Jim Joseph
May 1, 2013
This means that brands are suddenly jumping into intense conversations with a real point of view, on issues that could be seen as quite controversial. All this for what feels like the first time ever!
Adam Popescu
Apr 26, 2013
Does a negative post on Twitter have infectious germs powerful enough to influence the behavior of tweeters? Maybe. Then again, maybe not.
John Nugent
Apr 17, 2013
We explored a couple of notable brands that have a language all their own and how they use it to define the space for their customers.
Matt Petronzio
Mar 22, 2013
There's no doubt that Google remains the world's most popular search engine, but are you using it to its full potential?
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
Mar 18, 2013
The show will be “a chance for visitors to explore the very physical history of the typefaces they already know,” says Monotype’s Type Director Dan Rhatigan.
Jennifer Miller
Feb 28, 2013
Three months from now, nobody will remember what you wrote in that email, but they’ll definitely recall your status update about your cat.
Carmine Gallo
Feb 22, 2013
Stanford invites “pioneers in the field of communication” to share their insights and to coach business students in the art and science of persuasion, pitching, communication, and presentation skills.
Cheryl Conner
Jan 8, 2013
Many times, the ability to remain silent is the best communication strength you could have. When is silence not good?
Christa Carone
Nov 21, 2012
There are many vehicles, outlets, and opportunities for great brand storytelling. To make the best use of them, companies need writers who understand narrative, style, and voice. And to do that, they need to support the good writers they employ and foster the development of good writing skills among others.
Kelsey Campbell-Dollaghan
Nov 9, 2012
A thoughtful identity gives a multinational disease research network a new way to communicate.
Phil Pinn
Oct 31, 2012
What could we learn from the masters of English about great communications? Is there a set of rules we could apply?
Ken Makovsky
Aug 21, 2012
We received a reprieve most of the time in colloquial English, but never in written English. Splitting infinitives is not just forgivable; it is, in fact, “a sacred duty.” Especially when not splitting the infinitive clouds the meaning of your communications.
Kevin Allen
Jul 24, 2012
In the race to find culpability, what doesn't get talked about is the very climate that creates the conditions for people to behave badly and feel perfectly justified in their behavior. It is, in fact, the very same thing that creates an environment and provides the fuel for people to conversely do great, generous and far-reaching things. It boils down to cultural permission.
Daniel W. Rasmus
Jul 19, 2012
Our future is as much threatened by the lack of imaginative connection making as it is from a dearth of engineers or mathematicians. Here are practical lessons from 35 years of writing poetry that can help individuals and teams deliver more innovative products, processes and services.
David Silverman
Jul 12, 2012
Some view it as a scandal that the CEO of J.P. Morgan "knew" about the risky trades long ago. Or that the Bush administration knew "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.." Or that the average cell phone customer can know when they're roaming, and yet still be surprised by the data charges from vacation, whether it's $100 to upload a photo to Facebook, or $62,000 for downloading Wall-E. What is rarely mentioned is the amount of information that lands on the desk of a CEO or a President, or every single one of us, every day.
George Bradt
Jul 3, 2012
A monumental question for leaders in any organization to consider is: How much greatness are we willing to grant people? Because it makes all the difference at every level who it is we decide we are leading. The activity of leadership is not limited to conductors, presidents, and CEOs, of course — the player who energizes the orchestra by communicating his newfound appreciation for the tasks of the conductor, or a parent who fashions in her own mind that her children desire to contribute, is exercising leadership of the most profound kind.
Scott Anthony
Jul 3, 2012
A seminal memory of childhood for many Americans of my age was the arrival of the magazine Highlights for Children every month. The magazine was chock full of goodness, but my favorite part was the Goofus & Gallant cartoon. For those who didn't have the pleasure of reading the magazine, the cartoon taught life lessons through contrasts. Not surprisingly, Gallant was always polite, did his chores, and thought things through, whereas Goofus wasn't polite, didn't do his chores, and definitely didn't think things through.
Glenn Llopis
Jul 2, 2012
Today’s fast, furious and instantaneous news cycles allow leaders the opportunity to become active in media conversations and get discovered on a moment’s notice. As such, you must become more informed about the news that impacts your voice both directly and indirectly. Whether it’s a Twitter hashtag discussion, LinkedIn or Facebook group conversation, your local news, blog or national news story, you must be prepared to address the issues in a succinct and objective manner.
Seth Godin
Jun 22, 2012
When a brand becomes a bully, it loses something vital. So much money, so many egos and so many governments are involved in the Olympics now (and they have so little competition) that it has become a sterling example of what happens when you let greed and lawyers run amok over common sense and generosity.
Natalie Zmuda
Jun 11, 2012
PepsiCo has tapped Mauro Porcini, 3M's longtime design guru, as its first chief design officer. Mr. Porcini will be charged with creating a culture of design at PepsiCo as well as globally managing design for a variety of key food and beverage brands. His reach will extend from package design to advertising, industrial design and digital experiences.
Lamya Hussain
Jun 8, 2012
Canadian franchise Tim Horton is pairing fresh coffee with fresh news in the UAE. Recognizing the parallels between news and coffee, Y&R Dubai adapted Tim Hortons’ coffee cup sleeves turning them into an advertising medium for Gulf News.
Noreen O'Leary
May 31, 2012
Travel is an experience people like to discuss with their friends as they share the details of where they’re going and how they’ll get there. Hertz knew customers’ social activity and conversations were impacting purchase decisions but the company didn’t know how much until now.
Angie Reed
May 29, 2012
Technology has simplified communications for most businesses, but the increased use of conference calls, video conferencing, and instant messaging has created a new list of off-putting behaviors that could land your business in an awkward situation. Here is a list of some pet peeves and how to avoid them.
Yi Chen
May 23, 2012
With more companies preferring an open space layout, this has led to rising complaints of office noise and the lack of privacy for informal chats. Software company Autodesk has come up with a solution that tackles the issues.
Tim Peterson
May 22, 2012
The hierarchy of customer interaction methods starts with face-to-face, followed by websites, channel partners, call centers, traditional media, advisory groups and finally, social media. That won’t be the case in a few years. According to an IBM survey of 1,709 CEOs from 64 countries and 18 industries, social media will leap to the number-two spot while traditional media plunges to the bottom within the next three-to-five years.
Justin Ellis
May 2, 2012
In adjusting its style guide to use calendar days instead of “yesterday,” “today,” or “tomorrow,” the Globe is trying to adapt to the pace of online news.
