I have been watching some of the NFL Playoff games this weekend and took notice of the Chevy approach to marketing in today's economic climate. Auto sales have been dropping drastically for months - across all brands. When challenged with keeping your brand in front of potential customers while also trying to maintain some sort of market share your choices of approach are really limitted as a marketer.

Chevy, I believe has taken an interesting approach. Sure sales across all brands are down, but what if you could really focus on and actually gain market share in this environment to minimize your losses?

In their latest series of ads for the Chevy family of vehicles, mainly focusing on their trucks and cross-over vehicles, Chevy is taking direct shots at the competition. Comparing features, accessories, storage space and seating compacity. Each execution names the competive brand and model, while positioning the Chevy brand and model well above.

It will be interesting to see if there is any measurable correlation in sales for any of the companies mentioned, but I have to applaud Chevy for finding a strategy that might just work on several key levels.

When thinking about your own marketing efforts in this economy, remember that you always have the option to build your brand, even at the expense of the competition. Belief in your brand, product and service is paramount in this economy. Self-confidence in your brand can lead to consumer confidence in your brand as well - as long as you somehow let the world know about your confidence.

I have been helping a couple of friends of mine over at burningewok.com with some coding and blog development for their podcast and it really got me thinking. I wonder if I could develop, produce and release a podcast that focused on marketing the way we see it here at Malicious thinkTank, inc.?

I am pretty sure the answer is YES! If you take a listen to one of the podcasts over at burningewok.com you will notice some great intro music. That was arranged, mixed and produced by my son Joshua, so I am nearly done with my podcast, thanks to his great music and audio production skills.

So in addition to a great music intro, I guess I will need a few tools, some meaningful topics, and a little bit of technology. As I begin to flesh out topics and get the studio ready to roll, I will post details of some of the equipment, techniques and topics.

So my first blog post of 2009, is focusing on the announcement of this coming podcast. The format, I feel, should be pretty straight forward - brief intro of the topic, discussion of a specific marketing challenge and how it applies to a specific industry or even a client of mine. Then I will discuss the various options for approaches to a solution. The hope will be to bring it all back to a strategic backbone of sorts. That mystical 'one-thing' from the movie City Slickers. I focus on getting all my clients to consider what that 'one-thing' is and to use it as a measuring device for all executions.

Is that really a strategy? no, not really -- however, you gotta start somewhere.

So, my 'one-thing' for malicious thinkTank, inc. is to make sure I am giving my clients as much insight as I can, in addition to taking direction from where they have been and where they want to go with their marketing efforts. If a marketing function that I want to pursue for MTT, inc. does not measure up to that 'one-thing' then I really have to re-evaluate what it is that I am wanting to do.

I believe this podcast is a great oppurtinty to provide that 'insight' to clients and potential clients.

If you would like to check out the burningewok.com podcast, head on over there - I think you will enjoy it!

Have a great 2009!

Well, I have officially started working on a complete project for umbraco. An updated blog package that is designed to run on v4 installations. Some of the features I am looking to include are:

• images for posts
• galleries in posts
• internal or external videos in posts
• integreated rss xslt
• tag xslt
• posts by year and month xslt

Stay tuned for more development news.