Davis ThinkingWeb bots, the “internet of things”, machine learning and other converging technological advancements offer an early glimpse of our artificial intelligence future. And marketers need to start paying attention.
Davis Brand Capital today released the 2009 Davis Brand Capital 25 ranking, which evaluates brand beyond its traditional marketing function and considers it as an amalgam of intangibles creating value in the intellectual economy. The ranking compares the five key intangible categories by which the consultancy defines brand capital: brand value; competitive performance; innovation strength; company culture; and social impact.
Microsoft’s laptop hunters are back. This time we follow Giampaolo, a tech-savvy Roman import with “really big hands” (heh... good one, CPB). He’s looking for “portability, battery life, and power.” Portability you say? In a laptop?
As part of a new campaign, HP has called on the talents of the (Amy Poehler-founded) Upright Citizens Brigade and The People’s Improv Theater to tout its gizmos on YouTube’s adorably titled Master PC Theatre. While we applaud HP’s efforts to combine new media and pop culture with its storytelling, it all feels a little awkward. For one, improv should be funny. But more importantly, the “performance” overshadows the late, tacked-on message.
Hewlett-Packard has made digital marketing a core focus of the entire company, according to CMO Mike Mendenhall. In his appearance at the recent ANA conference, Mendenhall also noted that the independent social networks that have grown up around its various product lines are now viewed as an integral part of its consumer service operations.
In the corporate world, the HP Way has been to sell the servers and professional services that companies need, and then to partner with big software companies like Oracle and SAP for the applications. This has left HP holding the bag with low-margin businesses.
Kodak's auction of intellectual property has yet to produce a sale. But it has had one unlikely result: turning the fiercest rivals in the global patent battle into potential collaborators.
Integrating design into your company involves more than just hiring superstar designers. It takes a long-term commitment and developing a culture that brings everyone up to speed.
Apple has edged out IBM to become the top brand of 2011, according to an annual list from marketing strategy firm Davis Brand Capital. The Cupertino-based company ousted IBM, which topped the list in 2009 and 2010.
Most every company says it values its customers, and hates to 'walk away' from them. Leaders are called on to make tough decisions they believe are in the best interests of their companies. And sometimes, these decisions advantage some customers at the expense of others. That doesn't make them bad decisions, just risky ones. But leaders of some of our greatest brands act like they have forgotten (or never knew) what every junior brand manager surely knows --- to test potentially risky messages and find ways to mitigate their negative impact. Instead, senior leaders are acting like bulls in a china shop, awkwardly and prematurely broadcasting their strategic decisions in ways that destroy their company's (and their own) reputation and value.
In the 20th century, a select group of leaders — General Motor's Alfred Sloan, HP's David Packard and Bill Hewlett, and GE's Jack Welch — set the standard for the way corporations are run. In the 21st century only IBM's Sam Palmisano has done so. When Palmisano retired this month, the media chronicled his success by focusing on IBM's 21% annual growth in earnings per share and its increase in market capitalization to $218 billion. But IBM hasn't flourished because it kowtows to Wall Street. In fact, five years after Palmisano took over, IBM stock was stuck where it had been when his tenure began.
Cloud technology isn’t hype anymore: Businesses are moving computing work to the cloud. And with trillions of tech dollars at stake, it’s war up there. Here are the tech companies battling for their piece of the market.
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.
Interbrand has released its 2010 ranking of the world's best global brands. The 11th annual assessment of the world's most successful brands for the first time doesn't include BP, which lost billions of dollars of value, and brand equity, due to the Gulf Oil spill.
The second move in about a year for a little-known data storage company highlights how big technology companies are scrambling to help their larger customers do more with the massive amounts of information they are collecting.
Mark Hurd served as the CEO of HP since 2005. He was known on Wall Street as a cost-cutter. Cost cutters tend to be loved for their short-term financial gains, but there is a flaw to their management style in that they typically find it difficult to build the long-term value of their corporate brand. I have no comment on Hurd's conduct that caused him to be fired but I do find it interesting that the board voted 6-4 to fire him based on the advice of a public relations consultant. Was the Board concerned about the corporate reputation of HP? Or, as Larry Ellison, CEO, Oracle, said, "the HP Board just made the worst personnel decision since the idiots on the Apple Board fired Steve Jobs many years ago."
Hewlett-Packard Co. scooped up Palm Inc. for about $1 billion in cash, pushing the computer giant deeper into the competitive smartphone market and ending the independence of a struggling company that was rapidly running out of prospects.
Last week, Harris Interactive released their annual study of the most visible and reputable companies in the country. Based on a poll of almost 30,000 people, companies were ranked on a "reputation quotient," calculated by a variety of public perceptions, including vision and leadership, financial performance, social responsibility, and perceptions of work place environments. I spoke with Robert Fronk, SVP of reputation management at Harris Interactive, to find out the impact of corporate reputation, and whether or not it even matters.
It certainly was a diverse week in the social media sphere, with the the iPhone OS 4.0 reveal, Digg’s CEO shakeup, Tiger Woods’s new commercial and the Baja California, earthquake’s coverage on Twitter and YouTube. And, as if the aftershocks from the natural disaster wasn’t enough, we’ve been practically flooded with iPad news since its launch this past Saturday.