Sherry Turkle
Apr 23, 2012
In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people — carefully kept at bay. We can’t get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right.
Bryan Thomas
Mar 15, 2012
The role of business linguist for the CMO is probably one of the more challenging aspects of the job. Translating marketing value and priority to other areas of the corporate enterprise, if done ineffectively or ignored, can lead to disaster.
Dorie Clark
Feb 13, 2012
Every company wants customers talking about their products. But before they can sing your praises on social media or evangelize to their friends, they need to remember your product’s name. It seems obvious, but many companies – especially in the technology sector – overlook this easy way to connect with their audience.
Andy Bowers
Feb 6, 2012
We all learned you’re not supposed to end a sentence with a preposition. But from where did this alleged rule come? And why does it encumber us with such labored sentences as the one preceding this?
Chris Brogan
Feb 3, 2012
Jacq and I just watched Adele Live At The Royal Albert Hall (amazon affiliate link), and though every song was just wonderfully done, I found myself fascinated by what Adele was doing in between each song. Because even though most people would be interested in hearing her belt out her amazing repertoire of hits, what I took away from the performance was Adele’s real magical ability: the ability to resonate with her audience.
Layla Revis
Jan 3, 2012
It takes years to build a good reputation, but seconds to damage it beyond repair, as executives at companies from Dell to Domino’s certainly have found out. This was a sentiment echoed by executives at the Senior Corporate Communication Management Conference in New York when discussing social media and corporate reputation and how to embrace the new reality of immediate communications.
Karl Greenberg
Nov 22, 2011
How do you make a decentralized global apparel company without a single, cohesive voice around the world, no e-commerce, and a lagging digital presence into a unified global brand with a vibrant digital, social and e-commerce strategy, with eight million Facebook fans, dwarfing any other jeans marketer and e-commerce growing 40% per year?
Tim Phillips
Oct 28, 2011
When I started writing a blog to support my book, Talk Normal: Stop the Business Speak, Jargon, and Waffle, I had an inkling that many of the words I loathed were common in the offices where I was working.
But this could be an illusion: once we’re bothered by something, we tend to notice it more. So it could be that the business buzzwords that make me cranky are no more significant than the guy who bumps my chair when he walks past--which, on second thought, isn’t a big deal, he’s been doing it for years.
Not so, it seems.
Austin Carr
Oct 13, 2011
Last month, CEO Reed Hastings announced that the company's DVD and streaming businesses would be split: The DVD-by-mail service would be rebranded as Qwikster, while the streaming service would remain under Netflix. Consumer reaction was overwhelmingly negative, just as it had been for the company's recent price hikes. Many found the announcement confusing (customers would now have to deal with separate websites, usernames and passwords, movie queues, credit card bills, and ratings systems), and senior Netflix execs came out to reaffirm the decision, calling it a "natural progression" and part of a "long-term marketing opportunity."
Nilofer Merchant
Oct 6, 2011
While there are many things worth celebrating of Steve Jobs's life, the greatest gift Steve gave us is a way to design our own lives.
Neal Gabler
Aug 15, 2011
The July/August issue of The Atlantic trumpets the “14 Biggest Ideas of the Year.” Take a deep breath. The ideas include “The Players Own the Game” (No. 12), “Wall Street: Same as it Ever Was” (No. 6), “Nothing Stays Secret” (No. 2), and the very biggest idea of the year, “The Rise of the Middle Class — Just Not Ours,” which refers to growing economies in Brazil, Russia, India and China.
Now exhale. It may strike you that none of these ideas seem particularly breathtaking. In fact, none of them are ideas. They are more on the order of observations. But one can’t really fault The Atlantic for mistaking commonplaces for intellectual vision. Ideas just aren’t what they used to be.
Dean Crutchfield
Jul 26, 2011
Strolling along 42nd Street I overheard a mischievous, baseless and ill-informed comment by a millennial to his friend, “There is no such thing as voice or text or music or TV shows – they’re all just data.” He’s right, but our need for words is ancient, and a powerful brand voice can make us question everything we think and do.
Glenn Llopis
May 31, 2011
More and more leaders are scared for their business. Not because their products and services are not innovative or relevant, but because they just don’t connect naturally with the changing face of America’s consumers.
Dan Pallotta
Feb 1, 2011
There's a clothing drop box down the street that says, "The American Red Cross of Massachusetts is a humanitarian organization, led by volunteers, that provides relief to victims of disasters and helps people prevent, prepare for, and respond to emergencies." Good enough, so far. But adjacent to those words, in a font four times the size, and in bold, mind you, are the words, "Mission Statement." Which made me wonder, is this Red Cross's mission, or its mission statement?
Patricia Cohen
Dec 17, 2010
With little fanfare, Google has made a mammoth database culled from nearly 5.2 million digitized books available to the public for free downloads and online searches, opening a new landscape of possibilities for research and education in the humanities.
The digital storehouse, which comprises words and short phrases as well as a year-by-year count of how often they appear, represents the first time a data set of this magnitude and searching tools are at the disposal of Ph.D.’s, middle school students and anyone else who likes to spend time in front of a small screen.
Nick Bilton
Dec 3, 2010
When starting a new Web site or Internet service, most technologists are aiming to sell to a larger company or gain hundreds of millions of users. But for some there is an even bigger glory than cash: their company name becomes a verb.
Stuart Elliott
Nov 8, 2010
On Madison Avenue, there are talking dogs, talking horses, even talking margarine tubs, not to mention talking brand characters like the E*Trade babies and the Keebler elves. But Mr. Peanut, the dapper Planters mascot since 1916, has never spoken — until now.
Joe Light
Nov 2, 2010
After forcing callers into automated customer-service lines, some companies are trying to sweeten the experience—by making the recorded voices less annoying.
William Lozito
Oct 26, 2010
The HP Slate has been announced and the blogosphere seems to be a little confused, not least because many of us thought this was never going to see the light of day.
Elisa Steele
Oct 11, 2010
Just for a moment, I'd like everyone to take off their advertising hat and become a consumer, with passions, needs and preferences. Think about a brand which you feel a particular connection with, one that helps you fill a need in your life. Not only that, it has to be one that has stood out from the competition because of the creative messaging used to promote it so that it connected with you emotionally. In fact, you feel so strongly about this brand that you rave about it to your friends and family, because you want to share that feeling with them.
