Marketing Speaker, Jim Ackerman Reveals the Demonstrable Power of Relationships

A lot of marketing speakers want you to advertise. Marketing Speaker Jim Ackerman wants you to build client relationships first. In this installment, Jim takes you through a case history that proves, by the numbers, that client relationships are crucial and powerful as predictors and promoters of marketing and advertising success, for small business and large.

Why is Southwest the Only Airline that “Gets It,” asks Prominent Marketing Speaker

Southwest Airlines seems like the only airline these days that knows how to treat a passenger, both on and off the aircraft. Witness their friendly people, their on-time arrival record, and now the online stations they’ve put at every gate to help waiting passengers turn wait time into productive time. Nobody else does that! All while the Deltas, Americans, and Uniteds of the world are charging us for bags. Are you engineering a positive customer experience in your business. Marketing Speaker, Jim Ackerman, examines the ramifications in this timely post.

Marketing Speaker Jim Ackerman Shares a Seminal Business Experience

The experience I had visiting Horizon Services in Wilmington DE, has changed my business and my life. Exec VP Mark Aitken doesn’t use the standard HVAC business for his model. He is patterning his business after the best that the world has to offer. No wonder he has one of the most successful HVAC companies in the country, with revenues above $35 million. And that’s how he can give hundreds of thousands in goods, services and sponsorships back to the community each year. There are lessons in this story for all of us. Not just marketing lessons… business lessons… life lessons.

Marketing Speaker, Jim Ackerman says Speed Is Of The Essence

The Universe Likes Speed… And So Do Prospects
When God told Abraham to sacrifice his son, Isaac, the scriptures record… “And Abraham rose up early in the morning… and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him.”
Interesting to note that there was no delay on the part of Abraham. He didn’t [...]

Tricks With Gift Certificates…

There are two kinds of businesses in the world… those that rely on the holiday season to make or break their year, and those that don’t.
If your business’s success for the last 12 months depends on how you do in the next 30 days, it might be a good idea to milk all the revenue [...]

Advertising is a messy, almost futile endeavor

A client called me from a medium-size Canadian town of about 120,000. The client is in charge of marketing for a jewelry store. One of about five competing stores within the geographic area of dominant influence of this town.
The boss had entered into an agreement to do some television advertising and they said they wanted [...]

Recession/Depression Prescription

I recorded this video a year ago. Revisiting it today, I was surprised at my own profundity. If you haven’t seen this, you really should take a look. If you have seen it, it bears watching again. It’s a good prescription for what you can do to save yourself from today’s economy.
Click on the link [...]

The End of the Branding Era

Hail the end of an era. A bad era at that, in my humble opinion. Hail the end of the “branding era.”
I’m not saying it’s the end of brands. There will never be an end to brands. But this notion of “branding” has got to go. And it is going quickly… although this is probably [...]

Happy Birthday Little Recession…

Hooray! Happy birthday to the recession! We’ve recently passed the one-year mark since the official crash and resultant “little” recession. How did you celebrate?
Actually, it hasn’t been just a little recession, has it? It has been, and continues to be, a big recession. A devastating one for many people. Unemployment at higher levels than it [...]

The Home & Phone of Good Customer Service

After a couple of columns worth of bad news, how about some good news? How about a couple of companies that  are doing things right?
I’ve complained almost tirelessly about the phone company over the years. If you’re a faithful follower of this column, or a reader of my latest book, How To Market Your Crap [...]