Jason's Business By Bootstraps

Category: Marketing

  • The iPad and the pricing paradox

    Here’s something weird: the Apple iPad has managed to make cheap things expensive and expensive things cheap. The expensive part’s easy. True story: I bought my first iPad because I had a meeting and I figured that displaying the pictures on it to the people around the table instead of trying to hook up a […]

  • Negative split testing

    In sales, primarily written stuff like web pages, emails, or old-school mailings, there’s a concept of split testing, whereby one sends out two versions of some sales material with one difference between them and then compares the response between the two.  The winner becomes the “control,” and then new tests are done to try to […]

  • Ontario Election 2011: ID confusion

    It’s election day here in the province of Ontario, which means I have to go all the way to a different floor in my building to exercise my constitutional right to throw up a little bit in my mouth.  But this isn’t a post about politics, it’s about the government messing with my mind. I […]

  • Borrowed credibility on Flipboard

    I rub shoulders with giants. It’s been about a month since I committed to daily Monday to Friday posts here. I’ve done regular posting gigs on other sites I’ve run in the past, but I was a bit out of practice so it took a bit to get back in gear.  Not so much with […]

  • The true price of sales training

    Studying sales and marketing is expensive. It’s not the courses, seminars, conferences and other sales training that gets me; it’s the “live research” where I actively pay attention to the marketing around me.  Take yesterday for example. The Art Gallery of Ontario called around dinnertime, where Kevin brought me up to date with some of […]

  • Positioning EdgeWalk: is the CN Tower’s attraction overpriced?

    I got a real kick this summer over reaction to the CN Tower’s latest attraction, EdgeWalk, where people get to walk around the outside of the tower, 1,168 feet up.  It’s priced at $175, positioning it as something lots of Toronto residents (the blog and YouTube commenters, anyway,) felt was a ridiculous price.  Me? I […]

  • Are people trying to help or just taking your money? Yes.

    That sequence from The Wire pops into my head more times than I’d care to admit, and I have no idea what it means 🙂 I’ve spent a lot of money on coaching, business services, training, and other stuff that’s not in the food, rent, or entertainment categories over the years.  Basically, things that’ll help […]

  • The nice things are easier too, how about doing them?

    The above image is in reference to Steam, the game distribution platform, but it applies to most online retailers and services. With the recent rumblings about why Google (and others) want real names – i.e. to track identities better so ads can be more profitably targeted, it’s great to remember that these powers could also […]

  • They don’t sell bananas at the farmers’ market

    Toronto has a bunch of Farmers’ markets, and at the one I go to there are a lot of actual farmers, but some are pretty open that they bring in additional produce from pretty much the same place the grocery stores get it.  I haven’t asked the others, but I suspect that there are a […]

  • Better copywriting with the Mindset Lists

    To the future class of 2015, Russian courts have always had juries. I learned this, plus 74 other factoids, from the 2015 mindset list, an annual report from Beloit College that aims to prepare professors for the incoming cohort by reminding them of how the freshmen class sees the world.  Some of it’s political, like […]