Start-ups are teaching larger organizations some lessons, but are they listening? By the time some organizations finally schedule a meeting to decide who should study an upstart’s new product, the small company has already released its next version. Act now. Tweak later. These are the days of “minimum viable product” or MVP. MVP is a strategy used for fast and quantitative testing of a product. The idea is to get a “good enough” product in…

Groupon recently unveiled a service that features premium deals on high-end brands and restaurants. Groupon Reserve has dining deals and will add travel, entertainment, and luxury products. It also offers a free online reservation service at top-tier hotels, salons and restaurants and offers diners discounts of up to 40%. The move demonstrates smart brand thinking as Groupon adhered to these important branding principles: Solve a problem. Groupon needed to grow beyond deals on massages and…

Bend your knees, swing your arms back and jump. No baby steps allowed. Business success in today’s insanely competitive world often requires marketers to make a bold move to differentiate themselves rather than take small steps and incrementally move forward. In other words, jump! CASE IN POINT: Georgia Tech’s recent decision to offer the first online master’s degree in computer science. Bold? You bet. The Atlanta-based University is making waves in business and higher education…

As you likely know, we’re big fans of metrics, quantitative analysis, and ROI. However, strict devotion to these tools without understanding the emotion behind decision making leads to suboptimal results. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that there’s a human being on the receiving end of the ad, email or message. People make decisions based on many factors, both rational and emotional. Savvy marketers get that. Money isn’t everything. We’re in the middle of college graduation…

Kudos to Michigan and Syracuse who proudly wore their colors during last night’s March Madness final four basketball game. Typically, the visitor wears their team color and the home team wears white. Since the teams were far from their home court, they both smartly opted to wear their brand color. Michigan’s is maize and blue. The first recorded association of any color with the University of Michigan was in 1859 when a ribbon of deep…