Mass advertising to direct response.
To talk to consumers, you used to stick an ad on TV, in one of the main mags, on maybe a few radio stations, a shotgun effort informed by some pretty rudimentary demographic data. Then we migrated to the web, in the late 90's, and advertisers transferred the...
Unheralded visionaries unite.
Very few people have heard of Douglas Engelbart, who died on July 4, but it was he that thought up much of the stuff we accept as normal, every day tools and devices. His relative obscurity is in stark contrast to the billionaires who brought commercial success to...
Be proud of price
Price is always a sticky subject. In most cases, sales people have been trained to slide over answering the inevitable, and often first question about price, until the value of the sales proposition has been established with the potential buyer. That is the way it...
Thousand word images
Bob Mankoff is the cartoon editor, or as they probably call it, "Editor of Idea Drawings" of the New Yorker magazine. His TED talk while being about the humour of the New Yorker, is more widely about what makes us laugh, and sometimes cringe at a cartoon, and more...
Of Gnomes, underpants, and phase 2.
We have a Department of Innovation in Canberra, and similar departments or at least functions in every state jurisdiction, and piles of industry bodies and associations, all mouthing clichés about Innovation being the savior of the economy, and the way of the future. ...
3 reasons Incrementalism wins: Sadly.
Across all my activities, I hear management talking about the "next big thing", the importance of innovation, of being different, creating new product platforms, and striving to be disruptive, but settling for a change of colour, flavour or pack size. After a long...
Digital policy “Snafu”
Governments and their regulation centric thought processes always lag the digital developments that are accelerating in our world. Typically, they are regulating to close the barn door well after the horse is across the paddock, and failing to consult those who...
Visual marketing explosion
The old adage of a picture replacing a thousand words is being writ large as the social media ecosystem mutates at astonishing speed to accommodate that old truism. Millions of photos are uploaded every day, and marketers have recognised the value of visuals in posts,...
Lobster Marketing and context.
We pay a fortune for lobster, it is a delicacy, but it is not long ago that lobster was poor peoples food. If you had nothing else to eat in New England in the 18th or 19th centuries, you would go to the beach and scrounge some lobster, and rules were in place to...
4 key marketing trends and the secret sauce of success.
Marketers have a whole range of new tools to use to tap the opportunities emerging from the digital age, but most appear to approach the challenge in an ad hoc manner. It seems to me that there are 4 trends that are driving marketing behavior: The shift from...