What’s New
Podcast: Linda Popky appears as a guest expert on Technically Speaking to outline your steps to launching and promoting your book! - Listen
Podcast: Linda Popky and Dan Weedin (Shrimp Tank Podcast) talk with Brett Clark from BC Fitness about the importance of staying active and doing resistance training to slow down muscle loss as we age. - Listen
SAC® Press Release: "Companies Eye Innovation and Disruption in Volatile Economy" – Read Release.
Video: Just a Moment for Marketing: One-minute marketing tip videos. – View over 100 videos.
eBOOK: Top of Mind: 101 Insights to Transform Your Business
Purchase PDF or ePub book.
Subscribe to the Top of Mind Thursday Newsletter
Free articles download with sign up
Marketing Above the Noise
Introducing Dynamic Market Leverage™, an approach to help cut through the clutter, stand out, and effectively build business.
Available in Hardcover and eBook formats
Top of Mind Thursday Memo Archive
Top of Mind Thursday – March 14, 2024: Starting from Nothing
This week, I’m in Tecate, Mexico at a wellness resort called Rancho la Puerta.
When it was founded 84 years ago, the Ranch was a small summer camp with very primitive accommodations. Slowly, over decades, the operation grew and developed to be one of the top-rated destination spas in the world.
Deborah Szekely, who co-founded the Ranch with her late husband, is about to turn 102 years old this Spring. She still is very much involved with the Ranch and speaks to guests every week about her experiences.
When asked yesterday what she considered the greatest learning from her century-plus years of experience, Deborah said, “We started from nothing. We worked with what we had and we grew slowly as we could without expecting things to change overnight.”
How often do we expect to jump into a new venture and have it succeed immediately? How many times are we disappointed because something didn’t grow and prosper as quickly as we would have liked? What if we just stuck with the basics and continued to focus on slow, incremental progress forward?
Deborah has one piece of advice she’s relied on throughout her life: “Do the right thing and it will work out in the end.”
Amen.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – March 7, 2024: For Everything, There Is a Season
What happens when the Internet freezes, again and again?
Not much gets done. In fact, everything in your business comes to a screeching halt.
That’s what happened to me this week after a Comcast “upgrade” that seemed to result in endless on-again, off-again service for an entire day.
After figuring out how to get past their chat bot to a live human, I had a number of frustrating interactions with the Xfinity team. They asked me if my coax cable was plugged in, rebooted the router several times, and then scheduled three different times for a technician to visit before we finally got someone out to resolve the problem—nearly a full day later.
Comcast has worked hard to train their customer support people. It’s just not clear they’ve trained them on the right things. They are invariably polite and try to be helpful. Multiple people told me to “rest assured” this would be taken care of promptly. This kind of language is not reassuring at all. I finally told them I would not rest until this was fixed and the “assured” part was not something they should be pushing—given how hard it was to get to the right person who could fix this.
But the worst thing was one well-meaning rep who had been prompted to tell me he had a way to cut my internet costs. . . if I would move my mobile phone service to Comcast. Huh?
The last thing you want to do when a customer is having ongoing problems with an existing product or service is to try to upsell them to buy more of your offerings. All I could think was what a hole I would have been in had my mobile service been subject to the same issues I was having with internet connectivity!
A friendly and helpful technician came out the following day and within 20 minutes found the source of the problem and fixed it. The good news is he didn’t try to upsell any additional products. The bad news is he then pleaded with me to give him a great rating in the survey I was about to receive—or he might get suspended for 5 days. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but it was at least a novel excuse.
Meanwhile, I pointed out to him that my street was at that very moment being dug up by one of his competitors to install fiber and offer us an alternative to Xfinity. Maybe now would be a good time to work on improving existing services, not pushing new ones or rigged rating systems. I doubt that this will happen. Rest assured.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 29, 2024: Leaping Forward
Today, February 29, is Leap Year Day—the day that only appears once every four years.
Anything that happens today—good or bad—will only come back around for an exact anniversary in 2028. But did we move forward or backward since the last leap year in 2020?
Hard to believe, but four years ago, we were just starting to worry about something called Coronavirus. Not long after this date, the world pretty much shut down. We learned how to be socially distant, the importance of N95 masks, what worked and didn’t work in remote settings, and that even the best restaurants could (and would) provide good takeout meals.
In the last four years, we’ve seen a couple of conflicts wind down and two more new wars ramp up. We’ve seen a rise in incivility and violence in general, and antisemitism, racism, and gender-based hatred in particular.
Cybersecurity and supply chains are no longer the buzz words they were four years ago, but AI and ChatBots are the hot topics now. As happens with most technologies, we’re warned they may drastically change our lives. The question remains whether that will be for the better, the worse, or perhaps not much at all.
We’re still dealing with the fallout from the insurrection in January of 2020, with some perpetrators sentenced for their crimes, and the former president indicted 92 times for various criminal acts—for which he may or may not ever see the inside of a courtroom. And we likely will have the same two men vying to be the oldest-ever president again.
We’ve seen major steps backwards on women’s rights, including the reversal of Roe v. Wade and now an Alabama court that has jeopardized the success of in vitro fertilization by declaring that frozen embryos are full-fledged people. (Does that mean one can use the car pool lane with a test tube beside them? Inquiring minds want to know.)
The question now is where will we be on Feb. 29, 2028.
Will we have moved forward or back? That’s up to each of us. Today’s a good day to think about what steps we want to take personally and professionally to be in a better place in the future. That’s not such a big leap to make.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com
Top of Mind Thursday – February 22, 2024: The Death of Dissonance
On Friday, Alexei Navalny, the leading opponent to Vladimir Putin in Russia, died mysteriously.
While his death was shocking, it was not a surprise. Anyone who crosses Putin faces a much shortened lifespan—some fall out of tall buildings, others are poisoned or shot, and still others, like Yevgeny Prigozhin, are killed when their plane suddenly blows up.
Navalny himself survived a poisoning attempt in 2020, yet he returned to Russia where he was captured as an enemy of the state and imprisoned in a remote prison camp.
Navalny was the last of the well-known dissidents to question Putin’s supremacy. Since his death, hundreds of people throughout Russia have been arrested for leaving memorials to Navalny. A Russian-American woman is being held for sending a $51 donation to a group supporting Ukraine.
Navalny’s widow vows to continue his fight, albeit from outside Russia, but how much she can achieve under the current conditions remains to be seen.
There’s a lesson for us here in the US. No one here is arrested for expressing views against a political figure. We don’t poison those who oppose the government, nor do we blow up their planes or push them out of tall windows.
But democracy is fragile. Over the last decade, we’ve seen attempts to resort to violence rather than accept the will of the people through the voting process. We’ve seen political candidates threaten to eke out revenge against their rivals if they’re elected. We’ve seen colleges and universities physically attack those who belong to a different ethnic group or who don’t subscribe to the mob’s prevailing views. We’ve seen too much effort to stamp out dissonance.
Music without dissonance is boring. But a world without dissonance is dangerous. Let Alexei Navalny’s death be a warning to us: We can’t afford to let dissonance die.
Check out our marketing leadership podcasts and the video trailer for my book, Marketing Above the Noise: Achieve Strategic Advantage with Marketing that Matters.
.
Let us help your business rise to the top.
linda@popky.com
(650) 281-4854
www.leverage2market.com