Remember the Basic Economics of Marketing (ROI)

I got a call recently from a friend whose company has developed a new consumer software application. He had been presented with an opportunity to buy banner ad exposures on a newspaper web site.  “The price,” he said, “seems pretty amazing.” (In a good way.)

The newspaper had offered him banner ads on their site at a price of $0.02 per exposure. So, he would pay 2 cents every time the banner was presented to a site user.  This seemed so cheap, he was suspicious. My reaction was the opposite.

This seems to be a common challenge faced by marketers – forecasting return on investment (ROI) BEFORE deploying marketing dollars. Yet I would argue that there are few if any cases in which ROI should not be the primary driver of marketing decisions.

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How We Judge Books… and What You Should Do About It

We’ve all heard the age-old admonishment. Don’t judge a book by its cover.

What a joke.

In a time when we are all subject to constant information overload, there literally is no time to judge a book – or anything else for that matter by anything more than its cover.

Thankfully, it appears that we human beings are intuitively equipped to make snap judgments with shocking accuracy. If you doubt this point, pick up a copy of Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Blink (The Power of Thinking Without Thinking). In it, he shares countless examples of people reaching amazingly insightful conclusions with seemingly almost no data on which to base their positions.

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