These concepts are common to all consumers -- relevance, creativity, and a shared experience -- encompass core elements of storytelling.
Haydn Shaughnessy
Sep 22, 2010
Could Web 2.0 be grounded in nature? Our new research shows that Web users are increasingly conceptualizing the online world and new technology — social networks, mobile phones, and even whole businesses — as ecosystems.
Len Stein
Aug 27, 2010
The growing dominance of social media compels marketers to abandon their old hard sell in favor of a content-driven marketing conversation that can facilitate meaningful brand relationships with customers and prospects. In this challenging environment, content is a key tool to fostering relationships, but publishing a blog, creating a Facebook fan page or launching a Twitter feed is only the beginning of a strategic content marketing program.
Content marketing differs from traditional methods that employ interruption techniques in the belief that delivering helpful, relevant information drives profitable consumer action. The idea of sharing content is increasingly driving marketers to make proprietary intellectual assets available to influential audiences. Savvy content marketers create fresh information to share via all available media channels, on and off-line.
Michael Bush
Aug 23, 2010
In 2009 Katie O'Brien was looking for an agency partner to help her launch a major digital effort. The global digital marketing manager at Ben & Jerry's issued a brief to a traditional digital shop and a traditional PR agency, Edelman. The plans they brought back were, in Ms. O'Brien's own words, "night and day."
The biggest difference, she said, was that one understood social media better than the other -- and it wasn't the digital agency.
Gord Hotchkiss
Aug 20, 2010
How do we read? How do we take the arbitrary, human-made code that is the written word and translate it into thoughts and images that mean something to our brain, an organ that had its basic wiring designed thousands of generations before the appearance of the first written word? What is going on in your skull right now as your eyes scan the black squiggly lines that make up this column?
Umair Haque
Aug 11, 2010
It's 2010, and we still don't know how to describe the archetypal magnates of the next economy. We don't have a word for it, so we resort to awkward neologisms, like "information entrepreneur" or "green mogul." It's as if we're still not quite sure just what kinds of "capital" tomorrow's tycoons will be "ists" of. What are the kernels of tomorrow's prosperity?
Steve Rubel
Aug 11, 2010
The media is something that for most, if not all, of our adult lives, we have taken for granted. Media giants form the terra firma of the marketing industry, both its paid and earned disciplines. They provide the lifeblood of services and bring us the audiences we need to do our jobs.
However, underneath it all, the harsh reality is that there's a new digital dynamic present today. This will mean that many media companies divide themselves into dozens of smaller independent operating companies if they wish to survive. Many won't.
Gareth Kay
Aug 10, 2010
A recent post by Gareth Kay (of Goodby’s Brand Strategy discipline) turned our attention to a presentation he made at Boulder Digital Works on crafting a creative brief for the post-digital age. Kay begins by taking a (somehow comical) look at creative brief templates of yore (1992), which mostly all addressed a very common set of elements: a problem to be solved by advertising, consumers to ‘target’, a message to tell them, reasons to believe, and tone of voice. Needless to say that there is a continually expanding set of technology devices and platforms – and respective user interfaces – available in our current culture: from mobile to social media, to desktop and mobile video and others. Their impact includes facilitating a more participatory culture, making us more social, contributing to a more fragmented media landscape and leaving us ‘always on’ and conscious/communicative of our location; these factors need to be considered within an informed creative brief.
David Armano
Aug 4, 2010
You see, businesses, brands and organizations are truly struggling with the disruptive nature of social technologies. In fact, the term "social technologies" is part of the problem—we are all fixated on the technologies and meanwhile the real action lies in harnessing the change brought about by human behavior enabled by technology. I used the simple story of how a colleague shared a book with me. The book itself (media) is not social—the interactions, communications, stories and conversations that involve the book are.
Colin Goedecke
Aug 2, 2010
If you look at the world today, it’s devoid of enough true leaders. We used to have so many. This troubles me. What has happened? Is it because people don’t want to step up to the higher responsibilities of leadership, or don’t know how to be great leaders?
Monica Langley
Jul 30, 2010
Tony Hayward, the departing chief executive of BP PLC, is unrepentant about how the energy giant responded to the U.S.'s largest offshore oil spill.
In his first interview after agreeing to step down from the top spot this week, Mr. Hayward said he did everything possible once the Deepwater Horizon rig exploded and sank in the Gulf of Mexico, by taking responsibility for the spill, and spending billions of dollars to stop the spewing oil and clean up the shoreline.
Denise Lee Yohn
Jul 16, 2010
I’ve finally gotten around to reading “The Opposite of Fate: A Book of Musings,” a book released quite awhile ago by Amy Tan, the author of best-selling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Kitchen God’s Wife. Tan includes many insights about story-telling and communication in general which I believe can be applied to developing brand strategies.
One of such “musings” is “Five Writing Tips” — an edited version of a speech given as a commencement address at Simmons College, in Boston, in 2003. Although her remarks were intended to inspire a new generation to write and think differently, I found they also provide helpful guidelines for creating brand strategy.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Jul 15, 2010
When did brevity become a synonym for clarity or truth?
For most of human history, it was the exact opposite. What was brief was least important, as usually the format of a statement dictated the attention it deserved. Shortness was equated with incompleteness, which meant that things communicated quickly were more suspect and were considered less trustworthy (a rapid-fire sales pitch or the unknown threat of someone "of few words" being two examples). The common bias was that brevity could be the same as stupidity.
Gardiner Morse
Jul 15, 2010
Two venerable brands have recently sidelined their names in favor of initials. National Public Radio now wants to be known as "NPR" while the Young Men's Christian Association — the YMCA — has abbreviated its abbreviation to, simply, "The Y."
But aren't "NPR" and "The Y" already de facto brand names?
Aaron Baar
Jul 13, 2010
Designing a new brand platform for a 160-year-old organization is no easy task, particularly when that organization is as diverse and well-known as the YMCA. The new brand platform involved a two-year development process that looked to reflect the character of the more than 2,600 individual "Y" organizations around the country.
Rohit Bhargava
Jun 22, 2010
Getability is simply how easy an idea is for someone to immediately understand without a whole lot of explanation needed. When your marketing has getability, it means that it is simple, clear and memorable. This matters for good reason. Marketing that is complex or confusing rarely works. To help their getability, two brands in particular are using a technique that may be worth considering when promoting your product or service ... they are giving an ownable name to the problem they solve.
The recent marketing from Dyson around their new Air Multiplier fan is one great example.
