Jason's Business By Bootstraps

Tag: marketing

  • Marketing or procrastinating?

    I’ve spent a lot of this week working on a new marketing program for January.  This is a good time of year to do that kind of thing, since most people are either on holidays or thinking about them, so getting a decision on a project during this window is like pulling teeth (though I […]

  • Marketing-driven design

    I hate when I have to admit that someone else was right, especially when I held such a strong position for so long. For millennia (internet millennia, anyway, or at least since the dawn of software made for sale) there’s been a strong divide in many companies between sales/marketing and engineering. Marketing would seemingly promise […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • 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 […]

  • How can you sell your service with your service?

    (Via Corrupt Camel) Granted, the first thing I think of when I see one of those “you just proved bench advertising works!” ads on a bus shelter is generally “you just proved you have unsold inventory!” but since I don’t much like driving I’ve got some extra brain bandwidth while I’m being chauffeured past these […]

  • The technology marketing gap

    I really enjoyed This Week In Startups episode 177 with Arnie Gullov-Singh from Ad.ly, who had lots of good insights as someone generating revenues from social media through celebrity endorsements.  Here’s my pull quote from the episode, in regards to Klout, which is a semi-competitor with Ad.ly, but relevant just the same:   [quote]It’s very […]

  • The villainous competitor positioning pattern

    A quick followup to my post on Infinite innovation vs sufficient suckage, which was actually born out of the ideas in this post.  There’s a pattern emerging, which I mentioned earlier, about companies positioning their crappy offerings as “slightly less crappy” as the ones from the established player in the market.  We’re seeing it in Canada’s […]

  • Wired offer shows email integration done right

    I don’t know what made me happier yesterday: the fact that the Wired iPad app is now free for subscribers of the print magazine (especially with a postal strike looming) or the way in which they told me: “hey, click here to get the app, and pop your account number in, which by the way […]

  • Infinite innovation vs sufficient suckage

    I only took one undergrad economics class but then I boosted that with stuff like Freakonomics, so I’m 100% qualified to talk about this today. Some wireless carrier ads got me thinking today.  Rogers has this data sharing plan, which, if I’m not mistaken, lets you share your data plan across multiple devices for $10 […]