Blog: "Someone Should Have Taught Me This..."
Essential guides, techniques, and psychology principles for building a kick-ass marketing operation
AI Marketing for Startups: Strategies & Insights
AI tools could revolutionize marketing strategies for startups, helping them achieve better results with less effort. By leveraging machine learning and data analysis, startups can optimize their marketing efforts and deliver personalized experiences to their target audience.
The Green Lumber Fallacy In Entrepreneurship
The Green Lumber Fallacy assumes that the best outcomes come from academic or scientific understanding. But this is hardly ever true.
![What must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business? [Guide]](https://i0.wp.com/scottfenstermaker.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/pexels-anna-shvets-5324939-1.jpg?resize=400%2C250&ssl=1)
What must an entrepreneur assume when starting a business? [Guide]
There are simply some realities that an entrepreneur must assume when starting a business if they want that business to survive.
What an Entrepreneur Would Most Likely Be Interested In
Does Your Mind Work Like an Entrepreneur's? Some of us may ask ourselves what a true entrepreneur would most likely be interested in, wondering if we have the right psychology to dip our own toes into that pool. Starting a company in the 2020s is still something of a...
Thought Leadership Marketing: May Contain 0% Thought
Most “thought leadership” marketing leads nowhere and displays no thought. Valuable content doesn’t just address what to think, but *how* to think.
The Marketing Rebellion, and the Future of Content
If two-thirds of your marketing is occurring without you, then what role is branded content to play in the future? We examine Mark Schaefer’s “Marketing Rebellion.”
Antifragile Marketing: Ways to Gain from Disorder
Could you build a department or operation that actually grew stronger under stress? We apply the principles from Nassim Taleb’s “Antifragile” to marketing.
So You’ve Been Put In Charge of Marketing…Now What?!
These are the common tensions, traps and mistakes that I see (and have made), when arriving in a new marketing management situation.
Wisdom From The Wizard of Ads, 20 Years On
The Wizard of Ads has now become one of those timeless advertising texts, with principles that are just as valuable today as they were 20 years ago.
SMB Impossible, Part II
In last month's post, we got into a meditation on business turnaround principles, as demonstrated by the philosopher Robert Irvine (the host of Restaurant: Impossible). Restaurant: Impossible is my guilty pleasure, my Keeping Up With The Kardashians. And I thought it...
SMB, Impossible: Transferable Principles of Successful Small Business
One of my guilty pleasures is the show Restaurant: Impossible with Robert Irvine. Whenever I take a trip out to my parents' place in Woodstock, they always have a backlog of the show on their DVR. I've always loved stories about fixers, from Winston Wolf to Michael...
The Psychology of Social Media In a Crisis
The Role of Psychology in a Social Media Crisis One of the large parts of professional social media management is the role of a crisis. When something urgent and negative happens, people feel emotionally compelled to share information without necessarily evaluating...
Social Media Psychology: Social Is Worse For You Than You Thought
For all the time we devote to social media, you would think that it would register some meaningful improvement to our lives. You would expect that social media would do something psychologically beneficial for us: elevate our mood, increase our energy, or help us get...
Customer Testimonials: Right and Wrong Ways
Nothing supercharges lead generation and sales quite like social proof. One study published in the Wall Street Journal noted that social proof was more influential in changing behavior than the prospect of saving money. Content Marketing Leaders Spill on Using...
Marketing Psychology: Price Framing
Price framing is the marketing technique of presenting prices and products in the most optimal way. We take a look at the psychology and implications.
Applying the 80/20 Rule to Marketing: A First Look
One of the many great lessons I’ve taken from Tim Ferriss is applying the 80-20 rule to projects. In this article we apply the 80-20 rule to marketing.
Everything You’ve Been Taught About Public Speaking is a Myth
Let me clarify the title a bit: everything you've been taught about public speaking can only get you to a certain level of proficiency. Then, like in every other area of mastery, you have to re-think everything you've learned because it's time to make finer...
The Stoics and the Epicureans
The Stoics for the motivation and achievement, but the Epicureans for the style... I recently got onto Hellenist moral philosophy after reading The Obstacle Is The Way, one of the books recommended by Tim Ferriss. The book is a motivating entree into Stoic thought,...
Swarm Intelligence and Capitalism
Recently I revisited an article that I posted once upon a time on Swarm Theory (Decentralized Problem-Solving). This is the notion that a self-governed network of entities operating on simple heuristics (e.g. bees in a hive, ants in a colony) can solve certain...
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room?
"Nil sapientiae odiosius acumine nimio. (Nothing is more hateful to wisdom than excessive cleverness.)" --Petrarch One of the most striking scenes in Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind's Enron expose The Smartest Guys in the Room details the courtroom testimony of...