Richard S. Chang
Jun 10, 2010
On Tuesday, G.M. sent a memo to Chevrolet employees at its Detroit headquarters, promoting the importance of “consistency” for the brand, which was the nation’s best-selling line of cars and trucks for more than half a century after World War II.
And one way to present a consistent brand message, the memo suggested, is to stop saying “Chevy,” though the word is one of the world’s best-known, longest-lived product nicknames.
David Brooks
Jun 9, 2010
Studying the humanities will give you a familiarity with the language of emotion. In an information economy, many people have the ability to produce a technical innovation: a new MP3 player. Very few people have the ability to create a great brand: the iPod. Branding involves the location and arousal of affection, and you can’t do it unless you are conversant in the language of romance.
Valeria Maltoni
Jun 8, 2010
A couple of days ago I wrote a post about exposure and visibility and how quality content that is valuable takes time to create. Everyone agrees with that sentiment. However, when push comes to shove, with very few exceptions, people tend to spread content that is more popular -- even when popularity means less helpful, sometimes incomplete.
The ability to think critically is a gift -- it's also the underpinning of an effective business strategy, where you work from your core competencies. I worry that much of that ability gets lost to the desire to fit in and become popular -- to make the quick list, in blog parlance.
Brad VanAuken
Jun 2, 2010
Is quality important? Yes. Is Innovation important? Absolutely.
Is service important? Of course. Is it desirable to be the industry leader? Sure. However, in more and more categories, as I perform brand audits, I find that large numbers of companies in many categories make these claims, so much so that the claims have become hollow.
Len Stein
May 27, 2010
With the meaning of a brand wide open to public interpretation and prone to hyperbole and misconception, corporate managers must thread a thicket of sticky challenges to successfully communicate brand mission, values and philosophy. Moreover, as brands become the publishers of their own unfolding stories, they need intelligent editors who can provide stakeholders with a stream of high-value content that is packed with utility, seeded with inspiration, and that is honestly empathetic. Anything less will not suffice in a world where consumers can simply click away or spin around and mount a web-wide counter-attack on brands that refuse to walk their talk.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
May 18, 2010
What's a brand? You realize that no two people, let alone two marketers, agree on the answer. It's a word, a metaphor, an analogy, a concept or some sort of thing with an existence and personality dependent on whomever is doing the defining, where they're doing it, and what they hope to accomplish.
Clinton Duncan
May 18, 2010
Brand Australia was conceived by the Federal Government of Australia as a four-year program to position Australia internationally as not just a pleasant place to holiday, barbeque shrimp and wrestle crocodiles, but also a nice enough place to perhaps invest a few dollars. And that’s the key to understanding the place this brand is intended to take; it does not replace the tourism brand created by FutureBrand, rather it sits above it as the overarching brand for global citizenship, culture, business and investment. Confusingly, that same tourism brand created by FutureBrand had been in use as the business to business brand under license by Austrade — the government agency responsible for promoting Australia and Australian businesses overseas. Therefore, it’s a before and after, whilst not being a before and after. Still with me?
Jeff Jarvis
May 9, 2010
I think Facebook’s problem lately with its disliked like button (and Google’s problem with the start of Buzz) is that they confuse the notion of the public sphere—that is, all of us—with the idea of making a public—that is, the small societies we create on Facebook or join on Twitter. Private v. public is not a binary decision; there is a vast middle in between that is about the control of our own publics. Allow me to explain….
Michael Margolis
May 4, 2010
Our tastes have expanded. Not just with food, but how we consume information, relationships, and experiences. Our expectations are on the rise.
Social media storytelling is changing things.
We demand communication that doesn’t insult our intelligence. Our instincts tell us we’re better than this. And so increasingly we opt-out, filter, and turn off the noise. We have settings for that. The message better be worthy of our attention.
Umair Haque
Apr 20, 2010
So you've got an elevator pitch — a short, pithy description of why your business is special, exciting, and unique. Yawn. Today, elevator pitches are the economic equivalent of speeches at a beauty pageant: predictable, often vapid, always bland.
Here's a suggestion. Try a Dumbwaiter Pitch instead. It's an exercise I often do with startups, giant corporations, social entrepreneurs, and investors. Its goal? To strip an organization right down to its bones, and see how compelling it really is.
Fred Wilson
Apr 2, 2010
Three years ago most western european countries had a local social network that was the most popular social net in the country. Today Facebook is dominant in most of western europe and those local social nets have largely been bypassed.
It would seem that Facebook leveraged the size of its network (approaching 500mm people worldwide) to beat its competition in social networking. But what's interesting to me about that is that it also means that it leveraged a network that was larger out of country to beat an incumbent who initially was larger in country.
Al Ries
Apr 2, 2010
There's the key and the lock. The bolt and the nut. The button and the button hole. So, too, there's the position and the hole in the mind the position is trying to fill.
Except, of course, many marketers seem to have forgotten about those holes in the mind.
Which is strange. If there is one constant in the communications chatter about the marketing function it's this one: The consumer owns the brand.
True enough. But where in the world is the consumer going to put the brand except in his or her mind?
Grant McCracken
Mar 30, 2010
I am always surprised that no one much bothers to tell the story of capitalism.
No, the stories we prefer to tell our children is that capitalism is a dangerous, soulless, relentlessly exploitative exercise. Indeed, this story is so preferred as our received wisdom, that it is exceedingly rare to hear anyone recite Adam Smith’s magical insight, that good things can and do come from people pursuing their own, sometimes narrow, objectives.
Virginia Heffernan
Mar 28, 2010
A company shows anxiety on its face — that is, on its Web site, which has become the face of the modern corporation. Visit sites for recently troubled or confused enterprises, including Maclaren, Toyota, Playtex, Tylenol and, yes, John Edwards, and you’ll find a range of digital ways of dealing with distress.
David Taylor
Mar 25, 2010
Coke Zero was launched in 2006 with the ambition of being as big as Diet Coke in 10 years. I posted back in 2006 asking questions about the rationale for Coke Zero and how successful it would be. Well, 4 years into that 10 year journey, and the status is (mkt share 4 weeks to 26 Dec 09):
Coke Zero: 2.2% share, lowest share since launch
Diet Coke: 26.8% share, +1%pt
So, why is Coke having such a hard time?
