When you are an empathetic marketer, it is easy to get lost in the big picture and warm fuzziness of people, relationships, and ideas.  In fact, it is easy for me to do the same thing.
… Read more   There is nothing wrong with this and I wish there were more empathetic

Leo Burnett is a massive international ad agency.  They craft campaigns for some of the biggest brands on the planet – McDonalds, GM, Visa, Nintendo, ad nauseum… Read more   .
So leave it to this short guy in Austin to shout from our little blog, to fling a little stone at Goliath,

Last week, we began to discuss the foundation of understanding personality types for better marketing.
We discussed the Emotional Vs. Logical decision makers.
Today we will talk about the Deliberate buying style vs. the Quick buying style.
Let’s begin with the Quick style.
Quick… Read more    decision makers will pull the trigger

It was early 2004, and I was sitting in a client meeting with Roy H. Williams when he began talking about the power of authenticity.  I pulled this video up on my Powerbook as example for our client.
At the time William Hung was a household name, his naive confidence… Read more   

On BeneathTheCover.Com, we talk a lot about being authentic in your marketing and communication. I want to peel back the onion a bit on this and get a conversation started.
First, let me offer a definition of Authenticity direct from Wikipedia… Read more   :
Authenticity refers to the truthfulness of origins, attributions,

It is easy to talk about being authentic; harder to act authentic.  Managing crisis is a perfect opportunity to test how authentic someone is.
Here are a few things to consider about authenticity… Read more    next time you are in crisis.
Taking full responsibility for decisions made – If you find yourself

Using personality types to improve marketing and communications does not have to be hyper complicated.  Rarely is it useful to get down into the finer details of personality type… Read more   .  In other words, you don’t have to have a psychiatry degree to use personality type in marketing.  You simply must

Master being transparent – Unless you are a international spy or hold lifesaving top-secret data, being frank in world full of those trying to spin is refreshing.  Notice how Skype’s CIO doesn’t dance around… Read more    and try to skirt Skype’s problems.  He lays it all out – why hide from the

Now is the time of year when we all pontificate about what we think is going to happen in the next 12 months.  Sometimes we are right, sometimes we are woefully wrong, and other times we are blindsided by things we never saw coming.  Somethings are impossible to see, others… Read more   

… Read more   If you are anything like me, you love a fresh start.  Somehow when the clock ticks past 11:59:59 on New Year’s Eve and into New Year’s Day, it is a symbolic slate cleaning, and we all magically have a blank slate.  While it may only be sentimental, it is a