Category: Marketing

  • Mixed Message Monday: Kevin Hart and Kickstart

    Mixed Message Monday: Kevin Hart and Kickstart

    Mixed Message Mondays are my foray into marketing commentary, focused on marketing attempts that must have seemed like a good idea to someone, but have somehow managed to lose the intended message… I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it feels like Kevin Hart is everywhere lately. He’s doing TV shows, movies, guest appearances, commercials,…

  • An Addendum to My Open Letter

    An Addendum to My Open Letter

    [NOTE: This post might make more sense if you’ve already read my Open Letter to Influence Marketers, but I think it also might work standalone. Your individual mileage may vary.] After I published my “Open Letter” post on Friday, I had a conversation with Kate Hutchinson, a colleague and friend for whom I have a…

  • An Open Letter to Influence Marketers

    An Open Letter to Influence Marketers

    [UPDATE: I’ve posted an Addendum to this Open Letter. After you read this, be sure to check that out, too.] Dear Vendor Marketers, I love being invited to your technical briefings. I can’t emphasize this enough. They’re awesome. They’re filled with useful and interesting information that I’m more than happy to spend my own personal…

  • Things Marketers Need to Just STOP Doing

    Things Marketers Need to Just STOP Doing

    In general, Marketing is a Good ThingTM. It’s how we learn about new products. It’s where we get info on how to differentiate between products. It can help us decide a particular product’s suitability for specific purposes. The folks in Marketing in the IT industry often take a lot of flak. There are several reasons…

  • Mixed Message Monday: Flonase Thinks You’re a Drooling Moron

    Time for another Mixed Message Monday, where I point out marketing that sends a different message than the intended one. At least, I hope the message delivered was different than they intended… This time I take a look at an allergy medicine commercial for the brand Flonase. The commercial comes out with a great message…

  • Mixed Message Monday: Little Caesar’s Thinks You’re an Idiot

    Mixed Message Monday: Little Caesar’s Thinks You’re an Idiot

    (Think of “Mixed Message Monday” as “GeekFluent Hits Back at Marketing Gone Wrong”. I feature advertisements or marketing campaigns where the message that’s actually delivered is (hopefully) not the one the folks who paid for the ad intended.) Since my last Mixed Message Monday focused on Domino’s, I thought I’d take a look at another…

  • Mixed Message Monday: Domino’s Wants You to Pay to Train Their Employees

    Mixed Message Monday: Domino’s Wants You to Pay to Train Their Employees

    Since some of what I do for a living can be classified as Technical Marketing, every now and then I like to do a post that is more about the marketing than the tech. Mixed Message Monday is my series on Marketing campaigns that have gone wrong — you can see what message the advertiser…

  • Introducing Mixed Message Mondays

    Some of my hybrid job description covers Marketing and Marketing-related work, so I thought it only appropriate that I blog about marketing occasionally. With that idea in mind, I’m introducing a new feature on GeekFluent: Mixed Message Mondays.  Each Mixed Message Monday (MMM) post will feature an ad or a marketing campaign where the message…