Powerful structures for product-driven organisations
I've spent the last couple of days at the Forrester Consumer and Financial Services (combined) forums in Barcelona. Some pretty good speakers and some interesting ideas which I'll go into in more detail later. Overall, it seems, a consensus has broken out around the need for brands to embrace the changing nature of media to… Continue reading Proving the rule
Be interesting if Antony or someone with access to similar software could map how John Grant's call for publicity around his new (and undoubtedly very readable book), The Green Marketing Manifesto, played out. Was it just a re-inforcement within a closed community (the 'echo chamber' of planning blogs) or did it get out to the wider… Continue reading Green Echos
Today's Facebook porn revolves around a story that the social network is set to launch a new adserving platform (called 'SocialAds') which will take the data from inside their walled garden and use it to serve more relevant ads to people in other locations. Valleywag has it here. Venture beat loose complete control of their horses here, going… Continue reading Facebook goes anti-social
(or 'towards a complete redefinition on the role of the brand strategist') There's a terrible joke or riddle I still remember from school: 'What was the longest river in the world before the Nile was discovered?'. The answer, of course, is 'the Nile'. The launch of the landmark Stephen King retrospective on planning poses an… Continue reading Planning planning
George Parker's well aimed rant at weak minded advertising for weak beer, included a very interesting idea. While beer advertisers have reduced their media spend on traditional media by almost a quarter, overall market sales have gone up. What do we learn from that? That the digital media advertising that's taking-over the budgets is really… Continue reading Inflection point
I've been thinking about this topic - how the principles of lean manufacturing could teach us something interesting about marketing - for ages, but getting nowhere with writing about it. Little things keep reminding me I need to get on with it. Like Amelia's discussion about getting the most passionate customers involved in the… Continue reading Just in time
Yesterday's keynote from Steve Jobs was, as usual, a great show, full of amazing new products and product innovation. The Nano got even smaller and got video, the shuffle got more memory, the standard iPod got a new name ("classic") and more storage, the iPhone became a lot cheaper, and he launched the new iPod… Continue reading Starbucks in their Ipods
Someone at Fallon must have had a couple of difficult meetings to convince Cadbury's to do this. It's a nicely shot little film which is... a Gorilla playing the drums along to a Genesis song. Funny, surprising and certainly unusual. If there's an idea it is that drumming gorillas (skateboarding dogs?) make you smile, which is what Cadbury's… Continue reading Brave or stupid
This quote comes from a business bigwig, asked whether he uses Facebook. "No, but I think my secretary does" I think she probably does too. The context is this somewhat reactionary piece in the FT asking how businesses should cope with staff wasting hours on social networking sites when they're supposed to be working. There's been a lot in… Continue reading "No, but I think my secretary does"
I've talked quite a lot here about the future of music and of record labels' role in it. Well last night I saw that future in action, and it was in the shape of an iconic Minneapolis superstar jumping around like a mad man on stage at the dome. Prince has sold out 21 nights at… Continue reading Shutting the label door
Leading product 