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by: Guy Kawasaki
The art of recruiting is the purest form of evangelism because you're not simply asking people to try your product, buy your product, or partner with you. Instead, you are asking them to bet their lives on your organization. Can it get any scarier for them, and tougher for you, than this?
Flowmarket is a store with an attitude.
All the products in Flowmarket are reflections of what we need rather than what we can actually get. Behind the label of the products there is nothing - the minimalistic bottles, cartons and boxes are empty.
by: Ilya Vedrashko MediaPost talks to Dale Herigstad on the future of media design. Herigstad is the creative director and cofounder of Schematic, a company that designs media interfaces, and a research fellow at Ball State Uni's Center for Media Design.
by: Joel Makower
Timberland, the often-maverick maker of footwear and apparel, last week unveiled a self-described "nutritional label" it plans to put on all of its shoeboxes in the coming year.
Continue reading "Timberland Reveals Its "Nutritional" Footprint" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
If my memory isn't failing me, after the Robert Redford character gets elected in The Candidate, he whispers to one of his supporters, “Now what?” Raising money ls like running for office: it's very exciting and even fun if you get the money. But after you raise the money, now what?
by: Joel Makower
The 2006 Global 100 Most Sustainable Corporations, the second annual such rankings, has just been released at the World Economic Forum conference in Davos, Switzerland. The list was compiled by Corporate Knights and Innovest Strategic Value Advisors.
I was critical of last year's initial rankings -- not the rankings themselves, but aspects of the methodology, and the transparency behind them. Among the questions I raised:
Continue reading "The 100 "Most Sustainable Companies," 2006 Edition" »
by: Alain Thys
For a publishing project at one of my clients I've currently been given the joyous task of rereading all the marketing classics. While this is fun at first, I can assure you that after the combined works of Kotler and his colleagues you're craving for some War & Peace as light reading.
by: Joel Makower
The online world has been aflutter of late with talk of "Web 2.0," a suite of tools and technologies that define the next-gen Internet.
Continue reading "Web 2.0 and the New Corporate Watchdogging" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
Someone once told me that the probability of an entrepreneur getting venture capital is the same as getting struck by lightning while standing at the bottom of a swimming pool on a sunny day. This may be too optimistic.
by: Karl Long
In the late 90’s when I was working with an Internet Consultancy a pretty significant buzzword was “disintermediation”, in other words, cutting out the middleman. Travel agents would be replaced by travelocity and orbitz, and car salesmen would be replaced by cars.com or edmunds.com and the like.
Continue reading "The New Intermediary - Blogs as Trusted Guides - or Reintermediation" »
by: Yann Gourvennec
It’s not because you are a collaborative work enthusiast that you have to agree with everything that is going on in the name of so-called WEB 2.0.
by: Roger Dooley
This Is Your Brain on Schadenfreude in the New York Times describes empathy research at University College London using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) techniques to provide real-time capture of the mental states of the research subjects. The subjects were shown videos of individuals playing a game fairly or unfairly, and then saw those individuals subjected to a negative or positive stimulus. The results were interesting:
by: Roger Dooley
The Ethical Brain by Michael S. Gazzaniga (2005, Dana Press) should be required reading for anyone who debates ethical issues that can be illuminated by modern brain science. Neuroethics is an emerging field, and this book is a nice primer for those who will follow the future discourse in this area. While some areas of ethical discussion today may be immediately obvious as being influenced by neuroscience, others are less so.
by: Guy Kawasaki
In my day job, I not only hear a lot of PowerPoint pitches, but I also read a lot of business plans. The PowerPoint pitches explain my Ménière's disease, but the business plans explain my recent need for reading glasses. One of my goals for blogging is to reduce the external factors that are causing the degradation of my body, so this entry's topic is the zen of business plans.
by: Roger Dooley
Just in case you or your web marketers don’t have a handy fMRI setup to scan the brain of someone surfing your web site, here are a few cheaper and more convienent data points that may help guide your next site design or web marketing effort.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Check out these charts by Karl Hartig. My favorite is the consumer electronics one. It shows how long it took consumers to adopt electronic stuff. I used it in my book called Rules for Revolutionaries. I've been trying to find it ever since, and my buddy Bryan came through today.
Written at: Palo Alto, California.
Original post: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/01/the_best_charts.html
by: Roger Dooley
In sales and marketing professionals have always known that being genuine and believable is of prime importance in winning over a customer. “Believe in your product!” is the mantra of sales gurus like Zig Ziglar, “if you try and fake it, the customer will know.” Mirror neurons may be a part of this process.
by: Roger Dooley
What does your preference for your favorite cola have to do with Pavlov’s dogs? New studies described in New Scientist used fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging) scans of the brain show that our brand preferences may be stored in much the same way as Pavlov’s famous canines learned to salivate when they heard the food bell.
by: Yann Gourvennec
Pandora project enables you to create your own radio stations based on music you liked and delivering new titles you hadn’t thought of or even didn’t know that they existed.
