Marketing Archives - Three Over Four

03Jul 2021 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Aaron Templer Published In Marketing Profs

MarketingProfs was kind enough to publish a piece of mine, “Why Social Media Should Leave Your Marketing Department—And Where It Should Go Instead".” It's a distillation of a few chapters in my book, Leading in a Social World. In the piece I basically deconstruct social media marketing, and reconstructs it in a customer care space. TL;DR: Social constructs generate value by way of social capital. Leaders interested in generating this kind of value need to think about social groups very differently than marketing segments. It's about reciprocity and democratized relationships, very different than funnel-conversion thinking. Check it out! Aaron

07Nov 2015 by Aaron Templer

Process vs. Product

Marketing, Three Over Four Approach

I’m interested in the business-minded pursuit of understanding creativity. I’m not sure what to do with it, but I’m interested. One thought that keeps coming to mind: The creative processes that I’m most familiar with don’t start with outcome. I can’t help but wonder if this is why businesses are tripping over the concept and have such a hard time integrating it into their working environments. Business, by its nature, solves a problem for someone. If there’s no problem to be solved, there’s no market. No market, no money. The creative processes that business minds are trying to learn from start in a very different place. A place of expression, not fixing. Exploring the problem, not solving it. If you have a minute contrast a few articles: This nice snippet…

01Jun 2014 by Aaron Templer

Storytelling the Three Over Four Way

Branding, Marketing, Three Over Four Approach

I had a terrific time working with The Colorado Medical Society this past May. The President of the CMS had a great idea to interweave storytelling techniques for leaders throughout the entire conference. His thinking was that we all leave these conferences full of energy, armed with new information to make changes in our society, businesses, or communities. But we’re missing the tools to actually do something about it. So I was brought in to help by way of providing techniques for leaders to tell stories. Storytelling being, of course, one of the more effective way to engage and move people. We did a few things to bring storytelling into the conference. (This is an environment which, incidentally, isn’t exactly the most welcoming place for such a topic. After all,…

09Aug 2013 by Aaron Templer

Digital Marketing. Or, Marketing.

Marketing, Social web, Three Over Four Approach

A friend, mentor, and professor of mine was a leading voice in southern poetry. He wrote profoundly about many things, most notably about the martyrs of the civil rights movement and white privilege. So it made more than a little sense when the chair of his department asked him to teach a class about multiculturalism in American literature. He refused. And his reason why will stick with me forever. He told me “I told them that the history of American literature is multicultural. The entire damn American narrative is about our multiple cultures. I can’t see how we can teach any American literature course without it dealing with multiculturalism at its core.” At the risk of inflating my self importance (let’s be honest: what I do is to his work…

02Jan 2012 by Aaron Templer

No more. No less.

Branding, Marketing, Three Over Four Approach

Last year, I busted out a few guest posts for the blog Please Feed The Animals. When I asked Erik Proulx (the curator of the place turned film director and inspiration for me and countless others to have the courage to just friggin’ do stuff that’s important) how many words he thought worked best on PFTA, he said “between 30 and 3000.” There’s this famous scene from Amadeus. I don’t understand. There are just as many notes as I required. Neither more no less. And then this nice article from the ever-reposeful Pico Iyer quotes Thoreau: “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” All reminders for me today: It’s the story, not the tactics associated with telling it, that makes…

27Sep 2011 by Aaron Templer

Shame on the brand? Or shame on the agency?

Branding, Marketing, Three Over Four Approach

Are values solely the domain of the client? The brand? Watch this video. Maybe not new to many of you, but important. I can’t ever remember hearing about the agencies responsible for this kind of work coming under criticism. Can somebody point me to an instance? Because I’m wondering why. Is it wrong to keep the agencies responsible for this stuff out scrutiny? Why are they immune from criticism? Can’t they say no to the work? Arthur Anderson wasn’t exactly excused in the Eron’s misdeeds. Values matter. We make decisions based on them. Those decisions create good, spread ideas, move us forward. Or they contribute to the dynamics in our world we know aren’t of value. I bet that there’re more than a few agencies who’ve turned down work like…

14Oct 2010 by Aaron Templer 1 Comment

A few ways to stop intellectual load shedding

Leadership, Marketing

There are many places in the world that have regular “load shedding,” or rolling blackouts. It’s a fact of daily life. When I travel with my wife and in-laws to India, we stay in a small townhouse in Nashik, Maharashtra. Load shedding is as much a part of our daily planning as what we need to get at market. It effects shower schedules (water is heated by an individual, portable “geyser” that runs on electricity), which cascades into breakfast schedules, which cascades into when we can leave the house, which cascades into when we’ll be able to meet with a visiting relative, which cascades into where we need to be for lunch (the main meal of the day), which inevitably bumps into the next scheduled load shedding. (more…)

24Aug 2010 by Aaron Templer 1 Comment

The Agnostic Brand

Branding, Marketing, Social web

True story: A guy robs several Pittsburgh banks fully undisguised. His face is recognized clearly on video surveillance, and he is caught. When asked by investigators why he didn’t wear a mask, he said “I wore the juice.” The bank robber was convinced that lemon juice, when applied to the face, makes you invisible to cameras. This is a leading example in a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments.” In essence, the paper suggests that this bank robber wasn’t just too stupid to be a bank robber. He was too stupid to know he is too stupid to be a bank robber. The paper actually generated a term for this dynamic. Which I just love. When you're too…