Had the pleasure of having a dialog with the Innovative Agency podcast last week. We talked about leadership, marketing, and the Three Over Four approach to building trust with clients and within the marketing industry in general. Check it out here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/32-why-trust-is-important-in-marketing-how-leadership/id1419747902?i=1000439001014
A Professional Services Marketing Approach That Might Surprise You
By Aaron Templer
It was a privilege to deliver a Professional Services Marketing course at the Chicago headquarters of the American Marketing Association recently, and I’m really stoked to boil it down for a presentation at a Michiana American Marketing Association event next week. Professional services continues to be an important market segment for Three Over Four, and as we all know: if you truly want to solidify a concept or area of expertise, understanding it well enough to convey it to others is great way to get there. These engagements are great opportunities to share value and also return it to our clients. A funny thing happened along the way. I’ve come to realize that what drives effective professional services marketing isn’t […]
Stop branding. Start leading.
By Aaron Templer
Brand management and leadership share a common space: Influence. Can a brand share characteristics of a good leader? Or must it?
A small wins strategy: The social web as liner notes
By Aaron Templer
I’ll say it: Effective participation in the social web is hard. Damn hard. It requires strategic acumen more akin to leadership (valuing social capital and investing in the necessary competencies to build and leverage it) and execution skills more akin to in-person networking (add value to those you want to reach and do it all the time) than any kind of marketing and communications discipline. It isn’t free. It isn’t fast. And the worst time to build your social web presence is at the beginning of a campaign, a crisis, or any other time when you want to broadcast and promote. It’s exactly the same as this truism: The worst time to build a real-life network is when you want […]
As branding dies leaders rise
By Aaron Templer
Branding (not product branding, but that enterprise-level notion of name and reputation we’re still wrestling with) is dying because we’ve run it into the ground. If you asked anyone or anything to wear as many hats, mean as many things, or be a placeholder for so many musings as contradictory (think tactics promoted as strategy), impertinent (think one-size-fits-all-contexts theories), and importance-inflated (the genocide in Rwanda is an element of a brand? Really?) as we ask of branding, it’d die too. From sheer exhaustion. It’s not the years (to paraphrase Indiana Jones). It’s the mileage. Branding started as a notion of something you could control. If you had the resources to overcome the complexity of making fires and casting iron, you […]
Two lessons in collaboration and learning
By Aaron Templer
I had an interesting week of facilitating workshops and guest lecturing. Standing in front of people and trying to add value – acting like (as my late uncle used to say) I knew what I was doing. Two key takeaways from the week of acting like I knew what I was doing: