Monthly Archives: April 2011

I love split tests as a marketing tool.  Love ‘em. First, a quick definition:  Split testing is when you take a large number of potential respondents to an offer and split them up into different groups – or cells we … Continue reading →

While they’re unfortunate, usually typos just have the effect of being a little jarring or distracting.  At worst they make you look sloppy.  However, there is one typo of which I’ve been aware for many years that is a particularly … Continue reading →

I’ve been directly managing product and marketing teams (and indirectly managing cross functional teams of all disciplines) for almost twenty years.  Over that time I’ve evolved a philosophy of management that I call James Bond management. To understand James Bond … Continue reading →

I’m a big advocate of fact-based marketing, which means I like to focus on what we can determine objectively about the market and the customer as much as possible, relying on our own opinions and impressions only when we have … Continue reading →

If you’ve been reading earlier entries in the Tim Callan on Marketing and Technology blog, you’ve seen that I tend to invent these frameworks to aid thinking about how and what to do in business.  That’s what the baskets-versus-fruit parable … Continue reading →

For my entire career as a software and internet product manager and product marketer, I’ve been a strong proponent for focus on optimizing the user experience.  Here’s the story of how it all began. I majored in English.  My thinking … Continue reading →

Oftentimes business speak has the primary harm of being obfuscatory or simply silly – “I reached out across the cross functional matrix to create alignment of goals and synergies” rather than “I cooperated” – but sometimes there are bizspeak terms … Continue reading →

Marketing programs cover a lot of ground.  These programs are widely variable in such qualities as: Expense range Time to execution Labor intensiveness Predictability Ability to be tied to ROI Skill set required And many more. It can get pretty … Continue reading →