Michiko Kakutani
Mar 18, 2010
In his deliberately provocative — and deeply nihilistic — new book, “Reality Hunger,” the onetime novelist David Shields asserts that fiction “has never seemed less central to the culture’s sense of itself.” He says he’s “bored by out-and-out fabrication, by myself and others; bored by invented plots and invented characters” and much more interested in confession and “reality-based art.” His own book can be taken as Exhibit A in what he calls “recombinant” or appropriation art.
Bob Deutsch
Mar 15, 2010
In my work as a cognitive anthropologist I study how the mind works, how people "make meaning," how people form attachments to things (brands), and how people make decisions. Decisions like how to select what to invest in, whether stocks or mates; why and under what conditions, people prefer Coke over Pepsi (or vice versa), Charmin over Cottonelle; why a person believes in one God over another.
In that search I have inadvertently uncovered something about viva la difference: WOMEN CYCLE, MEN CONSUMMATE.
Stuart Elliot
Mar 15, 2010
Computer users searching online for information say they are “Googling.” Commercials running in states like Michigan and Ohio suggest that shoppers go “Krogering.” But what will investors make of a campaign that proposes they start “Vanguarding”?
The campaign, scheduled to begin this week, turns the Vanguard brand name into a verb, the better to help potential customers remember the company’s mutual funds and other investment products.
Scott Anthony
Feb 25, 2010
I had an epiphany recently. The setting: a multi-billion dollar global giant. The topic of discussion: innovation. My epiphany: A simple two-word phrase that can hamstring innovation.
What about...
Steve Mollman
Feb 4, 2010
Feeling overwhelmed by the sheer volume of online content? You're not alone. Keeping up to speed can be nearly impossible these days, with potentially hundreds or even thousands of daily postings competing for your attention from services like Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feeds. If you worry you're missing interesting content, it's probably because you are.
Norm Smallwood
Feb 4, 2010
Several years ago, my colleague Dave Ulrich and I looked at how leaders build value by building employee confidence in the future. Our findings bear revisiting as companies begin to emerge after the devastation of the last 18 months and work to create new value.
Rich Thomaselli
Feb 1, 2010
The mea culpa and brand-saving by Toyota Motor Corp. began today, as the embattled carmaker launched a public relations defensive on all fronts -- print, TV and social-media networks -- in a bid to salvage its image in the wake of the 2.3 million vehicle recall.
Lawrence Lessig
Jan 29, 2010
Documentary films could have been created the way books were, with writers using clips the way historians use quotations (that is, with no permission at all). And likewise, books could have been created differently: with each quotation licensed by the original author, with the promise to use the quote only according to the terms of a license. All books could thus be today as documentary films are today--inaccessible. Or all documentary films today could be as almost all books are today--accessible.
But it is the accident of our cultural history, created by lawyers not thinking about, as Duke law professor Jamie Boyle puts it, the “cultural environmental consequences” of their contracts, that we can always legally read, even if we cannot legally watch. In this contrast between books and documentaries, there is a warning about our future. What are the rules that will govern culture for the next hundred years? Are we building an ecology of access that demands a lawyer at every turn of the page? Or have we learned something from the mess of the documentary-film past, and will we create instead an ecology of access that assures copyright owners the incentive they need, while also guaranteeing culture a future?
AP
Jan 27, 2010
Literature has always relied on technology. We wouldn't have the Dead Sea Scrolls had the ancients failed to invent papyrus, just as we wouldn't have "The Da Vinci Code" if Gutenberg hadn't come out with movable type.
Technology has also abetted literature by enabling the wealth and leisure that fueled the rise of the popular press — and allowed for such luxuries as a class of professional writers and a large campus establishment devoted to the literary arts. It is important to bear in mind that technology is not the sworn enemy of literature as Apple prepares (according to frantic rumor) to unveil its much-anticipated new tablet computer on Jan. 27. Still, the collision of technology and literature in this case may well prove explosive.
Declan McCullagh
Jan 21, 2010
The U.S. Supreme Court's sweeping ruling on Thursday that invalidated large chunks of campaign finance law arose in part from an unlikely source: the rise of Facebook, YouTube, and blogs and the decline of traditional media outlets. A 5-4 majority of the justices concluded that technological changes have chipped away at the justification for a law that allows individuals to post their opinions about a political candidate -- but threatens the ACLU, the National Rifle Association, the Sierra Club, a labor union, or a for-profit corporation with felony criminal sanctions if they happen to do the same on their own Web site or blog.
Umair Haque
Jan 16, 2010
A hill, a giant chasm, and a cloud-covered peak. Close your eyes and picture a lopsided "M" for a second. That's the new landscape of advantage. And the recent skirmish between Google and China is its best example yet. On one side is the old high ground of the industrial era capitalism; on the other, the new high(er) ground of next-generation capitalism. The yawning chasm in between them is the gap between the 20th century and the 21st.
Armin
Jan 13, 2010
I gave myself a deadline of January 15 to do a recap of identity work in the 2000s, assuming that it wouldn’t be an editorial faux pas to do a list of this sort well into the new year. So here it is. An admittedly incomplete — it would take months to do this exhaustively — compilation of the most relevant identities of the past decade. The choices are listed chronologically and there is no ranking system, they are simply there as records of the corporations, products and services that shaped the decade and the identities that helped (or didn’t help) shape their perception in consumers’ eyes and minds.
Iain McGilchrist
Jan 4, 2010
Why is the brain divided? If it is about making connections, why has evolution so carefully preserved the segregation of its hemispheres? Almost every function once thought to be the province of one or other hemisphere—language, imagery, reason, emotion—is served by both hemispheres, not one.
There is nonetheless a highly significant difference in how the two hemispheres work, giving rise to two wholly distinct takes on the world. Normally we synthesize them without being aware that we are doing so. But one of the two hemispheres can come to dominate—and just as this may happen for individuals, it may also happen for a whole culture.
Briefing
Jan 3, 2010
How you use your mobile phone has long reflected where you live. But the spirit of the machines may be wiping away cultural differences.
David Carr
Jan 3, 2010
I can remember when I first thought seriously about Twitter. Last March, I was at the SXSW conference, a conclave in Austin, Tex., where technology, media and music are mashed up and re-imagined, and, not so coincidentally, where Twitter first rolled out in 2007. As someone who was oversubscribed on Facebook, overwhelmed by the computer-generated RSS feeds of news that came flying at me, and swamped by incoming e-mail messages, the last thing I wanted was one more Web-borne intrusion into my life.
