Davis ThinkingHave you noticed that time passes more quickly the older you get, and milestones don't seem so milestoney anymore? There's a neurobiological basis for it that has something to do with expectation and habit: we get more familiar with the ebb and flow of experience as we get older so there's less likelihood that we’ll be truly surprised (and thus any individual experience will stand out). An 8 year-old is far more hopeful for a novel holiday season her parents, generally speaking. The acts of living shift from active engagement to semi-somnambulant routine; undifferentiated moments becomes unmemorable experience, and we're left wondering where the time went. From a marketers' perspective, I think this tends to make older people more cynical, distrusting, and difficult to convince.
The baleful consequences of the Great Recession cannot be resolved by maintaining the same approaches as when we created it. The "new normal" in business means many brand owners need to leverage something much larger than a re-take on marketing. They need to accelerate their collaboration with consumers, so that principles such as "for people, for planet, for profit," combined with tools of the web and next-generation media, can transform brands' role in the economy, society and business.
Discount retailer TJX Cos.'s fourth-quarter profit climbed 58 percent as bargain-hunting shoppers snatched up deeply discounted goods at its T.J. Maxx and Marshalls stores. TJX on Wednesday also unveiled an additional $1 billion stock buyback and said it plans to raise its dividend and ramp up expansion. The company, which also owns the HomeGoods and A.J. Wright chains, earned $395 million, of 94 cents per share, for the quarter that ended Jan. 30. That compares with a profit of $250.7 million during the same period last year
Usually I’m a Google fanboy. I live inside of my Reader, store most everything in Docs, broadcast my location with Latitude, hardly touch those other search engines (or whatever silly name they’re calling themselves today), and I’ve been a Gmail user since 2006. If Google builds it, I try it. But Buzz is threatening my fandom… because Buzz is ruining my experience in the other products – specifically, Gmail and Google Reader.
Happiness is contagious, and that "contagious" quality is where design meets the market. Coca-Cola's Happiness Machine video is a perfect example of how viral happiness can be. The brand's first viral venture captures what happened when they placed a very special vending machine on a college campus. The video launched on January 12 and topped a million views today based solely on people sharing the video through Twitter, Facebook, blogs, and word-of-mouth. The people in the video and people spreading the video will forever share a memory that cements the association of happiness with Coca-Cola.
Mobile marketing has been an interesting space ever since my time working at Bell Labs in the days of the 802.11A platform. Its promise was glittery then and now it's taken on a new level of interest, as measured by the near frantic rate of acquisitions and VC investments in this space. All this new energy can't be explained by the technology alone; the notion of proximity marketing has been kicking around for four years or more. What's different this time around is that mobile marketing breaks previous marketing models because the message is inextricably linked to the device it's delivered on. That's new. In the past, the device via which the marketing message was delivered, a TV for example, was irrelevant to the message itself. Welcome to Mobile Marketing 3.0. In the mobile marketing 3.0 world, hardware, technology, real-time interaction, community are all mashed up to deliver a marketing experience I'll call Extreme Marketing UX. The device is not irrelevant here but is what helps propel the action since the phone is part of the experience itself.
Design thinking translates rigorous trend research into meaningful experiences that lead markets and foster brand loyalty instead of merely following the cult of now. Blue may be the new green, but how is that relevant to an industry, a brand and the evolving desires of its customers? Times and trends can change so quickly that a campaign, product or service can be rendered irrelevant by the time it gets to market.
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