Never a Lack of Ideas

A Walk on the Wild Side In 2007, I designed a rummy-based card game called What’s Wild?! . I produced several thousand copies of the games and created a company to sell it. I did everything on my own— from testing different versions of the game, filing trademarks, outsourcing its production, generating PR, building a web presence, shooting a commercial, and selling to distributors, stores, and direct to customers. It was the biggest learning experience of my professional career — more so than any other job and any level of education I’ve had. The past five years have had plenty of ups and downs and I thought I’d share some of the lessons I’ve learned along the way. My next post will be on things I now do really well because of this experience. Focus on what you do best. I’m a marketer, through and through. I’m not a lawyer or an accountant. When I decided to produce and sell What’s Wild?! all by myself, I significantly underestimated the time I would spend on things other than ...

Unfiltered You might think that all coffee filters are the same. And, in fact, a quick look on a shelf in a supermarket or a search on Google will not reveal much differentiation between coffee filter brands. You might think there's no way to create a brand for a coffee filter for which people would pay a slightly higher price than an unbranded filter. If you think that, you would be wrong. I recently saw this list of 24 things you can do with a coffee filter besides make coffee. I learned a lot — coffee filters are great for cleaning windows because they are lint-free. Who knew? And I'll bet there are hundreds more uses for a coffee filter that I don't even know about. A New Way of Thinking About Coffee Filters   What if one brand of coffee filter crafted its brand around the idea that there are limitless ways to use a coffee filter and encouraged its customers to share new ways to use their filters? Put great content like that into the hands of a gifted markete...

Adapt or Die   Those who know me best often hear me proclaim my theory that only old people choose to eat butter pecan ice cream. Oh sure, some younger people enjoy its taste, but nobody under the age of 55 ever goes to the grocery store or Baskin Robins and buys butter pecan ice cream. The flavor is simply outdated. What does this mean for ice cream manufacturers? It means they should keep producing the flavor to satisfy current demand, but they had better create new flavors to adapt to changing tastes. That’s why they’ve created flavors like French silk and cookie dough — flavors that didn’t exist 15 years ago. In short, they adapt or die. Add This To Your To-Do List Have you taken a good look at your products or services lately? Are you still investing heavily in butter pecan ice cream and counting on it being your best seller for years to come? If so, you need to invest in innovation as quickly as possible. It could be as simple as offering new items on your menu, new s...

Quack Attack Peabody Hotels around the country have an awesome tradition: every day, each hotel features a duck parade in which a group of ducks waddle down a red carpet and into an indoor fountain, where they stay throughout the day. At the end of the day, the ducks waddle back across the red carpet and into their nighttime quarters. A Duck Master leads the ducks both ways. Crowds always gather to watch the parade and kids love it. My lovely wife recently witnessed the Peabody Duck March, as it's officially called, at the Orlando Peabody Hotel and shot the short video above. Duck, Duck, Goose The Duck March is a great example of a brand doing something fun and quirky over and over — so much, so, that the hotel is known for this tradition. It provides guests with something to tell their friends and if you look on YouTube you'll see hundreds of videos of it. The Internet didn't exist when the folks at the Peabody Memphis Hotel dreamed up the Duck March, but now it he...

My blog was featured in our local newspaper's Blog Log this month. I'd like to thank Jasmine Young for writing an excellent article and representing my blog well. Here's an excerpt of the article and a link to the entire story: Blog Log: Never a Lack of Ideas, by Nicholas Scarpino by Jasmine Young For The Sun | June 27, 2012 Since college, Nicholas Scarpino, 30, always had a passion for marketing. Now as a Senior Account Planner at Google's Chicago office, he constantly has a flurry of marketing ideas flooding his brain. Three years ago, Scarpino decided to begin his blog "Never a Lack of Ideas" to pin down his thoughts. "Blogging is a creative outlet for all the marketing ideas I have in my head that I can't directly apply to my job," Scarpino said. "I blog about any really cool marketing strategies that I already see in existence ... and I also write about ideas that I came up with on my own." Scarpino's most popular ...

What's Your Name? If you have purchased a phone or tablet other than the iPhone or iPad in the last five years, it's very likely that the name of your device is not indicated anywhere on it. The manufacturer is likely listed on the back of your device (Samsung, HTC, Motorola, etc.), but not the product name (Droid, Evo, Galaxy, etc.). Isn't that crazy? Imagine buying a car that just said Ford on the back and didn't include Mustang . If someone asked you what type of phone you have, would you be able to tell her? Maybe. But even if only one in 100 people can't remember the name of their device, doesn't it make sense to put its name on the back? How would you recommend it to a friend if you can't remember what it's called? The Counter Argument   Technology changes very quickly and new products come out all the time. If a new product flops and there isn't a version 2.0 produced, manufacturers don't want customers to remember the name...

Tough Question "What would you do if I gave you another dollar?" That's the hardest question you can ask a marketing professional. The answer varies for every business and it's difficult to figure out. Invest in a better customer call center? More ads on Google? A new direct mail piece? An ad in a trade magazine? The question is so difficult because most marketers don't know the value each dollar across their different marketing channels (that's called return on investment). An entire industry within marketing called attribution modeling seeks to solve this problem. Yet, far too few marketers have attempted to tackle this problem. Solving it starts with gathering consumer data. At a minimum, it requires excellent website analytics and a flexible customer database. The best companies are able to gather consumer data across channels and build models to know how to spend that extra marketing dollar. The One Dollar Challenge   It would be f...