Tom Ruwitch
In honor of World Storytelling Day, two quick stories about the profit-generating power of stories… STORY #1 Neuroscientist Paul Zak ran a simple experiment: he showed people a short, emotional story about a father and his young son with terminal cancer. Then he measured their blood. After watching the story, participants’ brains released oxytocin —…
A provocative question I spotted on a discussion board for marketers this morning: “Do brands really need to make customers feel inadequate to retain them?” The guy who posted the question explained: “A lot of marketing basically works by telling you something is wrong with you first… Do you think retention built without insecurity marketing…
Happy National Awkward Moments Day. I’ve had many. Here’s one… A few years ago, I was in the cereal aisle at the grocery store when I ran into my high school pal Lisa. I hadn’t seen her in years so I was surprised to notice… Her belly was enormous! It was sticking out so far…
Here’s a true story about audience-building. Read on if you want to attract more followers and turn them into clients… Before he became the voice behind George Clooney, Dan Tyminski was a best-kept secret — a guy with great chops and a small audience. He joined Alison Krauss’ band, Union Station, as a guitarist and…
Recommended Videos đź’ˇ Jeff Walker: This Skill Will Feed You for Life I love many things about this video. Here’s my favorite: “(Marketing) is nothing more than attracting your ideal people into your world and then being able to make an effective offer in a congruent, gracious way so that they want to step forward…
It’s Friday the 13th. (Uh-oh!) Are you afraid? Franklin D. Roosevelt would be. He suffered from a bad case of paraskevidekatriaphobia. That’s a big Greek word for fear (phobia) of Friday (paraskevi) the 13th (dekatre). Ol’ FDR preferred not to travel on Fridays or on the 13th. He also refused to attend a party with…
Ripped from The Headlines… The Washington state Department of Licensing installed one of those automated phone trees (“Press 1 for… Press 2 for …”) and combined it with AI so Spanish speakers could get answers in their native language. A government license bureau + phone trees + early-adoption AI. What could go wrong?! Well… …when…
Today’s the day (in 1997) when Paul McCartney became a knight. Now we’re supposed to call him “Sir Paul.” Call me blasphemous, but Sir Paul bugs me. It’s that story about dreaming “Yesterday” that gets my goat. In his biography Many Years from Now (published just a few months after he became a knight), Sir…
Once upon a time, I tried to change the oil in my car all by myself. It didn’t go well. My first mistake: Choosing a drain pan that was too small for the job. My second mistake: Trying to cap the drain while oil was pouring from it to prevent the too-small pan from spilling.…
Recommended Book đź“š The 10 Commandments of Con Men… I was already an avid reader of John Bejakovic’s emails when I picked up his book “The 10 Commandments of Con Men, Pickup Artists, Magicians, Door-to-Door Salesmen, Hypnotists, Copywriters, Negotiators, Political Propagandists, Stand Up Comedians, and Oscar-Winning Screenwriters.” I read the book in one-sitting. The next…