Marketing and the cult of the personality

Marketing’s loaded with big personalities – the Seth Godins of this world. Even the mighty Apple would have been nowhere without flesh and blood gurus such as Steve Jobs. Don’t underestimate your own reputation and its effect – positive or negative – on your brand’s performance. At a base level, people trust people and their [...]

Letter to SARS regarding failed tax application

Sent to contact.south@sars.gov.za on 2 September 2010. Presently awaiting a response. Dear SARS I submitted my tax registration application for a closed corporation at the SARS Cape Town branch what must be close on 2 months ago, if not longer. After queuing for about an hour, I finally got to the front desk, where a [...]

30 Seconds to Mars: My kind of cult marketing

I booked my tickets for the forthcoming 30 seconds performance in Cape Town this morning. Online. Early. It’s a far cry from my first encounter with their first album on Greenmarket Square. R30 it was. I picked it up and put it down the moment I saw these androgenous looking emo kids on the cover. [...]

Ooba: There’s a lot to be said for branded search

Conventional wisdom states that generic search terms are bigger than branded search. The South African search situation suggests the contrary. As one of the sorry bastards who’d bidded banked on the wrong keywords being ascendant, or optimising for secondary generic phrases that are both impossibly contested and disappointing in terms of traffic delivery, I will [...]

How has the world cup impacted your small business?

Everyone was creaming about renting their 27 squares batchelors out for like ten gorillaz a day, and then the 14 brazillion expected ama-visitas turned out to be more like 300 000 and all keen to dos in backpackers. How did your sausage stand do during the past month? Because if anything, I found that business [...]

What you want to do, versus what you have to do

Via StopDoingNothing.com: Does this resonate? Let’s talk about this later..

Sample cold-mailing sales letter: How to sell a populated website

So I tested the waters with the following cold-call sales letter a while ago when I wanted to flog a top-ranking website I own. The site ranks for a wide range of monetisable keywords, and I figured that the industry gorillas would see the worth of dominating the online space. On the whole they did. [...]

Cold-mailing decision makers: why more is more

I recently wanted to email a one-page sales pitch to an organisation I had no previous contact with. Conventional wisdom and the traditional doyens insist that you need to talk to the boy (or girl) at the top. But consider this. CEOs tend to be  a bit older than say marketing directors, and hence statistically [...]

Julius Malema Inc – when it lists, I’m buying shares

Julius Malema. This beligerent little fuck knows a thing or two about the modern South African attention economy. And, I am loathe to say, about the way African politics works. Be bold – be strong – for the megaphone Malema is with you. I see Max du Preez beat me to it with “The World [...]

Growing the relationships that matter

If you’re going to go solo, you better be doing it with your eyes wide open. When it comes to client and partner relationships, you need to master the art of cherry-picking. Focus on growing the relationships that will deliver value sustainably. This necessarily begins with choosing clients who pay their bills and partnering with [...]