency friend of mine recently told me that he “didn’t get” social media. My knee-jerk reaction might have been, “He’s right. He just doesn’t get it.” But that would be missing the point. It’s well and good to believe in the power of social media—I’m a huge proponent of social media, in fact—but beware of over-imbibing in Social Media Kool-Aid.
Social media proponents often forget (or dismiss) the many people who “don’t get it,” or just don’t care about it. Oftentimes social media evangelists preach at them, drowning them with statistics, until the nonbeliever is converted. Or exhausted. Lots of
Continue reading Social Media Myopia
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What is The Shortest Distance? The Shortest Distance is a blog about storytelling, integrated marketing strategies, social media, and the many ways they can work together to help people connect and businesses succeed.
Bruce is a seasoned marketing pro who has improved the performance of a variety of corporations by combining solid integrated marketing strategies with compelling content and leading-edge Web 2.0 tools.
His background in brand and product marketing, operations, management, design, publishing and sales, along with his classical training at the Kellogg Graduate School of Management, give him a 360º perspective on today's marketing opportunities.
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