marketing

I have always maintained that Design and Marketing go hand in hand. Any designer looking to become more business savvy can get quite far if he or she starts with some marketing knowledge.

Mike Funk writes:

Guest Post by: Ingmar de Lange

The brand utility is here. Many brands are experimenting with this approach, some successful, others find a dead end. Time to draw some conclusions: what are the main drivers a brand utility’s success?

Leave it to the company that so many people love to hate to first reinvent corporate social responsibility ("CSR") and now take on marketing.

Walmart has announced that it's creating a new function, called "marketing operations," and slotting its architect of corporate sustainability into the role, and it's taking its private brands marketer and putting her into the sustainability job. These moves say profound things about the marketing world, how Walmart is reinventing it and, by default, how it's leaving other marketers in the dust.

Originally published in 2003, before the social media craze started, these are five ideas that every company should still be exploring today. I believe that these five rules are even more important in the social media world we live in today.

The comments on my article, Revealed: How Steve Jobs Turns Customers into Fanatics showed several tendencies. First, they proved my point about fanaticism, as many of the comments were knee-jerk reactions from Apple fans who assumed (incorrectly) that I was attacking Apple’s products. (Did they even read the post?) The reaction was comparable to whacking a hornet nest with a stick.

Changing  the face of marketing is something that takes vision and persistence.  With the publication of Shift Perspectives #2, Bogdan Meica & Stefan Moghina are proving once again to have both.

This time focusing on the topic of innovation, our two Romanian friends have brought together the likes of Seth Godin, Mitch Joel, Gerald Nanninga and many of the people you find on this blog in one publication that is sure to make you think.

The e-mail came in like hundreds of others. I read it, thought about it and took the e-mailer up on their offer to unsubscribe. Frankly, I was upset that I ended up on the e-mail list. I never asked to be. And while it tried to come across as humble, real and authentic—it just didn't really do it for me. It took time out of my day that's valuable to me. I felt inconvenienced to have to go through the unsubscribe effort, though strangely satisfied after it took.

A new study out by Forrester seems to indicate that there's not enough people using location based services for marketers to bother with them right now. Although they also suggest that people should experiment with these tools as well.

Well, I also have a study (well, not a study really, just a discussion with some smart folks) that I believe shows something pretty significant:

An article in the Creating Results blog has some interesting stats about the effectiveness of referrals in the Health, Travel and Financial Services Industries