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New York Times, May 31, 2009 — ON a recent Thursday, Darren Herman, the president of Varick Media Management, was sequestered in his SoHo office. He wasn’t scrutinizing a television ad or images from a photo shoot. He was combing through graphs and Excel spreadsheets.
New York Times, May 31, 2009 — The hosts of “Morning Joe” on MSNBC seem to drink Starbucks every day. Joe Scarborough, the show’s namesake and co-host, sips Frappuccinos on camera so often that some viewers have wondered whether it is a form of product placement, paid for by the coffee company. Starting Monday, it will be.
New York Times, May 31, 2009 — The world economy is in mid-swan dive. Wallets are in lockdown. So how does a company get people to feel just a little bit better about buying more stuff? (And perhaps burnish a brand that has taken some public relations lumps?)
Behold the new breed of corporate logo — non-threatening, reassuring, playful, even child-like. Not emblems of distant behemoths, but faces of friends.
Prophet, May 30, 2009 — This article suggests a way forward for the Swiss financial market center and its international banks. It argues that while loosening the secrecy law will take away one USP and cause uncertainty among clients, it will be beneficial in the mid term. The opportunity lies in a key pillar of Swiss banking: integrity. By aligning business practices and behaviour to the desired brand identities, the Swiss banking brands are likely to recover and regain strength by delivering a relevant promise in a credible way. *Please note this article is in German.
Fast Company, May 29, 2009 — A decade ago the ability to generate ideas for businesses was a terrific and unique offering, and often a good business. Many companies and consultants were conducting workshops aimed at coming up with ideas, hundreds of ideas, and getting paid handsomely to do it. Today, it seems most of the businesses I deal with have more than enough ideas, it's determining the right ones to invest time and energy into that is the trick.
Fast Company, May 28, 2009 — The engineer is holding his breath. Beside him, the project manager grimaces. A dozen Emerson employees, all in khaki pants and button-down shirts, are gathered — silent and expectant — around their teacher as he squints at their creations. Back in their real roles, making aerospace controls or medical machinery or marine valves at the $24.8 billion St. Louis-based manufacturer, these people are not often met with bewilderment. But then, they rarely bring raw ideas to consumers either.
eMarketer, May 27, 2009 — According to a joint study by MarketingProfs and Forrester Research, most business-to-business (B2B) marketers are not folding in the face of the economic downturn.
Two-thirds of marketers surveyed in 2008 said their budgets would either stay the same in the next year or increase.
Fast Company, May 27, 2009 — These days, we’re all public figures. We’re sharing our friends on Facebook, our photos on Flickr, our music on Last.fm, and our goofy links insightful observations on Twitter. So when Fast Company set out to capture the personalities of our 100 Most Creative People in Business, we started — where else? — by looking for online profiles
Investors.com, May 26, 2009 — Best Buy (BBY) store shelves hold consumer electronics products from Panasonic (PC), Samsung and Sony (SNE)— and Dynex, Insignia and Rocketfish.
Those latter three names are lesser-known but close to the heart of Best Buy and increasingly popular with shoppers. They are private-label brands owned by Best Buy, the nation's No. 1 consumer electronics chain. Best Buy has seen sales of its exclusive store brands rise rapidly thanks to low prices and innovative designs.
BusinessWeek, May 26, 2009 — Comedian Jim Gaffigan has a suggestion for preparing a Hot Pockets frozen entrée: "Take out of package. Place directly in toilet." Gaffigan is not a big fan of Hot Pockets. He doesn't like exercise, either. But he loves bacon. "Without bacon, no one would even know what a water chestnut is," he says. Gaffigan's also a fan of social networking sites.
You'll see him on Facebook, Twitter, and News Corp.'s (NWS) MySpace. He keeps fans up to date on his concerts, albums, TV appearances—and naps. In short, he's a social networking success story. For a one-man band like Gaffigan, who probably has a decent amount of free time between eating bacon and being on stage, social networks and blogs have proved effective vehicles for marketing his business and... continue reading
Fast Company, May 26, 2009 — Design thinking is currently an "It" concept, the topic of countless books and blogs and conference panels. While it can mean a lot of different things to different people, for me, design thinking is a methodology, a tool, a killer app, and a problem-solving protocol to be used on virtually any problem. It can be equally effective in designing a new product or creating a new brand, to envisioning a new approach to health care or to reinventing city management. Mayor Daley in Chicago, where I live, is a pretty effective design thinker. That's right, Mayor Daley.
