by Marc H. Rudov | January 6, 2011 | Article
By now, I’m sure you’ve seen Microsoft’s series of “to the cloud” commercials. These spots, as demonstrated in the clip below, make two fundamental branding errors: 1) selling “the cloud,” yet another generic, nebulous form of...
by Marc H. Rudov | April 13, 2010 | Article
Almost every company has a chief of marketing mulligans (CMM), the person responsible for its indecipherable value proposition, or brand. Who’s your CMM? The CMM is the exec who habitually treats marketing like a second cousin to sales, the one who believes any...
by Marc H. Rudov | August 14, 2009 | Article
My Cousin Vinny is one of the best movies of all time. Two college buddies, Bill Gambini and Stan Rothenstein, are arrested in Wazoo, Alabama, for a murder they didn’t commit. Vincent Gambini (Joe Pesci), a lawyer-cousin from Brooklyn with no litigation...
by Marc H. Rudov | August 6, 2009 | Article
I’ve frequently stressed, and posted on MarcRudov.com, this maxim: If the brand is murky to employees, investors, partners, customers, and suppliers, they’ll redefine it in whatever ways suit them — killing revenues, causing wars between marketing...
by Marc H. Rudov | July 5, 2009 | Article
Imagine Tiger Woods announcing that, because he won the US Open in 2008 and is ranked #1, he would win again in 2009. Tiger’s too smart for that (by the way, he didn’t win in 2009). He knows that presumption — resting on his laurels — would...
