ethanbeute

  It’s a commonly accepted and often repeated concept. It’s illustrated by powerful examples from Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg to Frank Lloyd Wright and Buckminster Fuller to James Cameron and Tom Hanks  (every one of them is a college dropout). It’s the sub-headline and positioning of a recent “Billionaire University” story in [...]

  The start of the NBA season on Christmas day, as well as loads of new advertising campaigns, somehow spurred my curiosity about the Facebook fanbase and Twitter followers of the professional sports leagues.  So, I went and tracked down some counts. To be clear on my philosophy, more is not inherently better – it’s [...]

Note off the top: this post is one of only two that ties together the themes of this blog – marketing, environment, and culture (only other one was about Lisa Gansky’s The Mesh).  Now, on to the post … Dow Chemical Company.  Do you associate the name with nature, harmony, connectedness, or humanity? No?  Then [...]

When the Colorado Springs Convention and Visitors Bureau removed the new logos and video from VisitCOS.com and disabled public viewing on YouTube, it broke (slightly) my previous post about the Live It Up campaign. Wishing I’d used KeepVid a week ago, I searched for it elsewhere online. I didn’t find the Live It Up video, [...]

  In Colorado Springs, a place I’ve called home for more than 5 years now, community leaders recently gathered and consultants were hired to create a branding campaign for the city.  The targets: “residents, tourists, and the business community.”   I love a good internal branding effort – one that gathers stakeholders, is facilitated by [...]

I just ended a 14 year run in local television marketing and promotion that took me from Grand Rapids to Chicago back to Grand Rapids to Colorado Springs.  My short description of the work: running an in-house agency to build brands, drive viewership, and increase our overall standing with all stakeholders.  So, my side was the business-to-consumer marketing that results in [...]

You can build the stadium, field a team, schedule the game, arrange concessions, and sell corporate sponsorships, but if you can’t keep fans in the seats all season, season after season, what good is the game? Answer: if it doesn’t work for the audience, it doesn’t work for anyone. I received an email from a [...]

It worked.  Link bait positioning drew me in to a series of posts from Dan Zarrella, “The Social Media Scientist,” who uses data to punch holes in “unicorns and rainbows” myths about social media. A trio of posts (two relatively new, another a few months old) all attempt to shoot down the idea that marketers [...]

This blog has been woefully neglected over the past couple months.  It’s not for a lack of ideas or opinions; I’ve got plenty.  Instead, it’s more an issue of habit and focus.  The former’s insufficiently formed as it relates to punching out short pieces here.  The latter’s been divided over other projects. So: a quick [...]

You’re welcome in advance for this one. Naming your business can be challenging.  Do you use your name?  Do you include explicitly the kind of business it is?  Is it more abstract and evocative? For your next cemetery, golf course, apartment complex, condo development, housing subdivision, retirement home (err … senior living center) or any [...]