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Zen and the Art of Lawn Maintenance

TO FIND ANSWERS, SEEK ACTION In the past few weeks, we’ve worked on some challenging projects at Farris — helping people make tough decisions and get their messages out.An Austintown healthcare pioneer retired from a business he had built and loved. In doing so, six beloved employees had to be …

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Can a Community Create a New Brand?

BOARDMAN RESIDENTS AND BUSINESSES ARE GOING TO TRY“A Nice Place to Call Home” proclaim the signs entering Boardman Township. “A traffic nightmare,” proclaim some holiday shoppers. “You must have a location there,” say most retailers. “The Valley’s new center of healthcare,” say medical experts. So which is it? What captures …

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Marketing During the Meltdown

It’s quiet. Chilly. And still kind of dark. Most of the Valley is still asleep. But I’m at Mill Creek Park sipping the last of my wonderful hot coffee and getting ready to run one of the trails around the lake. I know the next 10 or 12 hours will …

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Accelerate Your Business with Ultimate eMarketing

YOU NEED SOMETHING NEW Let’s face it, we all do. You have the same website for years and even if you update it, so what? If you want people coming back and buying pro-ducts or services from you, you have to give them a reason to come back. You also …

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Partnership Marketing Minimizes Risk, Maximizes Reward

MARKETING TO SIMILAR MARKETS? Go to a home and garden show, and you’ll see landscaping firms right next to window replacement companies. Go to a church festival and you’ll see sausage sandwich trailers next to ice cream trailers. Go to the mall and…well, you get the idea. These are examples …

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Should You “Go Green” With Your Marketing?

Green, like hope, is not a good marketing strategy (yet).Joe Bananas and I were staying at a hotel near Chicago. We’d just come back from a golf outing reunion with our high school football team. Neither of us golf, so we played demolition derby with the golf carts while our …

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How to Sell Snowballs to Eskimos

It was 1985. My sales territory was the Yukon-Kuskokwim delta in western Alaska, along the Kuskokwim River. The Yupik people — commonly referred to as Eskimos — were my prospects. For centuries, they had built igloos with square blocks of ice, formed with crude wooden boxes. I was selling a …

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