When I lived in Massachusetts, one of our favorite sayings was, "If you don't like the weather in Boston, just wait a minute – it will change." Today, that's true globally. Rain, blizzards, ice storms, melting ice caps, flooding, droughts, hurricanes, freezing, record heat – it seems everywhere you look around the world, there are weather and climate-related crises.

Yes, the weather outside has been frightful. But the sea change over the last 12-18 months is less about the weather itself and more about people's reactions to what's happening outside. It wasn't very long ago when our general reaction to weather was, well, reactive: put on a sweater, take off a sweater; put on sunscreen, take an umbrella.

Now, it seems, we're willing to look beyond these specific incidents to focus on the bigger climactic forces behind them.

How does this impact your marketing?

Read on....

Visa's Not Everywhere You Want to Be

The Marketing Leverage Hall of Shame/Fame is dedicated to those companies who go out of their way to differentiate their customers' experiences, for better or for worse.

This issue's suggestion comes from Wes Trochil of Effective Database Management in Hamilton, VA, who tells us why he won't be leaving home without American Express.

Read on...

Have a Hall of Shame/Fame tip? Send us your stories and anecdotes. Each issue we'll publish one of the best. If we choose yours, you’ll receive a special L2M memento (and the fame of being highlighted here) as our gift. Email linda@L2Massociates.com with your suggestion.

L2M Associates is pleased to announce our affiliation with Marketing Operations Partners, an organization focused on changing the M.O. of marketing by leveraging process, technology, guidance and metrics to enable marketing to run like a fully accountable business. L2M joins with some of the leading thought leaders in the marketing community to help clients accelerate the sales and buying process, build a lasting marketing infrastructure, foster customer delight, win stakeholder buy-in for key initiatives, and demonstrate measurable ROI to management. For more information, visit www.mopartners.com.

Our article Marketing Strategy is the Foundation for Business Success was the most read article in the MarketingPros newsletter in late October, and is available on the MarketingProfs.com.

Linda Popky was interviewed by Women's Radio program in October about how important it is to show the best face of a company to a customer. Listen to her comments.

How does Participation Drive Innovation? Hear Linda’s comments as part of the panel that addressed this issue at the Women in Technology (WITI) Women & Technology Summit in late October. Listen to her comments.

Linda was also quoted in the cover story of Small Business Technology Magazine's Autumn issue , "No Data, No Business," about the importance of protecting and backing up company data.

The first article in our three-part series on strategic marketing for startups appeared this month in American Venture Magazine's At the Table online newsletter.

Want to learn how to better measure and manage your marketing investments? Linda will be teaching a new one-day course entitled "Measuring Return at Marketing" on May 12th as part of the Integrated Marketing Program at San Francisco State University's College of Extended Learning. For more information, please contact SF State at www.cel.sfsu.edu or 415-405-7700.

Linda will also be facilitating a workshop this spring on "Positioning: Right from the Start" for the Women's Technology Cluster (WTC)'s JumpStart companies. WTC is a business accelerator committed to increasing the number of successful women-led companies in the life science, high technology and clean technology sectors.

Both of these workshops are available to individuals and corporate groups through L2M Associates. Contact us at info@L2Massociates.com for more information.

We are in the process of booking our Spring '07 speaking schedule. If your business or association could use a dynamic, thought-provoking presentation or workshop on marketing or business strategy, please contact us at info@L2Massociates.com.

You are receiving this newsletter because you have been identified as someone who may be interested in receiving communications related to marketing strategy from Linda Popky and/or L2M Associates. We do not ever sell, rent, lease or otherwise distribute our mailing list. If you would like to be removed from this list, please unsubscribe here.

Please feel free to forward this newsletter to others you think may enjoy it. To be added to our subscription list, please subscribe here.

Linda Popky, President
L2M Associates, Inc.

Email: linda@L2Massociates.com
Phone: 650-281-4854
Fax: 650-780-0386
Web: www.L2Massociates.com