Advertising Age, May 25, 2009 — Hearing that Dell had launched a female-targeted microsite called Della last week triggered my "Is it a gag?" reflex — the suspicious reaction to a bit of marketing too extreme to be real. Yet upon arrival at the site, there they were: all the ridiculous "women's advertising" clichés you could imagine in your wildest feminine-products-commercial fantasies. But it wasn't a gag — not intentionally, anyway.
Advertising Age, May 25, 2009 — Analyst conferences are rarely exciting, but when P&G Chairman-CEO A.G. Lafley appears at one this week, some believe the near-term future of package-goods marketing — and the long-term future of Procter & Gamble — may hang in the balance.
MediaPost Publications, May 21, 2009 — After making quick work of print newspapers, and the Yellow Pages industry, "The kudzu-like creep of the Internet is about to claim its third analog victim," warns a new report from research firm Borrell Associates. The victim? "The largest and least-read of all print media: Direct mail."
"Direct mail has begun spiraling into what we believe is a precipitous decline from which it will never fully recover," Borrell predicts.
Advertising Age, May 21, 2009 — Sustainable communication is key to getting through today's recession. Diana Verde Nieto, CEO of Clownfish, a sustainability and communications consultancy, offers the four Cs of survival.
Prophet, May 20, 2009 — What is a brand and when does it become an asset? In this article, we discuss the history of brand valuation.
Prophet, May 20, 2009 — Why are companies using brand valuation? There are many reasons including, in a few cases, sheer curiosity. Using a case study of the Australian wine industry, Roger explains why brand valuation is the thing.
MediaPost Publications, May 20, 2009 — Social media has reached critical mass, with 83% of the Internet population now using it - and more than half doing so on a regular basis - according to new research being released today by Knowledge Networks. But for all the media industry's hype and buzz surrounding social networks, microblogs, and other social networking platforms, the genre has failed to become much of a marketing medium, and in the opinion of the Knowledge Networks' analysts, likely never will.
eMarketer, May 19, 2009 — If you want your brand to be associated with young people, then image isn’t everything, at least not according to a study by MTV Networks, the long-time arbiter of cool—and what’s hot—among young audiences.
For the study, Internet users ages 12 to 24 in five countries—Germany, India, Japan, the UK and the US—were surveyed.
Advertising Age, May 18, 2009 — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Apple may have some of the most interesting online ads we've seen in a while, but Microsoft's recent push to paint the competitor as pricey is starting to work, according to data from BrandIndex.
New York Times, May 18, 2009 — Why does a diploma from Harvard cost $100,000 more than a similar piece of paper from City College? Why might a BMW cost $25,000 more than a Subaru WRX with equally fast acceleration? Why do “sophisticated” consumers demand 16-gigabyte iPhones and “fair trade” coffee from Starbucks?
If you ask market researchers or advertising executives, you might hear about the difference between “rational” and “emotional” buying decisions, or about products falling into categories like “hedonic” or “utilitarian” or “positional.” But Geoffrey Miller, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of New Mexico, says that even the slickest minds on Madison Avenue are still in the prescientific dark ages.
Instead of running focus groups and... continue reading
Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2009 — With a reduced advertising budget and a desperate need to increase sales, Chrysler is relying more heavily on new technologies to predict how ad purchases will translate into sales.
A team of statisticians, economists, software engineers and media planners at Chrysler's digital marketing agency, Organic, has designed a "media modeling" system that helps the company calculate the best ways to allocate its marketing dollars. The system calculates how much ad spending is needed to meet certain sales targets and then analyzes how both online and offline ads affect Web activity and, ultimately, sales.
Wall Street Journal, May 18, 2009 — Wal-Mart Stores Inc. is revamping the electronics departments in its more than 3,500 U.S. stores this week, ramping up an aggressive battle with Best Buy Co. and Amazon.com to seize customers up for grabs due to the demise of Circuit City Stores Inc.
Wal-Mart's roomier and more interactive electronics displays begin arriving in stores Monday, showcasing the latest mobile phones and portable computers, and including standalone sections for popular brands such as Nintendo Co. and Apple Inc.
eMarketer, May 15, 2009 — According to Heidrick & Struggles, the No. 1 focus for C-level executives in 2009 is the customer—acquiring new ones, increasing retention and improving their lifetime value, in that order. Eighty-eight percent of the executives surveyed said acquiring new customers was important, and 87% said the same about customer retention.
Forbes, May 15, 2009 — It's no secret that the CMO position is perhaps the least secure job in top management, with a turnover rate that's faster than major league managers but slower than that among quick service restaurant employees.
According to Greg Welch, who launched Spencer Stuart's marketing practice and now heads the firm's global consumer goods and services business, the average CMO tenure has grown to just over 28 months in 2008, up four months since Welch started measuring CMO tenure in 2004. The average CIO lasts 38 months, and no other c-level executive checks in under 46.
