utility

What happens when we really understand our customers' desired outcomes or the jobs they are trying to do?

Something pretty incredible happens!

It’s not hard to come up with something new. It’s hard to come up with something new that people want.

I think that is kind of the separation point between having lots of ideas or creating lots of stuff, and just having maybe one thing that really resonates with people that they have that Ah-Ha moment when they see it.

~ James Carnes, Global Creative Director, Senior Vice President of Design at Adidas.

More is better, according to the leading marketing theorists when it comes to brands participating in social media. Blogger how-to lists and entire books are dedicated to the proposition, and there are services that will tee-up "content" so you can repurpose it into the mediasphere. The Conventional Wisdom not only says this is effective commercial speech but that it's a replacement for old approaches, like advertising. Spend more of your marketing budget on it this year or risk being oh so 2010.

This week’s New Media Age contains a feature on location-based marketing looking at some case studies of where it has been used well and the opportunities for it as part of the marketing mix. We’ve written before about opportunities that location-based services offer to marketing. From using Foursquare as a small business to the many ways to use Facebook Places, location-based services offer many potentials for experimentation and new ways of communicating with and marketing too consumers.