Back Seat Marketers

Just took another look at the Consumer Sentiment Index thanks to U of Michigan via the St Louis Fed, and it is still at historically low levels…

The hunt for income dollars are coming in all areas. As we’ve covered, distressing times are when business models are broken [Hint: Amazon quietly gets into private labels […]

Facebook launched vanity URL’s so you can get to a friend’s FB page without searching by name. Good thing, too, cause the name search is a bit wacky if not simply . I am locked in as twitter.com/corysorice and now facebook.com/corysorice. Also, I’ve bought my own domain. Does any of this […]

Quite interesting to be a part of what my company is going through during this downturn.
In fact, many companies and industries are digging into themselves to find what makes them unique and whether that means anything in this new market. Consumers have changed what they are buying and companies are having to shift gears […]

I’m amazed right now at how many companies are reeling from poor performance and are not sure where to find growth. Data driven, CRM companies know the score. They are driving business with their existing clients and know how to grow new ones profitably.
Get the word out with your customers that you’re on […]

Let’s be honest, the stock market turmoil makes great fodder these days. Feeling like we’re getting out of the woods one day leads to punishment the next. I’ve learned to just tune it out and use a few tools to guide me on where things are headed for the economy.
First, The Conference Board posts a […]

The Pew Research Center has found that the one-time and regular use of social networks by older parts of the US population are starting to take hold. This chart is the true sign of technology taking hold:

While many older parts of the US are not as well penetrated as younger ones, what we’re starting to […]

This year, financial targets are already blown. Any idea of guessing, er, budgeting for 2009 is extremely difficult. Intel does the right thing and forgoes a 2009 projection and with it, the CEO reminds internal and external constituencies that there is work to be done during the downturn:
“Intel has weathered difficult times in the past, […]

Windows 7 is launching in Beta and not soon enough. Generally, Vista was a bad launch in that it was years late, obsoleted in-market PC’s, and wasn’t well adopted. Honestly, Vista gets positive impressions from users that have done the switch, but the company struggled with getting demand for its system to make the switch. […]

Is it too late for the Detroit 3 to tune up its marketing strategy? In good times and bad, having Unique Selling Propositions (USP’s) are important part of maintaining and growing share. USP’s create a reason to talk to consumers via advertising. In bad times, brand campaigns for the sake of brand recognition die, but […]

[PhotoKeith’s shoot of Josh Ritter at Southgate House on Flickr]
I was talking to PhotoKeith this past week who is a [very good] professional photographer about different ways to grow his business and we both realized just how much value there is in combining a traditional micro-marketing database driven marketing approach combined with Facebook and MySpace.
Professional […]