Marketing —
Here’s an ad that I saw in the May 1, 2009 issue of The Week magazine. It’s from Post advertising their Shredded Wheat cereal with creative from Ogilvy: Personally, I love it. Just as wrong-headed financial management is being righted in this economy, we can reclaim the oft-maligned word innovation to mean actual progress. So [...]
To catch you up, Motrin posted the below ad and people, particularly baby-carrying mothers, were so offended that the makers of Motrin pulled the ad. Many of the offended people (“Motrin Moms” there were dubbed) were on Twitter, as well as blogs and YouTube. As a result, marketers are starting to get scared of social [...]
When it comes to viral influence, does the influence of a select few “key influencers” matter more than “the rest of us”? Duncan Watts of Yahoo Research says no, as Clive Thompson writes in Is the Tipping Point Toast?” in Fast Company. Watts says: It [achieving marketing success through influentials] just doesn’t work. A rare [...]
Woman from Marketing: “Well, since we’re all going to hell anyway…”
For a limited time only you can download the full text of Finding the Right Job for Your Product by Clayton M. Christensen et al. The article itself isn’t revolutionary — they essentially mirror the transition that marketing research has undergone in moving from demographic to affinity customer segmentation. Christensen and his colleagues describe that [...]
Last year I hacked away at an article about the need for a greater degree of experimentation in marketing organizations, but it never really seemed to gel quite right, and eventually I abandoned it. I’m happy to see that Joseph Jaffe completed the task in Manifesto for Experimentation. Successful executives I’ve seen already embrace this [...]
I attended an interview last night with Michael Linton, CMO of Best Buy, sponsored by Fortune magazine. He expressed the same healthy attitude toward trials that I’ve heard from other successful executives, e.g. “We have the programs we do regularly, the ready-aim-fire activities. Then we have the ready-fire-aim activities, the new programs we’re trying out. [...]
Hyundai successfully entered the U.S. market as a low-cost competitor, became established, and has even started to offer an affordable luxury model. And now a recent J.D. Power report listing them as the No. 1 non-premium auto maker in terms of perceived quality, ahead of previous frontrunner Toyota. But when you’re known for being the [...]
There’s an inherent problem in trying to market anything complex like innovation: we practioners are passionate and by necessity employ a rich set of ideas, while our clients who need it, by definition, have focused on another aspect of business and may not have the time nor the inclination to understand these rich ideas in [...]
The latest HBR offers a pleasing overview of decision making. The below callout is from Who Has the D? by Paul Rogers and Marcia Blenko… A Recipe for a Decision-Making Bottleneck At one automaker we studied, marketers and product developers were confused about who was responsible for making decisions about new models. When we asked, [...]
Another way to illustrate the evolution of consumer control… Shopping in 1920, photo courtesy Theodor Horydczak Shopping in 1960, photo courtesy Country Joe Shopping in 2005, photo courtesy Nicole Gesmondi
Now that’s a headline that made me stop and think… JEEP LAUNCHES OWN MOBILE PHONE TV CHANNEL Axe Deodorant Also Said to be Negotiating Similar Deal with MobiTV SAN FRANCISCO (AdAge.com) — In an effort to harness mobile phone TV as a major branded entertainment medium, Jeep is launching its own mobile phone channel with [...]
For Sarah McLachlan’s World On Fire video, they spent almost the whole production budget solving the problems she’s writing about rather than producing the video. When Boots pharmacy customers weren’t taking advantage of a service that transfers prescriptions directly from the doctor, Marketing firm Naked Communications stepped in: “Boots discontinued its TV spots and had [...]
We’ve been working for several companies facing how they and their markets change with the further spread of social media. It’s creating enormous potential for more democratic media production and sophisticated tools, but a lot of it will rely on companies understanding it and being receptive to it. We’re developing a framework to help companies [...]
I sincerely think human-centered designers’ (I use the term designer in the widest sense) ability to regard problems in a personal way results in drastically different solutions. Lately I’ve been looking at how marketing programs are designed to fit customers’ mental models, or not. For example, here’s JetBlue’s frequent flier program: short flights earn 2 [...]