Category: Contentions
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Get your customer’s name right, or don’t ask at all
In 2012, Starbucks baristas started writing down their customers’ names on their cups. This convention spread around to other businesses. Since then, I’ve been asked my name a lot. Here is what I often seen on labels in response: Harper Harbor Harvard Trevor Herburger While most customers probably won’t mind, as long as the product’s…
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World building, observations, and names
A couple of years ago, I wrote about how one way to see branding was to build a world. I currently work as the director of marketing at FGX. One of the aspects that continues to energize me is the depth of thought the leaders put into defining the world of global IT logistics. They’ve…
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Don’t just talk about it, write it out
There is a lot of jargon in the business world. That’s because it’s easy to give something a name and talk about it. It’s much more difficult to give meaning to the name and define it. Writing the new definition out forces you to get clear on the specifics of what it means. It also…
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AI and living tutorials
A couple of years ago, I published a post on how I thought AI would disrupt writing, editing, and marketing. I wrote, “The notion that people won’t get replaced with A.I., but people who work with A.I., rings true in each of these fields.” One reason this happens is because AI simply makes an individual…
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Contentions: Apple TV’s billion dollar loss
There’s a possibility that Apple is losing over $1 billion per year on Apple TV. The so-called “loss” is plausible, it’s also a rather ordinarily-sized expense considering Apple’s relatively high scale other marketing expenses. Consider this: Another report suggests that Apple spent $775 million per year on ads in 2023, with $512 million of that…
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AI can help spot the difference
I tried a new AI prompt for editing a couple of work-related documents—an email and a blog post—that my team plans on publishing. The prompt was a version of this: “Can you please edit this following draft for polish and tighten up each sentence one at a time?” The result was a line by line…
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Good Enough
There are enough people who don’t like how software has evolved, don’t need all of the bells and whistles (and don’t want to pay for it), and remember how much simpler software used to be. It’s how I feel about the music app, Doppler. I don’t know the team at Good Enough, but it seems…
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Polish as a commodity
Here’s an interesting idea: don’t use your editing time to polish a post (i.e., tightening up sentences, making line edits, rephrasing, etc.). Instead, use it to do more research. For example, find a better example—one that surprises you (and, hopefully, the reader). You could also look for a related concept to tie into the piece.…
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I don’t miss RSS one bit…
Because I use it every day. I use NetNewsWire to read new posts. I subscribe to a bunch of newsletters hosted on Substack—you can just type /feed after the URL and you’ll receive Substack through RSS. You can do the same with Medium. For other newsletters, I use Kill the Newsletter to subscribe via RSS.…