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by: John Sviokla
A few weeks ago I was presenting an approach to management that was at its core a “scientific” approach; not in the narrow Frederick Taylor sense of time and motion studies, but in the more knowledge-worker-friendly notions taking information about the business, and the market, and turning it into value as fast and efficiently as possible.
Continue reading "Science and Ideology (Not scientology!)" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
If you are following The Apprentice, you'll remember how a couple of episodes back the contestants where given a task to create an event for the dealers. You'll also remember how Chevy followed up with a web site where people can create their own version of a commercial by rearranging pre-canned clips, overlaying pre-recorded music, and typing their own titles over the whole thing.
Continue reading "The Flip Side of Consumer-Generated Advertising" »
by: danah boyd
I just finished taping a segment for tonight's O'Reilly Factor talking about MySpace.
by: David Armano
Call it "Brand Engagement", call it "Consumer Generated Media", Call it a "Mash-up". Whatever you want to call it—it rocks.
by: Guy Kawasaki
“The purpose of competition is not to beat someone down, but to bring out the best in every player.” Walter Wheeler
Continue reading "The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
Here are the most popular video spots tagged as "commercial" on YouTube, judging by the view count. The actual view numbers are probably higher because of the duplicate files that are not counted here.
by: Karl Long
Many conversations about interactive products and services come to the point of asking the question “but what if everyone uses that”, ususally reffering to the “free” aspect of a service, or the general priceing, or features etc.
Continue reading "Business Fear Mongering - “But what if everyone uses that”" »
by: John Sviokla
Every desire turns into a search. Search is now the most popular function on computers. ComScore just announced that Google increased their share of search from 36.3% to 42.3%, year over year. Watch out Yahoo! I’m not one of those who think Google speaks no evil, and is invincible, but, they have a great model, and they are executing like crazy. The thing I like the most about them is they are the first company that is truly trying to give companies an economic means to manage their demand chain.
Continue reading "Google: The best damn demand chain management company…" »
by: David Armano
NextD, an organization committed to the fusion of design and business created a video slide show from a recent presentation. Proof that a picture (or pictures) is worth a thousand words, the video does not include any audio—but still provides some nice insights into what's described as design 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. So what does this all mean? In short—it means that design and business will continue to "bond", whether they like it or not.
Original Post: http://darmano.typepad.com/logic_emotion/2006/03/nextd_design_10.html
As our “neuromarketing guy”, Roger Dooley will be posting regularly about the use of brain science in the fields of marketing & sales. You can already find quite some of his musings under the category tabs “neuromarketing” and “singularity” (or simply search for Dooley in the search box). We hope you’ll find his view from the cutting edge as fascinating as we do.
by: John Sviokla
Bernard Lacoste’s recent passing, is a good time to mark something that he brought to a high art – the creation of an Icon Brand. When I was a college student, my then girlfriend, now my wife, was very preppy and she tried to update my used clothing store attire, by giving me a Lacoste shirt and some Lacoste socks. This gave me the opportunity to salvage a second alligator, and I put two of them in a compromising position on my new shirt. She thought I had a twisted mind.
by: John Sviokla
Bill Taylor, in an article in the NYTimes published March 26, 2006, told the story of Rite Solutions, a software company that has a market for ideas – internal to the firm. Like other “information markets” such as the Iowa Electronic Markets which are real time markets that predict the outcome of political events (or even now the possible outbreak of bird flu) based on contract payoffs, and the Hollywood Stock Exchange, which allows you to buy shares of actors, and movies, the Rite Solutions idea market allows the wisdom of the market to surface the more potentially successful innovations.
by: Roger Dooley
The International Herald Tribune reports in On Advertising: Better ads with MRIs that a new ad campaign for a directory assistance service is based in part on brain science. The French campaign comes on the heels of a British campaign that saw the upstart 118-218 service gain more share than its entrenched rival, British Telecom. The article describes the British campaign,
by: Alain Thys
In communication they always a claim that less is more. And this little gem on what would happen if the iPod got the Microsoft treatment definitely proves the point. Yet how far do you cut back? When you have 100 features to communicate, where do you focus?
Continue reading "Stop Communicating All Those Benefits ..." »
by: Joseph Mann
It’s hard to stay good at your job if you don’t stop to have fun with it once in a while. That’s why I love the “better than guessing” series of tools periodically released by the Mud Valley Branding Community — they’re simple, useful and don’t take themselves too seriously — exactly what you’d expect from a group whose goal is “integrating business strategy, brand marketing and Six Sigma to make you sharper than the clothes you wear!”
by: Guy Kawasaki
Most of the information that you can find about recruiting is for the employer, not the employee. (I'm as guilty as this as anyone: for example, The Art of Recruiting, I and II.) Let's turn the tables, switch modes, and balance the scales by discussing what a hot candidate should ask a private, venture-backed startup before making the leap to “infinity and beyond” as Buzz Lightyear would say.
by: John Sviokla
Strangely, the media businesses and industrial companies are both facing a similar challenge – the dead hand of the past is influencing today’s product/service strategy. The article in this week’s WSJ on Schnitzer Steel Industries, Inc, and other junk yards is one example of a growing trend in the global economy – the merging of the new and the used market, or in media, the merger of the “now” and the “then” market.
