http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog Pithy, quirky, quixotic, insightful idealistic, helpful musings on branding, advertising, marketing, banking, and cyber stuff. Mon, 15 Aug 2011 17:25:39 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Back in the fall of 1993, Datastream Systems Inc. was being co-served by James Gibbons Creative Consulting and Perimeter Designs (Anne Peck’s firm), when they decided they needed an advertising agency. After about a ten minute conversation with Marketing VP, Amelia Fusaro, and an equally lengthy discussion between the principals ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/08/15/tomorrow%e2%80%99s-sales-today/ Back in the early days, we worked with a couple of passionate ladies named Earnest and Vail. They were high-powered advocates for the cause of exposing and addressing domestic violence as an everyday issue in our society. Not all that long ago, it was very had to do anything about ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/08/09/operation-safe-pregnancy%e2%80%94power-of-a-compelling-fact/ Both brands and individuals have personality styles. These are defined by methodology like Myers-Briggs, HBDI, DISK, and a whole alphabet soup of other instruments. But a big part of it comes down to sensitivity vs. insensitivity and emotional vs. rational. Everyone has the tendency to overvalue one’s own personality and ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/08/01/personality-styles/ I think that was one of Stephen Covey’s seven habits of highly annoying people. Not sure. But it certainly applies to creative strategy. Whenever I look at a creative brief and see an objective like… run an spot on 93.5 FM, or create an ad…I become very frustrated. Now, that ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/07/26/begin-with-the-end-in-mind/ I think it’s a great title for a book. At the very least, it’s a great name for a biographical blog category, featuring little vignette | case studies of clients and the things we’ve learned from them. Okay, so there are funny things, like the senior executive who hated the ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/07/13/our-clients-are-awesome/ We’ve launched a few social media programs lately. The whole process has been very influential on my functional vocabulary. I can’t say I’ve learned new words, but I sure use words routinely I never thought I would. Like blog platform. And micro-site. And RSS feed (about which, I understand Facebook ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/07/07/how-%e2%80%9clikeable%e2%80%9d-are-you/ These are important concepts we learned from our consultant. They are particularly important for franchise concepts. In fact, we had a client a while back that started as a franchise concept, but the very successful first location found itself so dependent on the personalities of the owners (an asset that ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/06/14/scalable-and-portable/ Our friend, Grace, stopped by for a brief visit yesterday. We are like proud parents (professionally speaking) when we think of Grace. The day we first met her, she was coming to show her portfolio in order to get an internship. That would have been … like … well, several ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/05/10/it%e2%80%99s-fun-to-look-back-sometimes/ A friend of ours has invited us on a tour of Israel. Yay! In his letter to us, and in a book he wrote about the connection between “The Land” and the Bible, he points out that learning the land provides great insight into the Book. It gives it a ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/03/22/a-sense-of-place/ I am, by nature, a self-absorbed ingrate. It took me many years to figure out that the person with the best idea isn’t necessarily the most important person in the room. It took me almost that long to figure out that my ideas weren’t necessarily the best ideas just because ... http://www.gibbonspeck.com/blog/2011/03/01/abracadabra-please-and-thank-you/