Reacting, Responding & Initiating

Marketing guru. Sold YoYoDyne to Yahoo in the first dot-com bubble (hmm, that sounds familiar ;-)), became Yahoo's VP of direct marketing, published a bunch of short & pithy marketing books, and now blogs a lot of largely-content-free-but-occasionally-insightful posts.

He's had a couple of books, two that I liked the most were Permission Marketing and Purple Cow.

Permission marketing talks about new media and how in the future we can't bombard users with ads (television). Users are too good at tuning these things out. Instead we have to establish relationships and give them things that they actually want.

Purple Cow talks about making unique products and how these products sell themselves. A purple cow is something taking notice over. But once we see one purple cow, its not nearly as interesting the second or third time. We also can't create a blue cow to have the same effect. Our next innovation must truly be unique and special to get the same "purple cow" effect.

Since then he's had other interesting books, but none that translated to an "ah-hah" moment for me.

Go skim some of his books at the bookstore and see if they interest you. I'd highly recommend the two above. His other books I won't vouch for.