As marketing and public relations professionals, one thing we can’t stress enough is that everything your business does is marketing. Perhaps not in the traditional sense, but really, what is marketing?

The American Marketing Association defines marketing as “the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large.”

When things go awry in this process, there are many ways to make things even worse. There are also, thank goodness, ways to make things better. This article, by Impact Learning Systems International offers a great reminder about the value of customer complaints and those who take the time to make them. It also gives tips about how to make the most of these interactions. Give it a read. It will only take a moment.

While you’re there, check out some of their other blog posts. Impact Learning is a great company offering proven customer service training and sales training programs.  Just down the street from us in beautiful San Luis Obispo, CA, Impact Learning helps organizations build value and integrity into customer relationships.

Effectively managing customer relationships is one of the important “non-marketing” aspects of marketing that every business needs to understand.

As you may have noticed, the Big Ears blogger has been laggy about updates. It started with a trip out of state, where the accommodations didn’t provide the promised wifi connection. (Well, technically, the wifi was there. It just wouldn’t let anyone connect to it.) This led to rushed visits to a coffee shop, where most time connected was spent on vital correspondence and file uploads.

Upon return to California, there was so much to catch up on and so many clients to please. And here we are. But things have calmed down. Our noses have returned to the grindstone … and our fingers to the keyboard.

How about you? How’s that To Do list? If you need a little help finding your groove, here’s a great procrastination hack. Click now. Really. Now. Don’t tell yourself you’ll “come back to it.”

In case anybody still doubts the power of a well-written ad, we present the Wicked Sick project. Will merely changing the copy of an ad result in an increase in perceived value?

Let’s take a look at the max wicked sick power of words.