Small Business

Learn why your marketing blends into the noise, how fear keeps you chasing bad clients, and what bold positioning choices turn your firm into the obvious choice for ideal clients.

You're hustling yet stuck. The breakthrough comes when you stop, pull back, and aim. Build tension through focus, sharpen positioning, release momentum that attracts ideal clients and premium pricing.

This small business marketing lesson gives a quick breakdown of the 3 Layers of Marketing (Product, Experience, and Promotion) and why it's important to start with the bottom layer and work your…

Far too many experiences are designed around the assumption that people want to be engaging with them. It’s an easy mistake to make. If you’re designing, say, an ecommerce site, it would be natural to assume your customers have an internal drive to find a product they want, add it to their cart, a…

As much as our work at Forty is about “touchy-feely” stuff (psychology, emotion, metaphor, experiences, etc.), I’m still a numbers guy at heart. That’s why I get so frustrated every time I hear someone recommending crowdsourced design services like [99designs](https://web.archive.org/web/20130115155…

Business is historically a male-dominated endeavor, so it’s no surprise that the stereotype about what it takes to succeed in business involves traditionally masculine characteristics: aggression, tactical thinking, bravado, ruthlessness, objectivity, ego, pride, sports metaphors, war metaphors, etc…

When I was young, I had a really pessimistic view of marketing. I thought advertising was about emotional blackmail and manipulation, branding was conceptual mumbo-jumbo, design was pointless visual fluff, and public relations was just a way to hide your faults and deceive your customers. Taken toge…