In need of an image makeover after an aggressive acquisition spree, Hewlett-Packard is launching its first corporate advertising campaign in more than five years. The company, which consumers know primarily for its printers, says it is seeking to recast itself as a broader technology concern with a campaign featuring, among others, rapper Dr. Dre and stand-up comedian Rhys Darby, star of the HBO series "Flight of the Conchords." A person familiar with the matter estimated that the eight-week campaign will cost $40 million.
Oracle, having spent the last nine months fighting rivals and regulators in order to own Sun Microsystems, has pushed itself into the middle of the scrum of technology heavyweights all jostling for the same corporate customers. The $7.4 billion deal, which gives Oracle a vast hardware business for the first time, pits it against Hewlett-Packard, I.B.M., Dell and Cisco Systems, all of which have made a flurry of acquisitions and alliances. Many of these moves broadened the companies’ products and services from their traditional specialties, like databases, computers or networking equipment. Each company wants to be able to claim to prospective customers that it, and it alone, has more of the parts to be an end-to-end service provider.
What's the No. 1 principle of marketing, at least as far as we're concerned? It's the principle of focus. You narrow the focus in order to own a word in the mind of the consumer. Without a focus, it's very difficult to build a strong brand. And without a strong brand, any company's future is in doubt. While focus should be the key ingredient in any marketing campaign, it's not the whole story. So we developed an acronym called FOCVS that does sum up our key thoughts. "FOCVS," a word using the original alphabet of the Roman Empire, consists of five key elements.
Hollywood loves a format war. First VHS saw off Betamax in the great home video battle of the 1980s. More recently, Blu-ray won the right to succeed the DVD when it was preferred by film studios to rival HD-DVD technology. However, as Hollywood looks to the digital era, the industry is split on how to manage the distribution of movies to TVs, computers and hand-held devices, setting the stage for its next great technological tussle. In one corner is Walt Disney and its Keychest product, which it describes as "enabling technology" that allows consumers to buy or rent a film and then view it on any device they choose. In the opposing corner is Digital Entertainment Content Ecosystem, a coalition of retailers, hardware makers and film companies, including Hewlett-Packard, Netflix and Sony.
I’m fascinated by the recent flurry of activity of designer PCs. Having worked at Sony during the early years of VAIO (perhaps the first fashionable PC line, launched with its distinctive violet color and sleek features and all), it’s pretty amazing to me to see how the category has developed. Both HP and Dell have introduced lines of designer PCs in the last couple of years. HP’s launch of the Vivienne Tam Mini in early 2008 was the product of the PC maker’s partnership with the popular clothing designer and its success spawned a series of other limited editions. In December of last year Dell launched Design Studio, a customization program in which customers pick from custom colors and pieces of artwork from artists. A study of the two companies’ entries makes for some interesting comparisons.
Google Inc., a champion of the belief that advertising should be less about art and more about science, is embracing its inner creative side. As it searches for new growth, the company in recent months has focused more on creating custom ad campaigns spanning multiple Google services for big spenders including Hewlett-Packard Co. and Ford Motor Co. Since the summer, Google has helped J.C. Penney Co. and PepsiCo Inc.'s Quaker Oats unit launch ad campaigns on YouTube and on some of the hundreds of thousands of sites across which Google sells display ads, along with search ads.
HP and Amazon's latest ad campaigns may use crowdsourcing to generate advertisements, but the concept is far from new. Dorito's "Crash the Super Bowl" contest, launched in 2006, has been one of the more successful campaigns of this type.
THE Internet has changed many things, of course, but one of its more far-reaching effects has been to transform the economics of innovation.
Today my series on brand value creation comes to a close with a look at companies’ Learning and Growth. Previous posts have examined how brands create value for companies from the Customer, Financial (2 posts), and Internal Business Process perspectives. The Learning and Growth quadrant of the Balanced Scorecard asks, “To achieve our vision, how will we sustain our ability to change and improve?” The results produced by a strong brand relative to this quadrant may be the most difficult to quantify, but they are perhaps the most significant. Here are 3 ways a brand creates value by impacting an organization’s Learning and Growth:
The sound of marketers excitedly scrawling the word 'Twitter' on whiteboards and flipcharts up and down the UK is now almost deafening. But, while some have succeeded, others offer a step-by-step guide of what not to do.
Under CEO Gianfranco Lanci, the Taiwan company is using cutthroat pricing to gain on Dell and Hewlett-Packard.
Microsoft's new Lauren is a tech-savvy engineer with a complicated, foreign name, tasked with finding a laptop that'll address his needs for under $1,500. You'll never guess what this Microsoft-paid probable-actor decided to buy.
Declaring his company's intent to "democratize print publishing," Hewlett-Packard's CMO heavily hyped the new MagCloud.com site to the Interactive Advertising Bureau conference in Orlando. In a keynote that promoted several of HP's recently-launched offerings, Michael Mendenhall appeared to put special emphasis on the game-changing potential of MagCloud. The site enables anyone to produce a full-color, ad-supported print magazine and make it available -- via on-demand printing and an e-commerce system -- to anyone else. <div style="padding: 0px 0px 0px 0px;"> <a href="http://adage.com/video"><img src="/images/random/video_alladage417bar.jpg" width="417" height="40" border="0" /></a> </div>
Netbooks, those pint-size laptops that unexpectedly sold like hot cakes last year, are making life stressful for Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Microsoft.
Harrah's, the casino entertainment company, is beginning to explore how to create commercially useful knowledge by applying a much-hyped knowledge management tool—prediction markets—in a very new context.
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