Contagious Narrative

An anonymous listener asks, "What's the difference between a VP of Marketing and a CMO?" I get asked this a lot... the answer is important, and it's really one of orientation.

Giuseppe Marzio asks, "Should VCs care whether their portfolio companies work on building a strong brand from the start?" I think so, and this one certainly does.

Dave Melville of Bowdoin Group asks, "How do you measure marketing ROI outside of inbound leads?"

Jon Gilman (@jongilman) asks:  "What’s the buzziest buzzword tossed around the marketing world these days that you’d like to eradicate from the english language?"

Boston entrepreneur Dan Sullivan asks, "What's a generally good marketing tactic startups fail at when they do it too early? Conversely, what's a tactic that works early on, but doesn't as you start to scale?"

Having spent most of my life as an ad guy or entrepreneur, I switched over to the dark side about 2 years ago to become a General Partner in G20 Ventures. Fellow recovering operator and VC Gayatri Sarkar asked what I've learned that I wish I knew then, and the answer may surprise you.

Alex Cook (@aacook) asks: "I'm working on a bootstrapped startup https://nanagram.co . We help people send printed photos in the mail by text message or email, mostly to grandparents. I'm being pursued by one of the social media giants, claiming they own the word "gram." I'm at a crossroads. On one hand, I like the name as it pays homage to "telegrams" which were also sent in the mail like our photos and "gram" is a nickname for grandmother. On the other, I don't have resources to fight a long legal battle. So now onto my question… If you were me, would you fight trademark dispute, or cave and change the name, putting energy elsewhere? FWIW, the US Trademark Office was on my side when they reached out to me a couple weeks ago."