Start-ups, by their very nature of having access to limited internal resources, agency support, and historical knowledge, provide an unparalleled environment for marketers to innovate. And they provide a trio of important lessons for large organizations.

Being the subject of someone’s anger can actually help you concentrate on certain types of tasks, but when it comes to more creative tasks that require open, lateral thinking, a dose of snark can do the trick.

In my years of working with successful and not-so-successful CMOs, one of the differences has been their ability (or lack thereof) to define and demonstrate a vision of their role within the organization beyond the grind of daily demands, sales or other metrics. That vision tends to take on broader aspects of the corporate realm.

Good question, and it's one this author posted on Quora. What's interesting, he says, is the difference in opinions among respondents from the brand, technology, and agency worlds.

Advertising has been around a long time. The advent of the data age -- or, as I've referred to it previously, the "Money Ball era" of marketing -- has brought more accountability and addressability to advertising, and the next ten years are only going to get more complicated.

The new CMO has to be digitally savvy, but it’s more than that. The new CMO has to be Social. And I don’t just mean social media (that’s part of it) but they need to be truly social. They're going to be out talking to customers, not sitting in their office reading reports done by agencies.

When we run the risk of being quickly pigeon-holed as another “me too” brand, our job is to break the mental molds.

Man, do the creatives get fired up after some firewater!

At a time when Google is moving into new services in which users have more options and are used to more experienced design, it might want to try to pick up a trick or two about human product experience design from the best in class on this subject.

More important than ideas are management teams; if new offerings are commodities it’s execution by the management team – what I like to call execution intelligence – that makes the difference in the market.

At most companies, it is a mark of shame to use anything other than the company's product. I doubt that you would see many tubes of Crest at Colgate-Palmolive. Try bringing a Coke product into Pepsi. It's kind of silly, isn't it? An innovation-focused company shouldn't have an avoid-the-competition-at-all-costs mindset.

These 11 fundamental marketing principles will help entrepreneurs, start-up teams, and budding CMOs lead an integrated marketing effort over the lifetime of a company.

I'm not advocating "Mad Men"-like liquor-pounding at the office. But I do wonder how things might work if we all walked around with an almost-drunk bravado.

Media and communications have changed, so a big TV spot or newspaper campaign probably isn’t the right approach for transformational marketing. But lately it seems the pursuit of breakthrough marketing creativity has taken a backseat to work on more predictable and achievable efforts.

The SETI@Home project's search for extraterrestrial intelligence offers lessons in how, where and why to apply social media campaigns.

The objective of process is to improve service quality and consistency. Unfortunately by dumbing down behavior, a "good" process can prevent firms from creating a great service.

Apple is exhibiting a spectacular amount of tone-deafness in its handling of the case of the lost iPhone prototype.

How is your experience changing as media titles unbundle from physical devices and become infinite and on-demand?

C.K Prahalad, recognized as one of the leading management thinkers of this age, died while on a trip to San Diego. Watch a video of the University of Michigan professor talking about the new age of innovation.

Seth Godin says if you're trying to build a community--or an organization--you must try something different, innovative and maybe even a little edgy.

What's your product development strategy? Does your company develop solutions-based products or develop simple products focus on sales and marketing? The answer, according to Joe Hall at the Marketing Pilgrim blog, depends on many things.

Somewhere along the way the word "irrational" was turned into a bad word, but Seth Godin argues it shouldn't be. Many successful business leaders have tossed aside focus groups and made seemingly irrational decisions about their products. Consider these few examples.

Bill Polian, president of the Indianapolis Colts NFL team, has the right game plan when it comes to his budget. After seeing some solid data, he knew he had to change something. Marketers should do the same. Here are a few questions you should ask about your marketing budget.

The full integration of social media may only be a matter of time, but the next frontier of marketing innovation is not yet on the horizon.