Never underestimate the practical business card when developing your marketing strategy. This is an essential part of your brand and should never be overlooked.

Why should we lowly marketing gurus care about a 4-minute-mile? Because they told him it couldn’t be done. They – the doctors and scientists and even his greatest fans – said it was impossible. To which Roger Bannister said, ‘I don’t think so.’

The end of 2009 brought the end of the commuter New York Water Taxi that ferried commuters down the Hudson from Yonkers City Pier to Manhattan, docking at the World Financial Center and Wall Street, and last summer, mid-town too. It was a good thing nobody knew about.

It doesn’t really matter what a company says about itself; it’s what the customers say about the company. And when customers have good things to say, that alone will sell to other customers.

JetBlue, long considered the social media maven with nearly 1.5 million followers on Twitter…but what’s this? A measly 60k on Facebook??? This can’t be! So what’s the popular airline kid to do when they have no friends? Easy! Give the fans something for free! Bribe them! Free sweepstakes just for being a friend on FaceBook!

Setting up a website is mandatory to market your wares, whether a dog walker or aerospace engineer. You need to be seen by potential clients, employers and employees. With a website, you’re telling the world you exist.

Starting an aggressive marketing effort and not having enough money to finish is poor planning. It’s like flying across the Atlantic with a half tank of fuel. Sure, you’ll make progress, but your plane better have floats because you’ll be landing in the Atlantic, and not in Paris.

While the current recession has hit advertising agencies and mass media outlets hard, the forecast is for mass advertising, such as TV, radio, magazines, and newspapers, to continue to lose its share of overall advertising budgets. TV is losing viewers, radio is losing listeners, and magazines and newspapers are losing…

PR is great, because it gives the consumer a sense of third party endorsement. It’s almost like the media outlet is saying, “This company is good because we have analyzed it. This is a good company. Their core values are great. I like them.”

Recently, I read an article that appeared in the New Yorker Magazine. It discussed how two well-known cereal companies, Kellogg’s and Post, dealt with the economic depression in the late 1920s. At the time, ready-to-eat cereals were relatively new and Americans didn’t view them as a real alternative to oatmeal…