Living The Oprah Life

In Chicago, 35-year-old actress Robyn Okrant (Lo) has started a blog called LivingOprah.com, recording her year-long efforts to live as Oprah would have her live. She watches the program, tracks what products Oprah says she “must” buy, she reads the magazines, makes the recipes, buys the Favorite Things, as recommended by Oprah Winfrey. The experiment, [...]

Geotility

Another bit of jargon that will soon pass into common use is Geotility - using phones and other devices to tag locations in realtime. New age mobile handsets like iPhone and the Nokia Navigator series will only add to use of this service. Read more on Geotility here. And an incredible, almost scary example of [...]

Is Your Brand On Twitter?

Like SecondLife in 2007, Twitter seems to be the talk of the new media marketing world in 2008. There are a lot of interesting experiments going on out there using Twitter and its microblogging platform. Dell it seems has been able to sell half a million dollars worth of products using a twitterfeed. In a [...]

Ideas. More Powerful Than Big Budgets

UK clothing brand Howies, like Method (The US-based home care specialist) and Innocent (A range of smoothies that’s making a name for itself in UK and parts of Europe) is a “planners” brand. In the sense that people, account planners mostly, who are at the cutting edge of marketing thinking often talk about these brands [...]

Zimbabwe’s Currency On Ebay

It is a known fact that Zimbabwe has been experiencing a hard currency shortage for a while now, leading to hyperinflation. Inflation reached 624 percent in early 2004, then fell back to low triple digits. When the currency recently took a dip to a record low, the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe on 19 July 2008 [...]

10 Commandments Of Design

In the 1980’s design god Dieter Rams expressed the ten most important criteria for what he considered was good design. His list: Good Design is innovative. Good design makes the product useful. Good design is aesthetic. Good design helps us understand the product. Good design is unobtrusive. Good design is honest. Good design has longevity. [...]

End Of The Organisation

Too dramatic a headline perhaps, but the traditional tightly controlled, top down, branded organization is finding itself having to adapt and change according to this post by Michael C Gilbert at Nonprofit Online News. Read more here and here.

Youth Marketing The P&G Way

David Knox, Brand Manager Walmart team at P&G is a specialist in marketing to teens. Speaking at the IEG annual sponsorship conference, David presented a picture of Youth in the US and what smart marketers are doing to connect with this increasingly elusive demographic. The slides of his presentation are up on Slideshare.
Like our philosophy [...]

M-PESA, An African Payment Success

About a fortnight back, we spoke about how the like of M-Pesa is replacing plastic. Today we see why it is such a huge success in Kenya, the place where it started. Olga Morawczynski, a doctoral candidate from the University of Edinburgh who spent 9 months studying customer adoption and usage in Kenya made some [...]

Look Alike Logos

Looks like it’s becoming more and more difficult to execute original logo designs. No matter how clever the idea, chances are someone has created a very similar logo. We’re all surrounded by the same influences, exposed to the same shapes, forms and patterns. With the importance of branding in the marketplace, and thousands of designers [...]