Continue reading "What do Movies and Junkyards Have in Common?" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
John Battelle wonders: "What if there was some kind of TelevisionRank that noticed, in real time, what people were paying attention to, right now? Where moments like the [Fox News' live coverage of trial] rose to the top of a television index in real time, so that at any time, anyone could ask of the web: What are people watching, right now?
by: Ilya Vedrashko
W+K London says that their "Choir" ad for Honda Civic has been downloaded 3,000,000 times in a month since launch and that the iPod version of the spot has got into the Top 50 chart on iTunes. "The microsite had a record 679,000 unique visitors during the same reporting period.
This led to Honda's highest level of test drive bookings ever."
Original post: Honda's "Choir" Hits Three Million Downloads
by: Joel Makower
What's the "sticker price" to the climate of that new car you're considering buying? Katherine Probst would like to help you answer that question.
Continue reading "Climate Labeling for Cars: Assessing the Toll of a New Machine" »
by: David Armano
A little over a year ago, I came across an article titled "Happiness is using the brain the right way" Download happiness.doc.
by: Mark Rogers
Google has reported that the UK population as a whole now spends more time online than they do watching TV. This is an epochal change for marketers. It means that they must finally get to grips with a medium (the internet) that has remained largely resistant to their wiles.
Continue reading "Near Future: Personally Targeted Advertising" »
by: danah boyd
People keep asking me "What went wrong with Friendster? Why is MySpace any different?"
Continue reading "Friendster Lost Steam. Is MySpace Just a Fad?" »
In his book Democratizing Innovation (free download here !) the director of the MIT Innovation Lab Eric Von Hippel makes a convincing case for user-centered innovation in business and consumer markets. If you're looking for new ideas to grow your business, your own customers may already be providing you with the answer.
by: Alain Thys
There’s a perfect storm brewing in television land. Changing media consumption patterns mean people watch less TV. Advertisers shift money away from the screen to other media. And to make things really interesting, both Googlewood and the cable companies are gearing up to disintermediate the broadcasters. Time to pack up ? I don't think so.
Continue reading "From TV Broadcaster to Multi-Channel-Caster" »
by: danah boyd
One of the goals of ethnography is to understand cultures on their own terms, from the perspectives of the people living them.
by: Guy Kawasaki
I received an email from Craig James that contained superb insights into the art of recruiting. With Craig's permission, I provide it below.
by: David Armano
Terrific interview with Jim Wicks, Vice President of Motorola's Consumer Experience Design group. The interview goes on in some detail to lay out how Motorola's culture has shifted due to an influx of creative thinking and innovative product design.
by: Joel Makower
Forget the "triple bottom line." Get ready for the "blended value proposition."
Before you glaze over about yet another sustainability-minded catchphrase, consider that this brave new term is being bandied about in the nation's top business schools -- or, at least, those with sustainability programs.
by: Karl Long
Micropersuasion points to a new report from Forrester on the topic of the “fading power of institutions due to social software”. Steve gives this report high praise.
Continue reading "The Rise of Microbrands as Institutional Power Fades" »
The exclusive department store ILLUM in Copenhagen recently launched an SMS-auction concept called Window Shopping.
By Alain Thys
Here’s an interesting number for you. Most European consumers spend 20% of their media time on online media. British internet users even spend more time online than watching TV. And still the average share of budget of these same media remains below 5 per cent. Is this just inertia, or is something more structural going on ?
Continue reading "Why Online Media Just Aren't Taking Off" »
by: danah boyd
Last week, i gave a talk at O'Reilly's Etech on how large-scale digital communities can handle the tensions between global information networks and local interaction and culture. I've uploaded the crib for those who are interested in reading the talk: "G/localization: When Global Information and Local Interaction Collide".
by: Guy Kawasaki
I've been on both sides of board meetings: as the entrepreneur (a.k.a., the “victim”) and as the board member (a.k.a., the “heavy”). I can't tell you that I've run perfect board meetings nor that I am the world's greatest board member, but I can provide some tips on the art of the board meeting. These tips apply to startups, established companies, and--with very little modification--to school boards, church elders, and not-for-profits.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
PSKF points to a British report that says "Web users now have almost 76 million sites to choose from, yet most only visit six on a regular basis." This is something we talked about with Behavior Insider last month - instead of buying ads on random places online, it would be more effective to "roadblock" the websites that make up these clusters. The challenge, of course, is to figure out what these sites are.
Original Post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2006/03/web-clusters-users-visit-six-sites.html
by: Roger Dooley
BMW has long been linked to neuromarketing - the 2003 Forbes article, In Search of the Buy Button, noted that the BMW Z8 generated one of the strongest brain responses of 66 cars shown to subjects in an fMRI scanner. A little over a month ago, neuroscientist Stephen Rose did a radio interview with the BBC (listen) in which he mentioned that BMW had set up a neuromarketing lab.
by: Jennifer Rice
We're almost to the end of the series on Maslow and Branding. I'll wrap up the last three needs in Maslow's hierarchy here, and then we'll look at how they all interact in social networks.
by: Guy Kawasaki
Here's a quiz to determine your “entrepreneurial quotient.” My intent is to test a person's knowledge of entrepreneurship. However, scoring high doesn't mean you're the next Steve Jobs, and scoring low doesn't mean you're not. Some answers are debatable, so there will be many comments. #10, in particular, is tricky so read it very carefully.
Continue reading "What's Your EQ (entrepreneurial quotient)?" »