Prophet, May 14, 2009 — In this StrategyDriven podcast, Michael explores the challenges and solutions to creating alignment between an organization’s strategic and marketing plans and accountability to achieving predetermined marketing results. (via StrategyDriven)
Wall Street Journal, May 14, 2009 — Not long ago, everyone in America wanted to be a member of the "middle class." In fact, as many as 53% of Americans described themselves that way to pollsters.
But with the information age and the rise of two-career incomes, being just middle class is a little old hat. The new aspiration for most Americans to be a member of the new professional class. Rising numbers — as high as 64% — report that they consider themselves "professionals." The census shows a significant rise over the years, from 4% being professionals and skilled workers in 1910, to 36% today. The numbers have doubled since just 1980.
Advertising Age, May 14, 2009 — Not content with the success of its stadium signage integrations in the past three years in such popular video games as "NBA Ballers," "NBA 2K" and "NBA Live," Gatorade upped the ante: It made the product part of the on-court action.
Advertising Age, May 13, 2009 — Could it be that we're about to see an uptick in brand advertising? You might think so based on conversations today with some of the senior marketers attending the ANA's "Brand Building in Tough Times and Beyond" conference.
Advertising Age, May 13, 2009 — Don't look now, but the Walkman's back.
Actually, the device that virtually created the portable-music market never left; it's been around as a player for cassettes, CDs and digital music in one form or another since 1979. According to Sony, the company produced 150 million Walkman units during its heyday in 1995. But in recent years, the device has all but fallen off the map thanks to missteps by Sony and huge advances by Apple's iPod, which has a stranglehold on the digital-music market. Still, Sony will seek to leverage its brand legacy once again with the launch of the Walkman X, a product that comes closer to the iPod line than ever before.
Advertising Age, May 12, 2009 — It wasn't enough that McDonald's is beating competitors in same-store sales and winning the value-perception wars. Thanks to stepped-up burger marketing, it's now getting higher-margin customers, too.
While McDonald's pretty much owns the value menu and pricing proposition, since last summer it's quietly boosted advertising of full-priced items, which is paying off by bringing in higher-ticket customers. The product-specific pushes, for Big Mac in July, chicken nuggets in December and the Quarter Pounder with cheese in February, have resulted in double-digit sales increases for the products in question.
Advertising Age, May 11, 2009 — Big Pharma is lumbering into the digital realm, using a growing chunk of its $4.7 billion DTC dollars to reach patients and prescribers on blogs, Twitter and YouTube.
What might be considered a yawn-worthy move into new and social media is nothing short of a revolution for the highly regulated pharmaceutical industry, and the mobilization is happening everywhere: Johnson & Johnson keeps a respected and popular blog;
Advertising Age, May 11, 2009 — KFC's grilled-chicken launch was to be the biggest in the chain's history. Now it might also go down as a marketing case study in what not to do.
The story starts with a marketer testing the elasticity of its brand. After all, we all know what the 'F' stands for in KFC, so suddenly insisting the consumer associate the fast feeder with grilled chicken, rather than the Colonel's fried version, was always going to be a stretch.
Advertising Age, May 11, 2009 — Like any smart company facing the threat of having to pay out the most costly environmental lawsuit in history — $27 billion — and contending with a "60 Minutes" report on the case that won't aid its argument in any way, Chevron has gone on a public-relations offensive. But the twist in its strategy is that it enlisted a former CNN reporter to rebut the news magazine's report by creating a near identical report that lays out the oil giant's side of the story.
Advertising Age, May 11, 2009 — eah, they have an app for that. But should they?
That's a question beginning to seriously plague iTunes, which offers more than 35,000 mobile games, utilities and entertainment applications from third-party publishers that generate $1 million in average daily revenue for Apple.
New York Times, May 11, 2009 — What did Chevron do when it learned that “60 Minutes” was preparing a potentially damaging report about oil company contamination of the Amazon rain forest in Ecuador? It hired a former journalist to produce a mirror image of the report, from the corporation’s point of view.
Fast Company, May 10, 2009 — You've seen them. Those tag clouds in the right-hand column of Web sites with jumbled type of varying weight and size indicating the relative usage of words. Tag clouds may be the most common example of an emerging field known as "information visualization," an offshoot of graphic design devoted to the clear display of complex information. Executive pay in relation to shareholder returns. Senate voting patterns.
New York Times, May 10, 2009 — The Dodgers quickly and completely rebranded themselves around Manny Ramirez over the 10 months since his arrival in a trade.
