marketing

Soda pop consumption in the U.S. has fallen for the 8th straight year, dropping by 1.2% in 2012 to its lowest level since 1987. First lady Michelle Obama is leading a national charge to get kids to stop drinking it, and New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg wants to limit consumption legislatively. Alternatives to soda are cranking on as many sales cylinders as there are flavor options, from sports drinks and flavored waters, to energy drinks and teas.

In the beginning, there were products and services, and some were good. Fewer became trusted brands, but those that did enjoyed unquestioned loyalty supported by a simple yet effective marketing engines built to reach people in mass quantity. The formula worked for decades. An empire was built on the shoulders of Madison Avenue and expanded globally. It is an empire, which still exists today, though arguably it’s a diminished version of its former self.

This is a podcast of a presentation that I gave last week to the Financial Services Forum during a conference about marketing to Baby Boomers.

It was an excellent event and I enjoyed meeting a couple of new people with interests in the ageing consumer - Martin Clarkson, Director, Elderberry Associates and Tom Hind, Director of Creative Content, Getty Images

Why do so many tech start-ups fail?  What advice do entrepreneurs need to heed?  These and other topics are covered in an interview I conducted with Ian Andes, President of 4iiii Innovations.

I have spent the last couple of days in Liverpool. My first visit to this part of the UK.

Horse meat keeps turning up in European food products. Though the vast majority of brands tested most recently by the UK government came up clean, meat from Taco Bell and Bird’s Eye got flagged. This comes after major equine revelations about Burger King’s cheeseburgers and Ikea’s meatballs.

What is marketing in 2013? How do you ignite your ambassadors and the makers of things?

The following presentation was held for Microsoft in Lisbon on the 20th of February 2013.

Several weeks ago I drafted a post articulating the need for the Public Relations industry to re-invent itself. That still needs to happen—and there's a lot of work to do. What I didn't communicate in that post is the fact that it's becoming increasingly meaningless to distinguish yourself as a practitioner of "advertising" or "public relations" because increasingly to the end consumer, user or stakeholder—it's all just becoming content. And as I've stated many times before:

I just mentioned this in my weekly email but I really liked Colin Nagy's (exec director of The Barbarian Group) Realist's Guide to Marketing in 2013.

Compete recently ran article claiming that Mobile Twitter Users Are the Ideal Audience for Advertisers. In it, Compete reports that, compared to other Twitter users, mobile Twitter users in the U.S. are 86% more likely to be on Twitter several times a day and 57% less likely to use Twitter on a desktop computer.