First of all, can I say: HELL YES DAVID BOWIE: There have been a few people saying how this was a masterpiece of viral marketing. And in a way, it was – it was announced via 1 tweet from Duncan Jones (David’s son, for all those who don’t know) and immediately set Twitter on fire. Facebook and even the BBC weren’t far behind. But the marketing here wasn’t really the viral part. You or I couldn’t record a...

Take 5 minutes, and read this: 8 powerful speech techniques used by Barack Obama Good sales copy, in the words of the prophet, is salesmanship in text. And make no mistake, all those techniques ARE salesmanship. Every one, from the repetitions to the tone to the focus on story, is designed to sell you – in this case, sell you on Barack Obama. Of course, to the crowd in front of him on election night, the sell was easy. To the people it...

Read this: Workplace discrimination prompts ‘whitened’ job applications Does it seem familiar? It’s fairly common knowledge that there’s a bias in favour of white people in the employment market, but here’s something you may not know: it’s not just bigotry. In fact, it’s rational. Tim Harford talks through the psychology behind this in The Logic Of Life. In the experiment, students were divided into 2...

Read this: Persuading vs Convincing That is all. Share this:FacebookTwitterGoogleLinkedIn

Here’s something I didn’t know. I discovered it thanks to NaNoWriMo. The idea behind NaNoWriMo is simple – you write a 50,000 word novel in November, quality be damned. The point is to force you to put words on a page. It doesn’t work for me – whatever I’m writing, be that copy or fiction, I’m far too much of a perfectionist. I hate writing bad words, and work far better taking time to produce good...

Here is a video of a smart man talking about smart things: Please ignore the bit about the Wright Brothers. It’s tosh. The rest of it, though, is an insightful bit of marketing. We don’t buy the what, or the how, we buy the why. Let me put it another way: We buy based on our emotions. We buy based on how the purchase makes us feel, and what crowd it makes feel part of. The important part is not so much making sure that your...