You can also browse all brand tags.
Wall Street Journal, November 5, 2008 — The roller-coaster stock market and plunging housing prices have left many consumers afraid. In response, marketers are adopting a softer approach to peddling their wares, playing up comforting images in their ads and focusing on family and the warmth and safety of home.
Harvard Business Review, October 1, 2008 — Earlier this year, I spent an intense half-day closeted in a room with the top 70 executives at Intuit. Our aim was to come up with ways that people outside the company could volunteer their time, energy, and expertise to make life better for our customers. Sound odd? Well, if you’re not conducting an exercise like that at your organization, you risk missing the boat on a sea change that’s transforming business.
Every day, millions of people make all kinds of voluntary contributions to companies—from informed opinions to computing resources—that create tremendous value for those firms’ customers and, consequently, for their shareholders. When I first encountered this idea, several years ago, it struck me as unfathomable: Volunteerism was for... continue reading
Advertising Age, June 30, 2008 — Simon Clift has been Unilever's chief marketing officer for more than two years, but he freely admits he only really began doing the job a couple of months ago, thanks to a corporate restructuring that has had him drop his line-management duties as president of personal care.
As full-time CMO, Mr. Clift is getting in touch with his touch points, as some of his peers might say. But he just couldn't resist a mocking drift into CMO speak during an interview in the Carlton Hotel during the International Advertising Festival at Cannes last week as he bandied about terms like "challenges" and "new-media environment." He stopped, smirked and then added: "Oh my God! I've become a cliche."
Marketing Profs, June 17, 2008 — With the Hispanic population in the US expected to surpass white non-Hispanic inhabitants by2030, marketers are scrambling for ways to tap into growing spending power while generating oyalty to their brands.
The challenge they face is to move beyond simply pushing established products or services.
Success requires a consumer-centric approach that hinges on offerings that are relevant to the target population.
Advertising Age, May 5, 2008 — Greg Allgood, who directs Procter & Gamble Co.'s Children's Safe Drinking Water program, recently has spent a lot of time demonstrating Pur's purification packets for developing countries that turn disgusting, brown water crystal clear. On one TV appearance last week, he accidentally took a swig from the dirty "before" water instead of the treated water in a clip that made the rounds to "Countdown" on MSNBC.
It's symbolic of the downside companies in the forefront of ethical marketing have faced in recent weeks: No good deed goes entirely unpunished; high-profile stances on social causes can have unintended consequences; and the water is getting pretty murky as "ethical marketing" encourages consumers and activists to delve into corporate policies in... continue reading
Advertising Age, February 25, 2008 — As proof that it's spending its marketing dollars wisely, Kimberly-Clark Chairman-CEO Thomas Falk told analysts last week that the company expects to spend only 46% of its marketing budget on TV this year, down from 60% in 2004.
If you looked two or three years ago, out of our top six consumer brands, TV would have ranked as the most popular channel for all six," Mr. Falk told attendees at the Consumer Analyst Group of New York last week. "Today, TV might be ranked as the best channel for only three of those brands."
Package-goods titan Unilever also is out to prove it can spend more effectively, in part by using TV more cannily.
By Jill Steele, January 29, 2008 — It’s the time of year when pundits make predictions. One that caught my eye comes from Geoff Ramsey, CEO of eMarketer. He sees the interruption-disruption ad model, where consumers accept advertising as a necessary evil in exchange for free content, dying off because of the Internet, social media and the DVR.
The prediction isn’t particularly surprising: almost everyone agrees this is the way we’re trending. What’s intriguing is his suggestion that marketers must turn advertising into content,... continue reading
Advertising Age, November 26, 2007 — When you unleash an "Onslaught" on YouTube, watch out for the counterattack.
Dove's viral video attack on beauty advertising has produced a surprisingly strong and enduring blowback against Unilever from activists, newspaper op-ed writers, bloggers and videographers who see it as hypocritical coming from the same company that markets Axe.
Associated Press, November 16, 2007 — Some consumer products companies are increasingly teaming up brands, combining two familiar names into one new product, such as Tide detergent with Downy fabric softener or Lever soap with Vaseline lotion.
Advertising Age, August 6, 2007 — In a 1999 interview with Advertising Age, then-P&G President A.G. Lafley shook his head at an admission by then-Unilever Co-Chairman Niall FitzGerald in a magazine article that at one point he and other Unilever executives hadn't been in a laundry room for years.
"That would never happen here," Mr. Lafley said.
In the end, that was the story of how one of the most fabled marketing battles of the past century was won — and lost. P&G had its head, literally and figuratively, in the laundry room. Unilever didn't.
† Access to articles with this symbol may require a subscription.
