Going Zen: Letting Customers Come to their Own Conclusions

by Andrea Learned
Forcing an issue is rarely a good idea. Human beings, whether consciously or not, will sense that pressure and resist, because they want to feel like they made their decision on their own terms. Whether in interpersonal relationships or the marketing realm (and many others), the hardest thing to do is simply present [...]

Backwards to Business

by Lindsay O’Neill
Honey I’m home. Last year I left “corporate America” to pursue my passion of connecting and empowering women in advertising and other fields of business. After a year long stint of running The Femme Network and other socially dynamic web-portals, I’m breaking back into the biz. What biz? The biz of online advertising, [...]

Brands: A Shrinking Advantage or Shifting Advantage?

by Michael Megalli
Partner - Group1066
Umair Haque writes about the Shrinking Advantage of Brands. Cheap interaction, he says, is “driving the strategy of branding into decay”. __Huzzah!
Haque echoes a number of the things that form the basis of our mission to remake the way marketers think about marketing. In doing so, however, he seems to throw [...]

The Oscars: Serving Advertisers While Annoying Viewers

by Andrea Learned
Excuse me if I yawn while I type… I was up late watching the Academy Awards last night trying to keep my eyes open until the Best Picture was announced. I doubt that I was the only viewer who just couldn’t make it.
Advertisers have taken over the Oscars, and it would seem [...]

Women and the Power of the Internet

by Fara Warner
Earlier this month, I had the opportunity to hear Meg Whitman, the outgoing chief executive officer of eBay, speak to a small group of women business and community leaders at The Henry Ford, a museum that includes many of the major inventions and innovations of the 19th and 20th centuries.
As Whitman discussed the [...]

Adding Social Networks to the Online Branding Mix

 
by Dr. Mary Lou Roberts
At the OnMedia NYC conference earlier this month there was a panel entitled “Cracking the Online Branding Code.” This video snippet argues for niche social networks as key to reaching people with a predisposition toward your brand. It’s hard to argue with that. People who have identified with an interest-based social [...]

Social Shopping - Is it really what she wants?

It’s no surprise we think of Google as the great internet efficiency booster. It’s easy to use and it’s usually right. But try asking Google to help you go shopping online – no dice. Those queries will send you to some random-looking specialty retailers, huge shopping search engines and some social shopping sites. What search [...]

Customer Experience Management - Hedging against the Uncertain Future

by Rick Graves
When budgets are tight, your customer rules more than ever… Whether this customer is internal to your organization, a B2B supplier, or a B2C end-user of your product or service, each dollar spent will be scrutinized and balanced more than ever, and how you handle these relationships becomes crucial to your success as [...]

Is Brand Management an Oxymoron?

by Thomas Ordahl
It depends on your approach to management. Remember the 1960s management theory Theory X and Theory Y. The basic idea was that a company’s approach to employee management followed one of two assumptions:
Theory X was that employees are basically lazy and need a strong, hierarchical hand. Theory Y assumes that people are [...]

Valentine’s Day Index 2008: Price of Love = $113.00

Brand Keys’ Valentine’s Day Index 2008
“More and more gifts are being exchanged between friends and family in the name of St. Valentine, and that’s turned Valentine’s Day into a major retail holiday,” said Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, Inc., a New York-based brand and customer engagement research consultancy.
“Again this year consumers report higher after-Christmas [...]