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Interesting post on the Northern Planner’s blog. On what he thinks a brand is. As far as I’m concerned, a brand is a collection of feelings and associations built up over time, he writes. Read the whole post here.
NY Times has an interesting story on what big tech companies play. By comparing the biggest consumer focused technology companies out there, one begins to understand how these companies are trying to build bridges around the web, hardware, software, mobile, social networking and location-based services. Look at the big picture here.
Management guru and author, Gary Hamel has an interesting column in the Wall Street Journal. In most organisations, he writes, change comes in only two flavours: trivial and traumatic. Review the history of the average organisation and you’ll discover long periods of incremental fiddling punctuated by occasional bouts of frantic, crisis-driven change. He compares companies to religious organisations and sees a parallel in the way many leading religions have become less relevant. If organized religion has become less relevant, it’s not because churches have held fast to their creedal beliefs—it’s because they’ve held fast to their conventional structures, programs, roles and routines. The problem with organized religion isn’t religion, but organisation. To thrive in turbulent times, organisations must become a bit more disorganized—less buttoned down, less uptight, less compulsive, less anal. All of the things that allow little organisations to grow into big ones—scale, learning effects, and accumulated expertise—are products of repetition. When the environment changes, however, the returns to repetition start to diminish. Problem is, old habits die hard, particularly when they’ve been hardwired into a company’s management processes. Read more.
CMO Council in association with IBM and Ricoh has done a global survey on what marketers and consumers think about loyalty programs. In a year when the economy was battered, many companies that run active programs are now reaping the benefits of their commitment. “The relative strength of our loyalty members in the recession is an even stronger impact than in non-recessionary periods. I can’t imagine where we’d be in the absence of our loyalty program because it really has established those long-term, ongoing relationships with those customers, and they’ve stuck by us.” – Larry Wadford, Senior Marketing Director, Office Depot. While marketers are excited about the possibilities of loyalty programs, many customers, while happy participating in the promos, price-off and incentives, think that the programs they participate in don’t seem to understand them individually. For their part, consumers are committed to loyalty programs. Most, take these brand partnerships into consideration when making purchasing decisions and they’re largely satisfied with their experiences even though they complain they’re getting too much spam and junk mail. Unfortunately, they’ve been programmed to expect the fundamental discounts and free products and marketers will be hard pressed to wean them off such a deep dependence on them and respond to more experiential rewards. This will challenge the creativity of marketers. Get hold of a summary of the report here.
A Peter Drucker classic from the HBR Archives. Managing Yourself. Success, as the master management guru writes, in the knowledge economy comes to those who know themselves – their strengths, their values and how they perform. Unlike in the past, where a person was born into a position or a line of work, we now need to know our strengths much better. For many of us trying to reach the highest levels of performance, Drucker writes, that it takes far more energy to improve from incompetence to mediocrity than to improve first-rate performance to excellence. By using techniques like feedback analysis, understanding our strengths, learning new things, understanding our values, where we belong, what should our contribution be, to understand the people we work with and most importantly managing the second half of our lives. Download and read the 10 page PDF here.
Umair Haque writes about the skirmish between China and Google and who will be the eventual winner. Umair, a champion of the 21st century and the post-industrialist era writes about Google’s refusal to play by China’s rules. “It’s not about having more; it’s about doing better. It’s not about protecting exports, pressuring buyers and suppliers, price discriminating against the powerless, and programming consumers to buy, buy, buy — it’s about making people, communities, and society authentically better off. It’s not about caring less — but caring more. It’s not about ruthlessness. It’s about mindfulness. Google, he believes, has taken the ethical high ground. An ethical edge operates at a higher economic level. It is concerned with what we sell, how profits are earned, and which authentic, human benefits “grow.” It’s a concept built for the economics of an interdependent world. More here.
Interesting review of the many geosocial services that experts think will change the way we live and interact with people around us. Mathew Hurst, writing on the Data Mining blog, thinks that 2010 will be the year when we create more and more intimate links with the digital space and our physical spaces via mobile and data driven devices. Services like Foursquare and Yelp are already being talked about as being the next Facebook and Twitter. Infact there are interesting local players who are entering the space with services created to service only the local community. Like the Mapping LA project from Los Angeles Times Read more.
Great little post on the Cup of Java blog that looks into the kinds of creative teams that ad agencies of the future will have. From concept to execution, there needs to be a open communication channel between Creative, User Experience, Technology and Media. Each group, writes Caffeine Goddess author of the blog, plays a vital part in how the work comes together. In a day and age when new information is breaking by the minute, it’s hard for one group in the new team to keep abreast even of the topics in their “domain” (read: time), let alone other areas of focus on top of that. Now, I’m not saying that Creative should not be looking out for cool tech and media or anything like that. But, it’s those who do keep up with the latest and greatest in their field of expertise that can really help you push a seedling of an idea into a full-fledged blossoming plant. This is why building the right teams is so vital. Each role is important to the other and therefore, keeping an open communication channel to share ideas, thinking and information is the best way to have a team that produces the best work possible. Read more on Cup of Java.
The 2009 Forrester Wave Report on Email marketing is out and the recession has done nothing to dent the impact of the medium, apparently. DM News reports that Email marketing is maturing, even though there is a whole lot more that can be done in this space. According to the report, the best Email players include – Responsys, ExactTarget, eDialogue, Acxiom, YesMail amongst others. More in DM News. The Forrester report is available on the Responsys site.
Edward Boches fires five questions that clients should ask prospective agencies about their business in the context of a changing world. Of the five, the last three are really interesting and unexpected. What is your definition of a creative team? What are five recent creative ideas that aren’t ads? What are your criteria for hiring people? Hmm, worth thinking about before we step out for our next meeting. Here.
