Category Archives: Bad Marketers

Super Soaker Teaches Us Why Focus Groups Are Important

Did anybody at Super Soaker stop to ask “hey, isn’t this product idea a little ridiculous?” at some point in the product marketing cycle?

Youtube: Oozinator – The Questionable Super Soaker
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Are Most Online Marketers Clueless?

I’m serious.
I am by no means a veteran in online marketing. I have the pleasure of working with and learning from people who have 10+ years of experience in online marketing, but I didn’t start riding shotgun with them until last year. I’ve talked to dozens of other online marketers, attended meetups, webinars, seminars, conferences, [...]

If the iPod Were Produced by Microsoft

Feature bloat meets packaging.

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The First Cardinal Sin of Marketing

I use the word “first” because I’m sure there are other cardinal sins that marketers commit, but at the moment I want to focus on one that is particularly egregious. So what’s the first cardinal sin of marketing?
The first, and arguably most outrageous, cardinal sin of marketing is to sacrifice long-term objectives in order to [...]

How Do You Fight Bad Marketers?

Seth Godin wants us to pretend that if a company employs unethical marketing tactics that customers en masse will recognize it for what it is and turn against said company. Yes, if a customer gets an unsolicited email from a company that doesn’t fulfill its promises he and his friends will drop whatever it is [...]

This is Why Small Businesses Don’t Tolerate Solicitors

I had a run-in with a bad marketer during my short lunch break today. I’m a big fan of supporting local businesses – they add character to the neighborhood where I work and I simply wouldn’t enjoy working there were it not for these businesses. So today I decided to extend my patronage to a [...]

TwittAds: A Company that Does Not Understand Advertising

TechCrunch basically made the point yesterday: TwittAds is a bad idea. I wanted to add my two cents from a the perspective of someone who spends a lot of time asking himself “would my company want to buy ads on this site?”
The point of TwittAds is thus: put advertising on your personal Twitter page and [...]

3 Reasons Why Marketers Hate Bloggers

On Friday last week I wrote about why bloggers hate marketers. I can’t tell you the number of articles I’ve read about marketers who simply don’t understand bloggers and how awful most marketers are at trying to utilize bloggers as promotional instruments.
What none of these bloggers talk about, however, is the subject of why marketers [...]

Bloggers Hate Marketers

There’s a great post on LifeHack today by Dustin Wax about "How To Get a Blogger To Promote Your Product." I originally began this blog entry as a comment on LifeHack in response to Dustin, but it quickly became evident that I’d need to dedicate an entire post to the subject.
As someone who is [...]