MARKETING COMMUNICATION DIGEST

Do you even know what a telegram is? And have you ever received any? If so, when was that? Either way, you’re reading this for a reason and it might be that your advertising, marketing messages and usual social media messages are hitting a wall. It’s called the wall of no response; the wall of disinterest; the wall of noise. Why is that happening? The answer is simple: Because you never send me a telegram anymore. The first telegram was sent in 1838 by Samuel Morse, the inventor of Morse Code. A telegram was an electronic cable message sent by an operator and then delivered BY HAND to the recipient. Telegrams largely went out of style in the mid-20th century once other forms of communication, like the private telephone, became commonly used. Telegrams connoted urgency. They stood out, got read, usually immediately, and the sender paid for that privilege. Imagine that happening today. What would you pay for that kind of access in a land of Tweets? William Wrigley, Jr. o...

We’re living in an era of start-ups. Every other person is looking to start a new business and become an entrepreneur. But more than 80% businesses fail to survive their first 18 months. Nobody knows if your business will work or not; there is no formula or method which can help you find out that your idea has the potential to be a great business or not. However, there are certain factors that you need to check on, before you invest your time, money and energy into your idea. Here are some observations and necessary things you should keep in mind before starting a new venture. 1. Timing Out of many factors, including idea, funding and team, timing is the most important factor that you need to check. Great ideas have failed only because they started before time or they were too late. It’s the timing that decides your company's future. YouTube , for instance, was not the first video sharing platform. There were a few before that, but due to bad broadband penetration i...

The last thing you want is for your business to be known as a “Jack of all trades” because you always get stuck with the “Master of none” part. We see this in the sustainability world a lot, in good and bad times — communication with everything thrown in:  “this product is organic and made with renewable energy and we give to the Nature Conservancy and treat our employees great so you’ll be healthy, save money, enjoy your job and save the world!” Phew! What a mouthful, and earful! Yes, even the targeted messages of our digital communication become overwhelming and unwanted very quickly, leaving audiences turned off. Well, let’s take a step back for a second and look at the target of our communications.  They’re people!  Not colour-laden pie charts or graphs that look like EKG readouts. People! With emotions that are many times impossible to track. Even with all the analytics and targeting possibilities digital media affords us toda...