Last week I ran across a New York Times article detailing one marketing research company’s process to determine the ugliest color in the world. The winner, Pantone 448, was voted ugliest color in a survey of 1,000 smokers. As the article reports, “It was described as looking like death, filth, lung tar or baby excrement…” The purpose of this was to use that color in a social marketing campaign against tobacco—to get people to associate ugliness with tobacco use, to reinforce its detrimental health affects in a visual and subconscious way.

Yet some people have positive associations of "chocolate candy" for any dark brown color. How can you and your team decide on the best combination of marketing with color and effectiveness for your next project?

It is every marketer or writer’s nightmare. After years of carefully planned and executed content strategy, your recipe for creating content is falling flat. Matching mission-driven keywords to audience social media sharing stats and website traffic reports is starting to lead to utterly predictable and b-o-r-i-n-g content.

Trying to help your team keep up with the incredible rate of marketing change? And keep on top of your daily work, and keep your brain open to thinking in new ways, and model continuous learning, and get the amount of sleep recommended for optimal brain performance? It’s tempting to say: “Good luck with that.” But the reality is there are known strategies and resources that work for high performers across sectors and in businesses of all sizes. Let’s look at core strategies and a few top choices for resources.

"A picture is worth a thousand words" has never been more relevant. Cave paintings thousands of years old got a simple message across, but now you need to decide daily when or which pictures to use, from a myriad of sophisticated visual methods, so you can communicate complex messages quickly and persuasively in an attention-deficit world.