Jonathan Rosenberg
Dec 22, 2009
Last week I sent an email to Googlers about the meaning of "open" as it relates to the Internet, Google, and our users. In the spirit of openness, I thought it would be appropriate to share these thoughts with those outside of Google as well.
At Google we believe that open systems win. They lead to more innovation, value, and freedom of choice for consumers, and a vibrant, profitable, and competitive ecosystem for businesses. Many companies will claim roughly the same thing since they know that declaring themselves to be open is both good for their brand and completely without risk. After all, in our industry there is no clear definition of what open really means. It is a Rashomon-like term: highly subjective and vitally important.
Bob Liodice
Dec 18, 2009
As we begin a one-year celebration of the ANA's 100th anniversary, we have created the Marketers' Constitution, which contains 10 essentials of marketing for the next 100 years. Its purpose is to ensure that our industry continues to thrive and contribute to the growth of the U.S. economy and to the well-being of our society.
John Baldoni
Dec 18, 2009
"We do have a conscious say in selecting the narrative we will use to make sense of the world," writes New York Times columnist David Brooks. "Individual responsibility is contained in the act of selecting and constantly revising the master narrative we tell about ourselves."
Brooks' explanation about choice of narrative can apply to leaders seeking ways to navigate our recession. The relentless tide of bad news may tempt those in charge to adopt a pessimistic view point, but leaders owe it to their followers to spread optimism. Without excluding reality, leaders need to inspire not simply hope, but also resilience. Storytelling can help in this effort. Here are some suggestions for crafting your own story to make sense of adversity.
Chris Brogan
Nov 13, 2009
The tools we use for social media have empowered us to be steady-flow commentators. Watch Twitter or Facebook during any event, and you’ll see our added commentary rolling along in time with the experience. At times, such as the US Presidential election, it was exciting to feel that experience, of everyone participating all across the world in an event. There are many more times where it feels like that.
In blog comments, on Twitter, all over Facebook, Yelp, YouTube, and several other sites, we’ve been groomed to give our opinion. We spit it out everywhere. We share, rate, criticize, deride, praise, and everything in between. Forrester’s Ladder graphic suggests that critics are second on the content ladder, just below creators.
Valeria Maltoni
Nov 10, 2009
Businesses are made of people, many of them in the middle. While everyone loves to talk to the C-level, the shift in the way people at all levels work, select and recommend service providers, and get things done is more notable in the thick of things, so to speak. Technology has made it even easier for people to connect with peers, collaborate, and get and give direct and indirect (through search) feedback.
There's a reason why social media has put a spotlight on being human - brands forgot how to tell stories. Along with a "me, too" characteristic of many B2Bs always in search of benchmarking and way to validate their value props, companies forgot (more likely stopped funding) media integration. This first set of considerations presents some difficulties in the connected world we live in.
Rita Chang
Nov 10, 2009
Flip, the Cisco-owned maker of pocket-sized camcorders, wants to go mass, and it's hoping its first, multimillion-dollar ad campaign, launched today, will establish it as a lifestyle brand. For a company that has previously eschewed big media buys in favor of grassroots marketing, it's a new strategy. But there's a lot at stake for the player that invented the sub-category of dummy-proof, affordable camcorders priced around or below the $200 range. For starters, it needs to quickly capitalize on the market's growth before it tapers off, thanks in part to competition from video-camera-enabled smartphones.
Ben Macintyre
Nov 9, 2009
Narratives are a staple of every culture the world over. They are disappearing in an online blizzard of tiny bytes of information.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Nov 2, 2009
If video killed the radio star, wasn't video supposed to obliterate text? It hasn't. Not even close. Who would have thought that 2009 would witness instead the continued resurgence of the written word? The language was sometimes indeterminable, and the conversations often unrepeatable without a blush added to the shrug, but text has proven amazingly resilient as a communications medium. Words "work" on printed pages and mobile phone screens (i.e. cross-platform), find utility for marketing strategies old and new (you can use them to declare, or to converse), and prove convenient and adaptable for users young and old.
Ann Handley
Oct 29, 2009
The other day I got an email press release from a technology company crowing about a partnership with another organization. It read, in part: "We believe the alliance between xxx and yyy represents a synergistic win-win with significant value add for both solutions, allowing each to utilize and leverage their unique strengths in the market."
Huh? If the news was worth covering, I couldn't tell, because the press release was stuffed to the seams with jargon-filled corporate-speak. I deleted the email almost immediately, sat back in my desk chair, and thought about EB White.
EB White was, of course, the author of Charlotte's Web and Stuart Little. But he was also the co-author, with William Strunk Jr., of The Elements of Style.
Cynthia Kurtz
Oct 28, 2009
As my original career was in biology, when I started working with stories I naturally wanted to consider the natural history of stories, including their life cycles. Now this is a much more difficult thing with stories than with tadpoles or mushrooms, because stories mingle and morph in ways that creatures can't. But here is try at it, based on my experiences and what I've read. I've been pondering this cycle for a long time and playing with it in mind, and this is what I've got to lately. Of course this cycle will be nothing new to anyone who thinks about stories, and it's obviously a greatly simplified metaphor, and I'm merrily making up terms as I go. But this sort of thing can provide a scaffold for discussions about helping people tell and share stories to attain goals.
Tom Asacker
Oct 21, 2009
A few weeks ago, I had lunch with a friend prior to an evening speech. After some small talk about life, the
universe and everything, our conversation naturally turned to the abysmal U.S. economy. “Things are really
tough right now,” she explained. “I’ve tried to get everyone to understand the importance of branding in this
very difficult environment, but I don’t think they get it. In fact,” she added. “Our customers hate that word.”
“What word?” I asked. “Brand?” “Yea. The non-profits we work with have a real aversion to the whole
notion of branding. I guess they don’t really understand the concept and how it applies to them.”
They’re not the only ones.
Denis G. Pelli & Charles Bigelow
Oct 20, 2009
Nearly everyone reads. Soon, nearly everyone will publish. Before 1455, books were handwritten, and it took a scribe a year to produce a Bible. Today, it takes only a minute to send a tweet or update a blog. Rates of authorship are increasing by historic orders of magnitude. Nearly universal authorship, like universal literacy before it, stands to reshape society by hastening the flow of information and making individuals more influential. As an open research question, we asked whether it’s possible to objectively track this change and accurately predict the eventual threshold point of universal authorship.
