The Gobbledy 2023 Year-End Wrap Up

Or, skip the wrap up and enjoy your break...your choice

Hello Gobbledeers,

How’s it going?

If you’re like me, you’re starting to get wrapped up for the end of the year.

And also if you’re like me, when you open your email this week you’re thinking, “please, please don’t make me read any more newsletters.”

Even the good ones! I even need a break from the good ones.

And I don’t know about you, but I consider Gobbledy to be one of the good ones. Top 13, definitely. Top 13 in my inbox, certainly. Top 13 newsletter that I receive on Wednesdays, no doubt at all.

So given that, I’m going to give you a choice….a kind of “choose your own adventure.”

Choice 1: Thank you so much for reading, have a great vacation and I’ll see you back here on January 10th.

or

Choice 2: Here are 5 of the most-read columns from this year that you can read at your leisure while you’re either in Florida, or awaiting Santa’s visit.

The choice is yours! (Though only one of the choices is correct, sorry).

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Why do software companies put their logo in urinals?

Pity the poor marketer who has to measure the influence of urinating on a logo on generating a sales qualified lead. And how many points does a prospect get for urinating on the logo? 5? And doesn’t this disproportionately generate more leads from men? Was there a female equivalent in the women’s bathroom? I have a lot of questions.

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I Think I’ve Found Gobbledy Patient Zero

Gartner is the patient zero of every software website you’ve ever read and thought, “I have no idea what this thing does.”

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How Not to Lay People Off Over Email

If I only had one piece of advice (I never have just one piece of advice) it’s that if you’re writing a note to your company that’s about to break bad news, don’t make the first paragraph some corporate nonsense about how your mission is to ensure everyone on earth has socks that fit and available in fun colors.

I love Pagey so much. He’s a pager, get it?

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3 Secular Marketing Lessons from Manischewitz

Manischewitz has done an amazing job with that strategy - it could’ve said, “we’re a kosher brand, and we just need to find more Jewish occasions for people to buy our wine. Or maybe we tell people to drink 8 cups of wine on Passover.” Or whatever.

But they didn’t - Manischewitz has 2 things going for it:

The wine is sweet.

The wine is kosher.

Those aren’t at odds with each other. They were able to run a two-pronged marketing strategy where they marketed to people who cared about kosher, and they found a growing number of markets where they cared about sweet (and the Ink Spots cared about both - sweet with an ancient tradition).

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Storytelling and Fakeness and Wrestling and I'm Not Ashamed about the Wrestling Stuff

For all of us in SoftwareTown (tm), it’s not about creating e-books and webinars and whatever. It’s about determining the values (we believe people work better when they collaborate). Then determining the “characters” or the functionality that represents those values (a virtual whiteboard that lets you collaborate without having to fly somewhere). Then how that story gets told each week (videos, emails, whatever).

Wrestling has the added benefit of ultimately being about good versus evil. That’s (obviously) a great hook. And then the characters can reflect different good values and different bad values, and the stories are about what happens when you pit those against each other.

I’m not sure there’s been a great example of this since this one from Salesforce:

Raise your hand if you’ve had a boss say to you: “Y’know what we need? A campaign like that ‘no software’ thing that Salesforce did.”

“Software is evil. Get the benefits of software without the evil parts” is an amazing hook.

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Thank you all for being a part of this Gobbledy community - it means more to me than you can imagine.

Have a great holiday and happy new year - see you January 10th.