Stealth Marketing: How to Reach Customers Surreptitiously is a fascinating article from the California Management Review that describes how agencies can intervene in natural communication situations to achieve results that traditional advertising can't achieve....
Once upon a time, marketing was about hyping the benefits of a product in order to convince you to buy it. Whether you were happy didn't matter much, because you already had your money and had moved on to other customers. In a contemporary consumer society, however,...
This is a question that has gnawed at my soul for months. I’ve sent e-mails to a variety of prominent people who could answer the question, but I haven’t received any responses. Maybe they think I’m a nut.In any case, I now present this as an open question to the...
Forty has been in business for over a year now, and it's been a wonderfully successful first year, having completely blown away our business plan estimate, our own expectations, and even our craziest ambitions. While I don’t claim to be a business expert, I do think...
The world’s biggest branding crisis isn’t accounting scandals, poor customer service, or ugly logos—it’s executives’ paralyzing fear that they’re going to do something wrong. Imagine that you’ve just been chosen as the new CEO for a Fortune 500 company. The numbers...
We don’t typically think of banks as a source of clever and innovative ideas, but Bank of America has somehow managed to break out of the mold. Keep the Change is a brilliant new service from Bank of America. In a nutshell, whenever you purchase something with your...
The technology for of “internet radio” has been around for well over a decade, so why is it now taking off in the form of podcasting? Folks have dabbled in online radio for ages. Dozens—possibly hundreds—of companies have risen and fallen on the promise that it would...
Misconceptions about the purpose of a corporate identity system often cause companies to limp along with a sub-standard business image. Find out how you can avoid these common mistakes in your own organization. (Update: Many thanks to Antonio Mariscal, who took the...
Compelling stock photos, catchy slogans, and memorable marketing copy have just a fraction of the branding power of a single human being. Think of all the great ad campaigns you’ve seen in your lifetime. Now think of all the great people you’ve known. Family. Friends....
In an effort to improve public perception (which leads to increased tourism and investment), some states might consider investing in an attractive new name. We’ve seen numerous examples of well-established companies changing names in an attempt to reinvent their...
There are passengers, and there are drivers—and there are also a few people who ride a bike instead. In his post Let’s Steer This Ship Together, Will Pate talks about a concept that I’ve also been noodling on for the past few months: “leading” and “being led”...
Having recently been consulted for a corporate naming project, I thought I’d post my personal guidelines on how to dodge the most common naming landmines. Over the years, I’ve put together a mental checklist that I’ve used when working on naming projects, and this...
The LA Times is feeling the effects of the population’s media consumption moving away from print, but their $10 million solution leaves much to be desired. Large companies tend to get so wrapped up in their own momentum that they fail to notice that the rest of the...
There are golden fields ready for the harvest, if you can bring yourself to stop fighting your peers for table scraps in oversaturated markets.
XHTML, CSS, DOM, XML, XSLT, XMLHttpRequest, and JavaScript were just programmers’ techno-babble…until they were collectively christened “Ajax.” On February 18, 2005, Jesse James Garrett (founder of Adaptive Path, wrote a brief essay entitled “Ajax: A New...
Eris Free, Paul Scrivens, and Molly Holzschlag have all touched an emerging issue in marketing—blog payola. Marqui is a new company with an interesting business model. Companies pay them to get their products written about in weblogs, and Marqui in turn...
(I wrote this back in 2005 but I preach the same principle today.) The brands we respect, the brands we’re drawn to, the brands we’re compelled to follow are those that are willing to let go of their fear and do what they know is right for them. I recently worked on a...
The recent “I’d Hit It” ad campaign from McDonald’s illustrates the perils of trying to tap into hip subcultures from the outside. Andrew Teman of “World Champion” originally pointed out the ad, a Flash piece appearing at the top of ESPN’s Page 2. (It’s still there at...
There’s no shortage of advice available regarding the best ways to generate buzz for your hot and exciting new product, but what are you supposed to do if your product isn’t really buzzworthy? Let’s say you’ve made a new line of those plastic clips that you put on a...
If you run a website, you may have noticed that your Google rankings dancing around over the past few weeks. Is this the end of the world as we know it? Google wields enormous power over the economy. When a Google developer tweaks a formula, thousands of businesses...