Continue reading "Amazing Online Jukebox Pandora Could Make Long Tail Even Longer" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
By popular demand (okay, two people asked me to do it), here are the top ten ways to attract the interest of venture capitalists. There's no guarantee that if you do these ten things that you'll raise millions of dollars, but this wishlist will get you in the game.
by: Karl Long
An interesting article from nature.com that proposes that web users can form an opinion about websites within the first 50 milliseconds, that’s like watching 1 frame of a tv show.
news @ nature.com - Web users judge sites in the blink of an eye - Potential readers can make snap decisions in just 50 milliseconds.
Continue reading "Web Users Judge Sites in the Blink of an Eye" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
In honor of the recent Macworld Expo and the upcoming Super Bowl (the two great branding exercises of every new year; one much more fruitful than the other), this blog entry is about the art of branding. My assumptions are that you don't have infinite resources and that you do have a great product (see an earlier post called “Guy's Golden Touch”). If you do have infinite resource and don't have a great product, there's still hope, but you don't need to read this entry any further.
by: David Jennings
Proving that convergence is rapidly becoming a fait accompli, news of personalised radio on mobiles is supplemented by peer-to-peer recommendations on mobile devices, currently in prototype development through the Push!Music project in Gothenburg.
Continue reading "Peer-to-Peer Recommendations Coming to Mobile" »
by: Joel Makower
The notion of "sustainable consumption and production" continues to be one of the more persistent and vexing challenges on the sustainability front.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Out of curiosity, I went to SimplyHired, a vertical search engine for jobs, and looked for openings containing the keyword “evangelist.” Amazingly, there were 611 matches--and none were for churches. It seems that “evangelist” is now a secular, mainstream job title. Indeed, the first eight matches were for evangelist jobs at Microsoft--go figure.
by: Joel Makower
Worldwatch's venerable State of the World annual is just out, and the 2006 edition zeroes in on China and India -- and the threats and opportunities they present to sustainability.
Continue reading "China, India, and the 'State of the World'" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
I'm getting tired of writing about lies, so today I'm covering truths. Specifically, the truths of innovation. I hold these truths to not be self-evident; hence we see so little innovation.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Since I've antagonized the venture capital community with last week's blog, I thought I would complete the picture and “out” entrepreneurs to begin this week. The hard part about writing this blog was narrowing down these lies to ten.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Venture capitalists are simple people: we've either decided to invest, and we are convincing ourselves that our gut is right (aka, “due diligence”) or there's not a chance in hell. While we may be simple, we're not necessarily forthcoming, so if you think it's hard to get a “yes” out of venture capitalist, you should try to get a conclusive “no.”
Continue reading "The Top Ten Lies of Venture Capitalists" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
One of the great ironies of startups is the envy entrepreneurs express for innovators in large companies—let’s use the Gifford Pinchot term: “intrapreneurs.” From the outside looking in, entrepreneurs think intrapreneurs have it made: ample capital, infrastructure (desks, chairs, Internet access, secretaries, lines of credit, etc), salespeople, support people, and an umbrella brand.
by: Roger Dooley
Science fiction writers have written for years about brain-computer links. Being able to “plug in” directly to add memory or knowledge, or “read” stored information is an appealing, if currently improbable, concept.
by: Roger Dooley
Almost fifty years ago, the idea of subliminal advertising raised a public furor; supposedly, messages flashed on a movie screen too fast for the viewers to consciously see boosted concession sales. Subsequent media coverage and books had people looking everywhere for subliminal messages.
by: Guy Kawasaki
If only I could get paid for answering the question, “How can I get people to evangelize my product?” I would be able to stop working and play hockey every day. Alas, there is no way to get paid for this information, so I give it to you for free.
by: Alain Thys
Sometimes it’s something unexpected that makes a variety of thoughts and conversations you’ve been having fall into place. Like today, I visited the Fabergé exhibition in
by: Roger Dooley
Scanning through some older discussions of neuromarketing, I ran across Jennifer Rice’s Neuromarketing Not So Hot entry in her Brand Mantra blog. From the title, I expected to see either an ethical attack on scanning brains for crass commercial purposes or doubts about whether such scans were reliable indicators of preferences or behavior.
Continue reading "Why You Shouldn't Rely on Neuromarketing" »
