Content, Strategy, Marketing & Business | A consultant’s view » Christine Thompson
As a girl, I shivered one night in the basement where our TV had been banished, and thrilled to the Beatles’ American debut. Not all my shivers were from the cold of that unheated room… I’d fallen in love. A landmark event in 20th century music, the 1964 Ed Sullivan Show ignited the outbreak of Beatlemania […]
Clients often ask me, as a former Apple employee, for insights into Apple’s amazing success. I’ve provided some answers in prior blog posts — but Apple’s strategies are hard to emulate, because the secret sauce is in the combination of ingredients. Having said that, there’s a lot businesses can learn from their approach. So here’s […]
Combining Apple’s sexy new MacBook Air computer with Microsoft Office 365, is this a match made in heaven (or in the cloud), for mobile consultants? For Mac users Microsoft Office 365 could be an attractive way to benefit from cloud-based versions of SharePoint and Exchange, assuming Microsoft hasn’t relegated the Mac client to second class […]
Apple has earned the reputation as one of the most admired brands — and envied companies — in the world. For the third year in a row Apple ranked as the world’s most admired company, by the highest margin ever. But this didn’t happen overnight, and it’s not just because Steve Jobs is one of the world’s most admired CEOs. There are several factors that account for Apple’s continuing success as a market innovator.
A key element of Apple’s strategic playbook is
25 years ago Apple and a handful of partners ignited the digital publishing revolution. I was there, a senior member of Apple’s pioneering team, along with visionaries and change agents from Adobe, Aldus, Quark and others. Our work laid the foundations for digital content and publishing, key milestones on the road to the Web, social media, blogging, and other 21st century communications.
Most of the tactics based on SEM and SEO aim at capturing the attention of shoppers engaged in active discovery. Which is cool, if people already know your brand, are aware of your current offers, and generally understand your brand promise or core value proposition. (In this context we’re talking about the buyer’s activities during the earlier phases of the marketing funnel.)
But what do marketers do if people are unaware of or unfamiliar with your brand? Or if you’re confronting damaging misperceptions about your product’s positioning, core benefits, price-to-value equation, etc.? Search alone is not enough.
In a prior post I discussed my problems trying to replace Windows 7 Release Candidate on a MacBook Pro under Bootcamp. This weekend I took another shot at it, having found some posts that suggested my issues might be related to disk fragmentation. You may have to defrag your disk first Thanks to these posts, I […]
If you’ve been running Windows 7 RC on a MacBook Pro in a Bootcamp partition, beware. The path to reinstalling Windows 7 is fraught with problems, hassles, risks and time wasters. Quick summary, if you don’t want to read the rest of this post. After several hours of effort each day, over several days, I […]
Just before the holidays I invested in Apple’s new server offering for small firms and workgroups, the Mac Mini Snow Leopard Server. It’s a sweet package.
For $999 you get a whisper-quiet, energy-efficient server not much larger than a paperback book. The device comes with 4GB of RAM and a terabyte of built-in storage, plus an unlimited client license to Apple’s powerful server software (10.6.x Snow Leopard).
Apple claims this combination of hardware and software can handle up to 25 concurrent users. To handle more users would require more powerful hardware. I’ve been using it to serve a handful of concurrent users, and it’s plenty fast. But it’s not perfect, and here’s why…
This must be a painful time to be a marketer at Dell Computer. Dell has just introduced a svelte, feature-packed premium laptop aimed at execs, status seekers and “impression makers.” Thanks to their PR team (or influencer relations), Dell secured a high visibility blog posting at the NY Times discussing the product and its aspirational positioning. Unfortunately, it backfired.
