Matthews on Marketing

Matthews on Marketing

Marketingspeak: Who Coined the Term ‘Funnel’?

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The funnel is a shorthand term for describing the route by which prospective customers, or prospects, become customers. The visualization of the process looks like a funnel. A larger number of prospects go in the top and are reduced to a smaller number of customers who come out the bottom. Marketers use the term every day, but who came up with the funnel visualization in the first place? Interestingly, the idea for the funnel visualization was a refinement of a previous visualization, also … [Read more...]

Be the Buyer Day: An Easy New Year’s Resolution

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Every marketer knows they should know their customer, but few truly make the effort. It’s hard and takes commitment. Customers are busy and can be maddeningly difficult to get on the phone. A sales rep may not want someone from Marketing talking to their customer. Marketing teams can be so busy with internal meetings their existing workload that finding the time can be a chore. Like many New Year’s resolutions, putting the customer first is obvious, we know it’s good for us, and yet…Just like … [Read more...]

Marketingspeak: Why’s It Called ‘Boilerplate’?

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Marketing is full of jargon, anachronisms (B-roll comes to mind), acronyms, and new expressions dreamed up almost every week. We use them all the time, almost without thinking. I've done my best in The Professional Marketer to dig in and find their origins. This week, from my chapter on the press release, is boilerplate: "Boiler plate" originally referred to the small metal plate that identified the builder of a steam boiler. The term was borrowed by the printing industry, where plates … [Read more...]

Growth Hacking and Marketing Teams – Oil and Water or Milk and Honey?

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One of the biggest challenges in trying to finish a book is drawing the line on content. In a field like marketing, with so much innovation happening in the past few years, I am finding it hard to complete my copyediting without succumbing to the temptation to add new stuff. Around the time I was making my final edit to the chapter on building a marketing department in The Professional Marketer, I happened to be part of a number of conversations on the “growth hacker,” aka “growth hacking.” … [Read more...]

New Case Study: The Virgin America Brand

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Just completed this case study of one of my favorite brands, Virgin America. Thanks to my friends there for helping out on this case study for Chapter 2 on Positioning and the Brand. - T.M.Virgin America is a California-based airline that has a declared mission to make flying good again. Launched in 2007, the airline’s goal was to disrupt the airline industry. Though hyper-competitive, the airline industry had become sclerotic. According to the American Customer Satisfaction Index, in 2011, the … [Read more...]