Jack Neff
Oct 12, 2009
Managing a brand has always been a slightly odd concept, given that consumers are the real arbiters of brand meaning, and it's become increasingly outmoded in today's two-way world. That's why a new report is going to recommend changing the name "brand manager" to "brand advocate," and fundamentally changing marketer organizations in response to the onset of the digital age.
The report, due out next week from Forrester, finally puts the onus on marketers to change their structures -- a welcome conclusion for media owners and agencies who keep hearing how they should change, but often complain that their clients have done little to shift their organizations to cope with an increasingly complex world of media fragmentation and rising retailer and consumer power.
Umair Haque
Sep 17, 2009
Innovation: it's the ultimate source of advantage, the undisputed heavyweight champion of the economic ring. Innovation is what every organization should be ruthlessly pursuing, right? Wrong.
I'd like to advance a hypothesis: awesomeness is the new innovation.
Let's face it. "Innovation" feels like a relic of the industrial era. And it just might be the case that instead of chasing innovation, we should be innovating innovation — that innovation needs innovation. Why? When we examine the economics of innovation, three reasons emerge.
Melissa Davis
Sep 15, 2009
Every so often the vocabulary of business adopts new words that filter into the mainstream business psyche. For example, the language of brands and branding is now commonly used and understood across a range of sectors— from universities to social enterprises to small businesses. Over the past year or two, the new vocabulary has brought in “sustainability,” whether it is to talk about the environment or general business operations, about communities or the future. Google the term and you’ll see that “sustainability” has 28 million definitions—only a few million short of the 34 million entries for “branding."
Words that become common business parlance can shift in meaning and, in doing so, become open to a multitude of interpretations.
Grant McCracken
Sep 9, 2009
It's fashionable to say "really?" in a new way.
The old way of saying "really?" meant (roughly)
Wow, that's interesting. Thanks!
As in:
"Did you know the Pittsburgh Pirates are the worst team in Christendom?
"Really!"
The new way of saying "really?" means (roughly),
"That's what you're going with? I wouldn't have made that choice. I wonder if you're an idiot."
As in:
"I'm thinking about moving to Connecticut."
"Really."
The first really is using spoken with the upward lilt of a question. The second really usually comes with an emphatic downturn in tone. (It's heavy with scorn.)
I'm not sure when this new really arrived. Certainly, a tipping point came when Saturday Night Live began running "Really?!? with Seth and Amy." Phrases dream of this kind of exposure. To be blessed by Lorne Michaels. To be lifted out of the obscurity. "Really" went big time.
But it's not enough to be elevated by Lorne Michaels. A phrase doesn't flourish unless it speaks to something in our culture. And that's the question: what does the sudden popularity of this little phrase tell us about ourselves?
Sam Ladner
Sep 8, 2009
Organizations are tenuous phenomena; they can fall apart at any time. To navigate the landscape of organizational culture interaction designers need a set of practical tools, language & knowledge drawn from the world of cultural anthropology.
It’s happened to all of us. We walk into what we think is a Web redesign project, only to find we have unwittingly ignited the fires of WW III in our client’s organization. What begins as a simple design project descends – quickly – into an intra-organizational battle, with the unprepared interaction designer caught in the crossfire.
What is it about design projects that seem to attract such power struggles? Contrary to what you might think, being stuck in the middle of an internecine battle is actually an opportunity to effect meaningful change on your client’s organization.
Denise Lee Yohn
Sep 4, 2009
The folks at Blackcoffee have been inviting folks to complete the thought, “A Brand Is…”. I was so fascinated to read the range of responses that I decided to take a closer look. I wanted to see what common themes emerged among people’s definitions of “Brand” and what we could learn from them.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Aug 12, 2009
The Massachusetts Historical Society is publishing the one-liner diary entries that President John Qunicy Adams made in late August, 1809; his posts were all 140 characters or less, so it’s doing it via Twitter. You can read them as if he’s tweeting each day, 200 years later.
He has 4,200+ followers, so a few social media advocates have said this proves there’s value in micro-blog (short) posts. While the technology of Twitter may be new, the desire and utility behind the behavior is hundreds of years old. If Adams could tweet without a mobile phone app, shouldn’t we all consider it almost an obligation to do so now?
Er, no.
Robin Wauters
Aug 2, 2009
Ever since I’ve started blogging about technology a couple of years ago, I’ve been consistently growing an immense feeling of hate towards press releases, and it’s not getting any better.
It’s not that I dislike the PR industry in general, although I often wonder how so many of these firms continue to be in business when the large majority of them have been doing it exactly the same way for the past few decades, instead of evolving.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Jul 23, 2009
The newly reformulated Powerade contains "ION4," and the branding emphasizes the secret code for this new concoction at the expense of the name of the product. I'm not sure that’s such a smart thing to do.
Grant McCracken
Jul 19, 2009
GM's CMO Robert Lutz was recently told an awful truth: "In my group it is just uncool to drive a GM car -- even if they are as good as the imports."
He replied: "I guess it depends whether you have your own personality or whether you are a lemming-like follower of current trends. I think an audacious and bold person with a mind of his or her own would go to a dealership and see that our new vehicles easily trounce the foreign competition. . . . It's uncool to drive an import."
It's hard to assess how many ways this violates the marketer's handbook...but I'm going to try.
Anne Trubek
Jun 28, 2009
Blogs, Twitter, Facebook: these outlets are supposedly cheapening language and tarnishing our time. But the fact is we are all reading and writing much more than we used to...
Lera Boroditsky
Jun 16, 2009
For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question.
Mark L. Olson
Jun 14, 2009
As a marketing and communications professional, I stress simple, straightforward language in my work, and I’m always watching for the evolving lexicon of the market. Two words that have been showing up all over the blogosphere, Web and in print like they’re on sale are authenticity and authority. After reading scores of bogs and articles featuring one or both words, it struck me there were two schools of thought among web experts, bloggers and marketers about which was more important, or which begat the other.
Caroline McCarthy
Jun 8, 2009
Now here's one you don't see every day: Wordnik, which launched out of private beta on Monday and states its mission as "discovering all the words and everything about them." Taking the basic premise of a dictionary, Wordnik supplements each entry with Web 2.0's tastiest treats--relevant Flickr images, Twitter search matches, user-contributed tags and comments--and then invites users to add their own words, too.
Grant McCracken
May 28, 2009
It's the place senior managers gather to deliberate. It's the place where the most pressing decisions are made. What's the metaphor that best captures the C-suite?
