In some cases, attitude is everything. When our friends at The Greenville News decided to launch their weekly news and information publication for Generation X, they needed to appeal to certain demographic characteristics.This is a demographic that tends to morph business, family, friends, leisure...all into one big thing. They are also a generation of shoppers. They like deals. And as the first generation of the Internet, they like (and are accustomed to receiving) FREE stuff. Particularly FREE content. And, it is a generation characterized by a passion for sarcasm. All of this worked together to form the self-effacing concept for…

This is a combination sales strategy and pricing strategy. We used to have a client who sold a certain product to maintenance managers at manufacturing plants. The product sale was a long-term relationship thing. The idea was to get into the plant with the basic product, which would then open the gate for followup services and add-on products. Pretty simple. Thing is, once you were in the door, there wasn't much opportunity for competitors, but once your competitors were in the door, there wasn't much opportunity for you. So our client had an approach that was something like this:Telephone sales…

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 domestic violence, even if you knew about it. And because of the dynamics of the situation, most of it went unreported. Part of the work of Earnest and Vail led them to the narrow sub-issue of "battering during pregnancy." They came to us with about a ream of statistics and…

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 color purple so much he turned purple when he saw it in a layout. But there are also really serious things, like the sales VP who taught us the principle of "moving next quarter's sales into this quarter." That urgency about moving a lead up the ladder and closing the…