If copywriters were actors, we’d be the sort who love rococo accents and false noses, like Laurence Olivier or Meryl Streep. We at the Content Bureau take pride in our ability to switch writerly guises and voices from one assignment to the next—heads-down white-paper financialese one week, eco-minded web copy for a sustainability initiative the [...]
Archive for April, 2010
Creative block? Try a worthwhile dilemma.
One of the challenges of working as a designer is that creative muses don’t respect business hours. Sometimes a brilliant idea strikes at bedtime; inconvenient perhaps, but still usually pleasant. More troubling is when you’re on deadline and can’t find inspiration. Every creative has her or his own techniques for breaking the block. One of [...]
The Mystique of “The Trades”
Every subculture needs its holy scriptures. Business executives feel more like business executives when they read The Harvard Business Review. Marketers replenish their chops with Brandweek, start-ups with Entrepreneur. And so on. From The Mining Journal (founded in 1835) to Fish Farming International, name a specialty, and there’s a specialty publication that confers at least wannabe-insider status on its readers.
Field Note #1: The New Sales Funnel
Sometimes I’m alarmed by how much business terminology, particularly in sales and marketing, borrows from the brutal lexicon of warfare: words such as strategy, tactics, campaign, and force (as in sales force) each hearken back to Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The field refers to a battleground, where troops use tactics to attack the [...]
