Mandela Station at West Oakland BART — Hub, Heart, Home

Capturing the essence of the West Oakland community. West Oakland is an area between the growing downtown of Oakland and the bustling Port of Oakland. It’s a mixture of 19th century Victorians, old warehouses, and small factories. It’s also one of the most diverse communities in Oakland and the Bay Area with younger renters and homebuyers,…

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Listening.

Getting Away from the Noise. Marketing has a bad reputation. It should. Most marketers look for tools to reach more and more customers and grow their audience but do they really know who they need to reach and why anyone would be interested in what they are offering or broadcasting? New technologies allow us all…

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A Year Ending in Flux. What are the 2022 Marketing Trends?

The Global Disruption of Everything Two years ago the world was predictable, measured, consistent in all ways…often annoyingly so. As we all know, this suddenly and shockingly ended. The pandemic has brought with it the largest shift in global systems in recent memory. This disruption only emphasized the always-on connected and predictable way business, markets,…

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Not knowing the future is a way to invent what’s next

And then there was COVID… It’s March 2020: suddenly restaurants, bars, and schools are closed. When COVID hit and began to have global impacts, everyone was forced, location by location, nation by nation, to face a new reality. How and what we purchased changed overnight. Remember the toilet paper shortages (I still wonder why that…

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Do you really know me?

Personas: They are customers and individuals with their own motivations. What’s my biggest problem? What do I need to deal with to make my job easier? Does someone understand what I need to get done? Can you say one thing to me that lets me know you’ll solve my problems? In the B2B world, the…

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Staying Connected – Eight Ways to Improve B2B Email Marketing

1- Know your recipients. Why are you sending emails to your core group? This is the biggest and most important question to ask yourself and your digital marketing team. Who’s on our list, for what reason and why do we know them? The “they” is all about people with titles and decision-making power, or at…

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Nobody cares about your marketing.

Saturated: Search Results and Online Tactics Won’t Cut It. Many brands and companies believe that an online campaign to reach their desired audience by spending more on search, digital ads, and online marketing tactics will get them more customers. Not really. Consumers and customers of all kinds are lost in a world of information sorted…

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Listening to Customers, Fake Friends, and Consumer Behavior

Listen and Learn: What Are Your Customers Thinking? If you don’t listen to your customers — really know them and understand them — you can’t build a valued relationship. Many brands wrongly believe that selling consists mostly of pitching a product, a solution, or an idea. In fact, the most important part of selling is listening to…

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The Challenges of Email Marketing – And Why It’s Important

Email marketing, as we all know, is often perceived as an obnoxious intrusion of useless and repetitive sales pitches. However, when it’s done right it has value and is a fantastic way to build trust and connection with clients, potential customers, and valued partners. The key is continually providing value and meaning. The overwhelming experience of…

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Connections

Building Brand Value is Really About What Sticks. How do you stay connected? How do you really break through the noise? The associations we have and how we make them come to us emotionally and personally through binding experiences that connect us. In this overwhelming world of social media from all corners of the universe,…

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