When Ramirez was suspended on Thursday for 50 games for violating Major League Baseball’s drug policy, shutting down Manny and Mannywood at least until early July, he left the Dodgers to clean up a significant marketing mess.
MediaPost Publications, May 7, 2009 — Marketers place a lifetime value on customers with addresses on its email list based on their purchasing activity. For Netflix, it could be $9. At US Airways, maybe $2. But how do you place a similar value on a person who is active on a company's Facebook or MySpace page? With social-networking booming, marketers are now in hot pursuit of the metric.
Wall Street Journal, May 7, 2009 — Safeway Inc. has reached deals to expand the outside presence of two of its house brands, selling them through other retailers, both overseas and domestically, an unusual approach for private-label goods.
Safeway, the fourth-largest U.S. food retailer by sales, has said it wants to market O Organics and Eating Right to other supermarket chains and to aggressively advertise the lines.
Prophet, May 7, 2009 — This 60-minute webinar will change how you view the world around you. Sound like a big claim? It is. But we believe that putting a different lens on the way you view everything from a glass of water to a lamppost to subway graffiti can radically change the way you view, and ultimately impact your business.
New York Times, May 6, 2009 — AD AGENCIES usually hang on their clients’ every directive. But when Intel was developing its biggest advertising campaign in years, it handed a carefully thought-out brief to the ad agency Venables Bell & Partners, which said Intel’s idea — to talk about the company’s role in everyday life — was, in a word, bad.
Brandweek, May 5, 2009 — NEW YORK Marketers have made great strides in recent years to better understand and connect with moms. But in trying to perfect the message, many have forgotten to listen to the very consumer they are trying to woo.
Advertising Age, May 5, 2009 — Unilever Chief Marketing Officer Simon Clift and Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy gave a stark warning to an international gathering of magazine publishing executives today, urging the industry to innovate and to be more creative. The addresses to the FIPP World Magazine Congress come as the magazine business endures the most calamitous period in its history, thanks to the breakdown of print advertising and publishing companies' struggles in grabbing a piece of the growing digital pie.
CMO Strategy by AdAge, May 4, 2009 — In these tough economic times, chief marketing officers are keeping their heads down, focused on meeting the short-term demands of the job. But are they kidding themselves by thinking that when the recession subsides, they'll be able to jump right back in the game after having shelved long-term plans?
Advertising Age, May 4, 2009 — NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Unlike many marketers, Tecate's Carlos Boughton isn't a fan of targeting a broad Hispanic audience. Tecate, which focuses all its U.S. marketing efforts and ad dollars on Hispanics, is the beer for Mexican immigrants. Segmenting that group further, the company launched a beer for the next generation, Tecate Light.
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — Stories of marketing heroes who transform poorly performing brands never fail to enthrall us. But why do some brand leaders wait until their brands are at the breaking point, and at risk of joining such brands as Radio Shack, 7Up, or the GAP, for which renovation may be too late?
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — Classic financial theory has it that all else being equal, the greater the risk, the greater the return. And when it comes to innovation, those businesses that are the most successful embrace that notion.
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — A common scenario in corporate headquarters these days features the Chief Innovation Officer having a meeting with her Innovation Council in the recently completed, state-of-the-art Innovation Room, frowning at the results of their efforts to create a “culture of innovation.” Why don’t they have it? Why aren’t they getting the output they need?
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — Corporate reputation must be built. It must be supported and managed. And, it must be an authentic reflection of the business — its culture, value system, and behaviors. Businesses that expect to experience the kinds of success achieved by best-practice organizations will understand that truth. And they will create and live the kind of meaningful purpose that will allow them, too, to more effectively reap the benefits of a strong reputation.
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — This article, focused on key themes from Scott Davis' upcoming book, "The Shift," outlines a series of profound shifts that have ushered in a new era in marketing. This era is marked by Visionary Marketers who know that no one is better suited to help drive the growth agenda than the head of marketing.
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — Scott Davis' latest book outlines the five shifts marketers must undertake to fundamentally shift the role of marketing and help drive both the growth agenda and bottom-line results.
Financial Times, May 1, 2009 — Starbucks is still struggling to remake itself amid a global economic downturn that has dented people’s willingness to pay a lot for a frothy cup of coffee.
It does not seem to have made up its mind whether to become more of a value brand or stick with being a premium retailer. In fact, it is sending out signals that it wants to do both simultaneously.
So here is my suggestion: why doesn’t it become a retail bank as well as a coffee chain?
Prophet, May 1, 2009 — For all the great marketers and great marketing, we still see too many instances of what I call “cart before the horse” marketing. The cart, of course, is marketing tactics, while the horse is the need to meet critical customer needs. The result is strategies and initiatives that falter before the finish line.