The Candyfreak Speaks
So you think you like candy? Have you eaten a piece every day of your life? Author Steve Almond has, and lived to write about it. ...
Those Mounds are Mine, Kid
My three-and-a-half-year-old son Jacob is quite excited about Halloween, partially because he gets to dress up as a robot (Cyborg from "Teen Titans") but mostly because of the CANDY....
Craptacular Marketing from Mars Inc.
A funny thing happened on the way to the confectionary: Sweets manufacturer Mars Inc. launched an ad campaign and forgot to sell the candy....
Brand Metrics: Which Ones Should You Track?
What causes you to wake up at 3 a.m. in a sweat? For marketers, it may be response rates and clickthrough rates, For CFOs, it’s cash flow and net asset value. ...
The Brand-Direct Marketing Connection
As marketers have an increased need to be accountable and make their advertising dollars go further, the brand/direct connection is becoming more important, said Karen Ebben, director of CRM modeling and program evaluation, General Motors....
Creating Relevance Where There Is None
Ensuring that your brand is relevant to your target consumer is priority number-one among marketers today. This includes not only understanding when, where, and how consumers use or purchase your brand but also developing an understanding of when, where, and how they respond ...
Consumer-Generated Content: Let Yourself Go
Procter & Gamble CEO A.G. Lafley urged marketers to "let go" of their brands and bow to consumer wants and needs in his speech at the Association of National Advertisers (ANA) conference on Oct. 6....
The 2007 Marketing Arena: Take Your Best Shot
As we look ahead to the 2007 marketing arena--and below are my picks for the 10 trends most worth watching--we should do so with both wonder and cynicism, cheering greatness and booing duplicity....
5 Keys to an Effective Marketing Dashboard -Part 5:Designing a highly engaging user interface
In the final installment, we turn our attention to the importance of deploying your dashboard in a way that will promote not just usage, but real interactive engagement that leads to learning....
Evolving Loyalty: How to Stay Current
Best Buy’s recent announcement to drop its $9.99 loyalty program membership fee, one of the worst-kept secrets in the industry for the past six months, is a timely example of a key element of loyalty program management:...
A Canvas Is a Canvas
Lately I have been putting a lot of thought toward the next great marketing canvas. Sometime after my third Diet Coke I figured out that no matter what the next great canvas is, it will tragically become a commodity ...
Basic Black and Team Spirit
The rivalry between New England and New York sports fans is well documented. If only because of where I was born (Rhode Island) and currently reside (Massachusetts), I'm part of Red Sox Nation. ...
Internal Branding: Six Keys to Success
A common concern among clients is how to take the work they have done with their brand and use it to rally and engage internal audiences. ...
Keys to an Effective Marketing Dashboard: Part Four
Measuring the long-term value of marketing in creating customer preference and loyalty for your brand(s) is critically important in determining the return from the investment. ...
Three Trends That Will Transform Your Loyalty Strategy
As we look into the future of loyalty-marketing innovation, three major trends will emerge. In fact, some leading-edge companies are already taking advantage of these concepts and tactics...
Five Keys to an Effective Marketing Dashboard: Part Three
In the pressure of today’s business environment to produce quantifiable results, the challenge of measuring marketing effectiveness has been, well, perverted....
Marketing to Today’s Teens: The Same but Different
Accounting for 25% of the population in the United States, Generation Y not only provides a huge current market, but it also provides the possibility of gaining lifelong brand loyalty. ...
Measuring your Brand’s Reputation within the Blogosphere
Blogs are a hot topic and have been so for the last year or so. They’ve been around, obviously, for much longer than that (ours has been up for almost five years), but had previously been reserved for individuals to share their personal stories or to serve as a platform for cutting-edge ideas. ...
The Second Key to An Effective Marketing Dashboard
In some cases, it makes sense to start structuring a dashboard and build your knowledge and understanding rather than investing in rocket science analytics that may miss their insight target completely....
Are You Experiential?
(Multichannel Merchant) The little girls who arrive at American Girl Place dressed like the dolls they hold in their arms show what's possible when merchants take an experiential approach to retailing, experts say....
Break a Rule for Innovation
Every business feels the pressure to innovate. The importance of innovation is blared daily in the headlines of business magazines, the presentations of consultants, the books and conferences of business visionaries. ...
The Eight Principles of Branding a Merger
Merger activity is positively frantic—hundreds are initiated each week. But mergers can too often be minefields. McKinsey & Co. claims that nearly 80% of mergers don't earn back the costs of the deal itself. Other studies show that the average merger has a 50% chance of resulting in reduced productivity or profit. ...
First Person: Ethnography, Quaker Oatmeal, and Frito-Lay
More than a decade ago, marketers, researchers, and innovation firms relied heavily on focus group research to vet new product offerings (more than 85% of which fail). ...
B-to-B Brand Architecture: More Sub-Brands Aren’t Necessarily Better
Many companies seek to extend their brand through acquisition or the creation of sub-brands, operating under the belief that more business units and sub-brands are the basis of a strong portfolio...
Think Before You Cobrand
One way to think about brands is as shorthand for the sum of promises and experiences they represent. By this thinking, cobranding can be considered dual shorthand, representing the new story that emerges when multiple promises are joined together. ...