Fast Company staff
May 20, 2009
There are no rules about creativity. Which made constructing our list of the 100 Most Creative People in Business a tricky task. We looked for dazzling new thinkers, rising stars, and boldface names who couldn't be ignored. We avoided people we've profiled in the recent past. We emphasized those whose creativity addresses a larger issue -- from the future of our energy infrastructure to the evolution of philanthropy to next-generation media and entertainment. So read on. Enjoy. Quibble. Complain.
Jeff Jarvis
May 17, 2009
In this week’s kerfuffling on Twitter and blogs about the Wall Street Journal’s anti-interactive interactivity rules regarding Twitter et al, a New York Times editor took a few of us to task for not recognizing that this was just a case of a CYA - cover your ass - memo from lawyers. I responded that CYA can now BYA - burn your ass - when such memos become public, as they will, and speak for you.
Andrea James
May 7, 2009
Last year marked several significant transitions for Seattle-based Starbucks. Howard Schultz returned to the role of chief executive officer, the company shuffled its leadership team, closed stores, introduced new products and shifted its focus from opening new stores to maintaining quality and customer loyalty.
Though Starbucks was already in transition before the economic slump worsened, the recession intensified the need for corporate changes.
Starbucks is an image company, one in which words matter. In 2009, executives described the coffee giant using a different set of terms than they used in 2007.
The word clouds below show us how different.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
May 6, 2009
The way that "cloud computing" is marketed makes me expect a pitch for a deed to a bridge in New Jersey will come next. In a sentence, cloud computing is when data, services, and apps that run on one of your computing devices are available on all of your devices because they run somewhere else. That somewhere is called the cloud because it makes your stuff available everywhere. The problem is that it kinda feels like nowhere, doesn't it?
Colin Goedecke
Apr 30, 2009
Listening is about being still. And patient. And generous. It’s a difficult trifecta to achieve.
Think about the last time almost anyone you know gave their absolute attention to you or someone who was talking to them.
You have to quiet your mind entirely, and be willing to be influenced by someone else’s thinking and thoughts.
You need to put aside any desire to rebut or argue a point, and be completely open and non-judgmental. Very hard to do.
Jonathan Salem Baskin
Apr 21, 2009
Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens has rendered a verdict: William Shakespeare couldn't have written the plays attributed to his pen. The likely author was Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford. This says lots about the nature of truth in the chaos of our Information Age...or the changed definition of how we make decisions in our Age of Chaos.
Steve Rivkin
Apr 10, 2009
"Do you Yahoo?"
"Did you Xerox the report?"
"Did you FedEx it?"
"Did you see the messenger Rollerblading?"
It's the branding of language.
Once upon a time, using a brand name as a verb was anathema. It was behavior that would drive a trademark lawyer crazy.
But more and more marketers are deciding that the grand slam of branding is to become part of the language - in effect, having your trademark substitute in everyday usage for the type of action or service that your mark identifies. Could there be, they argue, any clearer expression of a leadership position?
Grant McCracken
Apr 6, 2009
Thursday I heard a characteristically wonderful presentation by Faris Yakob at the BrainJuicer event in NYC. (This guy is talent with a capital T[shirt].) In passing, Faris noted that some people now groan when the term "twitter" comes up in conversation. Groaning? I can see exclaiming, kvelling, even plotzing. But groaning. Why groaning? The answer to this question lies, I think, in another question: why do people groan at puns?
Chad White
Mar 24, 2009
Last year, marketers seemed to be slow to change their messaging in response to the yet-to-be-formally-declared recession. During the holidays, retailers responded to slowing sales largely by promoting deep discounts in email after email. However, since the turn of the calendar, I've seen retailers adopting a variety of tactics to coax sales from their recession-wary customers:
Frank Striefler and Erik Hanson
Mar 18, 2009
Life today can be complicated. The accelerating pace of innovation, ideas and technology, and the pressure to keep up with it all in real time can make just getting by quite an effort. So, people don’t have the time or attention to go out of their way to understand things that are confusing. In fact, the more complicated something is, the greater the need for simpler ways of understanding it.
Gord Hotchkiss
Mar 12, 2009
Search, and Google in particular, was
the first true language of the Web. But I've often called it a
toddler's language - intentional, but not fully voiced. This past few
weeks folks are noticing
an important trend - the share of traffic referred to their sites is
shifting. Facebook (and for some, like this site, Twitter) is becoming
a primary source of traffic. Why? Well, two big
reasons. One, Facebook has metastasized to a size that rivals Google.
And two, Facebook Connect has come into its own.
Spike
Feb 25, 2009
I’m gonna open up the Brains on Fire heart and soul here for a
moment and talk about something that we struggle with: it’s how we talk
about what we do as a company. Here’s the dilemma: If you use your own language, then you have to
explain harder what you do. But if you use the same language as
everyone else, then you fall into the “just another” category.
Colin Goedecke
Jan 20, 2009
When The Wizard of Oz goes from black-and-white to color, the story springs to life all the more vividly; extraordinarily. In
the eyes of today’s audiences, many companies’ stories, images and
messages are missing a richly individual character: a truly distinctive
color, contrast, aura, personality.
Emily Nussbaum
Jan 13, 2009
This past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times.
Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by
fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to
mortgage its new building, slashed dividends, and, as of last week, was
printing ads on the front page. And yet, even as the financial pages write the paper’s obit, something hopeful has been going on: a kind of evolution.
Seth Godin
Dec 12, 2008
Headlines matter now more than they ever did. Headlines provoke and introduce. They cajole and they position. No headline, no communication.
Patrick Davis
Nov 24, 2008
The post-agency era is upon us. With
staggering speed and efficiency, consumer preferences and digital
technologies have coalesced to create a broad and deep cultural demand
for direct relationships. In this disintermediated market, do we need
go-betweens at all?
Nigel Hollis
Nov 21, 2008
For brand marketers today, "global" is
increasingly the name of the game. Long the prerogative of American and
European brands, now Chinese, Indian, Mexican and Brazilian brands are
seeking to establish their position as global players. Underlying this
push to globalize brands is the assumption that the world is becoming
more homogeneous.
Wells Tower
Nov 17, 2008
If its absurdist twists and wicked
parodies of conventional journalism are just a joke, thecountry's
leading satirical newspaper is having the last laugh.
John Dickerson
Nov 17, 2008
Snazzy new technology isn't enough to bring transparency to the White House.
Davis Thinking } analysis and interpretation
