Issue 22

Marketing Hope Is Alive and Well:
Top Firm Marketers Reveal Their Plans for the Year Ahead

By Burkey Belser and Sue Allison

We surveyed AmLaw 200 marketers and found that there is a planned uptick in some marketing activities on the horizon for the coming months, including some surprises. Read the full article as it first appeared in the ABA's Law Practice magazine.

0 Comments

Issue 21

Your Client Feedback Program May Not Lead to Satisfied Clients

By Sue Allison

I was recently talking with a colleague about how a majority of management event attendees say their law firms are doing client feedback in a systematic way; but when we ask clients if their law firms request feedback on service and performance, the answer is almost always “rarely” or “never.”

1 Comment

Issue 20

In Client Interviews, How Questions Are Asked Really Matters

By Greg Newman

In our recent "Marketing Hope" survey of plans for 2009 and 2010, 64% of Am Law 200 marketers indicated they will be investing in client loyalty interviews. That's a smart move in any economy. But how do you extract the most value from those interviews?

0 Comments

Recent Posts

Part 2: The Reptilian Brain - Surprising Results from Brain Science

By Burkey Belser

Posted on 08/25/08 at 10:56 am

Two months ago you learned about the evolution of the brain and, we hope, got a taste of the power of the emotional brain to bring the rational brain to its knees. We need a bit more science to pull us along as we delve further into the efficacy of advertising (in which, you will remember, we want to include Web sites, collateral materials and other marketing efforts).

The amygdala and the hippocampus

If you flash your logo on a screen, it is registered in the hippocampus, part of the limbic system, which contributes to memory formation. But the hippocampus can only hold onto a few bits of information for short periods of time. To extend the memory, the hippocampus has to “talk” to the amygdala, which searches for and ultimately “matches” that immediate memory with other memories in its storehouse.

Let’s explain this again with an example: If you see a Coke can, your hippocampus holds that impression until it can match that impression (or “immediate memory”) with the taste and satisfaction of the contents of that can. The hippocampus, says Isobel Butcher, is like a “cloakroom attendant who receives your ‘stimulus ticket’—Coke logo and can—and matches it to the contents of the cloakroom in the amygdala—all other experiences you’ve ever had with Coke.

The amygdala winds up playing an incredibly important role in our lives. Match a past memory with a current stimulus and you get an immediate emotional response before a thinking response has time to even stumble awake. I picked up my gardening gloves on Saturday to find a harmless lizard had hidden itself underneath. I jumped three feet. I’m not embarrassed; I quickly determined the lizard to be harmless but I was out of harm’s way before the recognition of “lizard” crossed my mind. That’s the limbic brain stirred by the amygdala in response to the stimulus temporarily registered in the hippocampus. Got it?

It’s no leap at all to recognize that positive memories provoke similar instantaneous reactions in favor of a stimulus just as negative memories provoke fright and flight from a stimulus. All pre-conscious!!!

View full article

Tags: , ,

Comments (0)