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Marketing puts the ball in play; sales puts the ball away.

Brand Marketers like to change what people think, while Direct Marketers like to change what people do.

Brands were built as a substitute for relationships. Today, they are the antithesis of relationships because they can't -- and shouldn't -- change based on information about me, the customer.

Branding is accomplished only when you have a relevant message that is repeated with enough frequency to become securely stored in [chemical] memory.

A company's brand has almost nothing to do with its products or services anymore. Branding is really a function of the dialogue between a company and its constituents. The more meaningful that dialogue, the stronger the brand.

Be careful not to worship cool. It's a false god.

Given where the world is going, I recommend that companies be more concerned with their karma than with being cool.

Note: Older EBF articles are not currently online. I'm not sure if this is temporary or permanent. If you click you will be taken to the Archive.org site to find an archived copy.

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If you build a better mousetrap, the world will only beat a path to your door if people are interested in catching mice.

Neuman surveyed the available evidence and found what advertisers and educators already knew--that most human beings are "obdurate, impenetrable, resourcefully resistant" toward any message, regardless of medium, that does not fit "the cognitive makeup of the minds receiving it."

Wrote Neuman: "The mass citizenry, for most issues, simply will not take the time to learn more or understand more deeply, no matter how inexpensive or convenient such further learning may be." People want from the Internet what they have always wanted from media: easy access to material of general interest and, especially, entertainment.

A trademark plays defense. It's the way that you protect what you've already built up. It's your copyright, your patents, your table stakes. But a trustmark plays offense. It's the emotional connection that lets you go out and conquer the world!

Half my advertising is wasted. I just don't know which half.

The secret of all effective originality in advertising is not the creation of new and tricky words and pictures, but one of putting familiar words and pictures into new relationships.

Because its purpose is to create a customer, the business has two - and only two - functions: Marketing and Innovation. Marketing and Innovation produce results. All the rest are costs.

People pay for a lot of things that they could get for free; bottled water is doing so well that Coke and Pepsi have rolled out water products. You have to make it easier and more enjoyable to pay a little money than it is to steal.

Marketing is a luxury of progress. It is necessary only in cultures that have largely satisfied basic human needs.

You don't build it for yourself. You know what the people want and you build it for them.

Online, brand with words. Brand with accurate, well-written, up-to-date content. Brand with classification. Brand with navigation. Brand with the search process. Brand with the purchase process.

When introducing a radically new product, it is necessary to understand how consumers currently frame their experience of the problem addressed by the new offering. That is, no matter how radical a new product is, it will always be perceived initially in terms of some frame of reference.

Branding is not about communicating a message; it's about engaging in a relationship.

Our judgments concerning the worth of things, big or little, depend on the feelings the things arouse in us. Where we judge a thing to be precious in consequence of the idea we frame of it, this is only because the idea is itself associated already with a feeling. If we were radically feelingless, and if ideas were the only things our mind could entertain, we should lose all our likes and dislikes at a stroke, and be unable to point to any one situation or experience in life more valuable or significant than any other.

Why are customers who say they're satisfied not necessarily repeat customers? Because satisfaction is a measure of what people say, whereas loyalty is a measure of what they actually do. Many managers still don't recognize this fundamental difference, so they use customer satisfaction and customer loyalty interchangeably, as though they were synonyms.

Email is still a great way to communicate with customers, but it is now-officially-a horrible way to prospect. So before you launch any email program make sure it's about customer retention and not about acquisition. And even then, don't assume it's working until you can verify that with metrics other than open and opt-out rates.

Studies have shown that the male sees his relationship to others in terms of higher-lower, faster-slower, first-second. A female sees her relationships in less competitive terms: similar to-different from, know her-don't know her. Thus advertising that says others will be jealous if you own this product works with men, but is off-putting to women. Women want to be able to say: "Yep, that's my life. If that product works for her, it'll probably work for me." Women also relate better to "warmer" than to "winner."

If you want to write good promotional material, remember this cute little phrase: features smell, benefits sell. It's easy to turn a feature into a benefit. Just add a "so" at the end of the feature and fill in the blank.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Customers think about products and markets very differently from the way products and markets are bundled and sold in the physical marketplace. Customers think in terms of activities, while firms think in terms of products. Activities that are logically related in cognitive space may be spread across very diverse providers in the marketplace.

Very few of us, myself included, know the customer. One reason is that all of us believe, and must believe, that the product and the service we produce is important. But 99.9% of your customers couldn't care less about your product or service. You are not that important in their universe. And that's almost impossible to accept.

The second reason is that you amass an enormous amount of information about the people who buy from you. Yet, for almost all companies, at least 70% of the people or organizations that should be your customers are not. So, if you want to understand the customer, those people who aren't your customers are the key.

Marketing puts the public face on the brand. Customers' experiences are influenced by how the promise of the brand is delivered through the call center, distribution channels, billing and service departments - in short, the Brand-Customer Relationship.

Brands were the first piece of consumer protection. You knew where to go if you had a complaint.

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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A promotion is worthless if it doesn't translate interruption into a permission given. If all you do is interrupt, then it's a waste of time.

In practice, there is no generalizable evidence on any lasting persuasive effects of advertising - at least not enough to justify a global spend of billionsÂ… Advertising lacks consistently dynamic effects because of, once again, competition. Your competitors' omnipresent retail availability, quality control, category management, CRM, promotion, and advertising all interfere. Left to itself, advertising your brand would, of course, work wonders.

Realistically, I maintain that advertising works as paid-for creative publicity. A competent ad automatically publicizes its brand and brand name. Ads can create and refresh memory traces and associations. True results can be rediscovered often. But often they aren't. This kind of publicity can then affect whether consumers find the brand salient, familiar, and reputable - in short, a brand they may want to buy. Indeed, the more alike two brands are, the more effective creative publicity can be, as it is virtually the only thing that separates them, in both the short term and the long term.

The realistic task for advertising is not to change what people think about your brand, which is always hard to achieve, but to have them think about your brand at all. As Dr. Johnson said almost 300 years ago, "Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed."

Note: Business 2.0 is now part of CNNmoney and some older articles are no longer available

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Marketers are in a slow, denial-laden shift from buying content-attached audiences, like those of TV shows, to buying intent-attached audiences, like those of search engines and personal video recorders.