29Jul 2022 by Aaron Templer No Comments
Rebranding is Change Leadership

Rebranding is Change Leadership

Branding, Leadership, Three Over Four Approach
How many guitarists does it take to change a lightbulb? Two: One to do it, and another to tell everyone how they would have done it better. Marketers are like guitarists in this way. We just love to amp up our outrage anytime there's a high visibility rebrand (even if they work out just fine most of the time). It's a passtime of ours, really. In my first column for Inc.com (here's all three I've written for them) I use this as a vector for discussing one dimension of leadership's relationship with marketing: Branding and rebranding is mostly about leadership because leading an organization's identity change is actually a complex and sophisticated exercise in leadership, challenging for the most seasoned leaders let alone marketers without any leadership training. So without…
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24May 2019 by Aaron Templer No Comments
Three Over Four on the Innovative Agency Podcast

Three Over Four on the Innovative Agency Podcast

Leadership, Three Over Four Approach
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  
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10Aug 2018 by Aaron Templer No Comments
A Professional Services Marketing Approach That Might Surprise You

A Professional Services Marketing Approach That Might Surprise You

Leadership, Professional Services Marketing, Three Over Four Approach
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 marketing at all. It’s leadership. That’s a weird claim. There…
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12Jul 2010 by Aaron Templer No Comments

A small wins strategy: The social web as liner notes

Social web, Three Over Four Approach
[caption id="attachment_2064" align="alignleft" width="250" caption="Albums - not just for the music."][/caption] 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…
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17Jun 2010 by Aaron Templer 3 Comments

As branding dies leaders rise

Branding, Three Over Four Approach
[caption id="attachment_2012" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Is branding really worth saving?"][/caption] 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 could…
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17May 2010 by Aaron Templer No Comments

Two lessons in collaboration and learning

Marketing, Social web, Three Over Four Approach
[caption id="attachment_1980" align="alignleft" width="300" caption="There are new bedfellows in the world of communications."][/caption] 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: (more…)
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