|
FUTURELAB |
Home - Services - About us - Team - Business and Games Blog - Publications |
To find out more about Futurelab: Click here
For our other blog on Business and Games, Click here
by: Roger Dooley
When we wrote Brain Branding post yesterday, most of the mainstream press hadn’t picked up on the unassuming press release from the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA). What a difference a day makes - Google News counted nearly forty related articles by this morning, including:
by: Jon Miller
The best B2B marketers test everything, and almost everything can be tested: offers, copy, headlines, forms, bids, colors, designs, lists, and more. Testing removes any debate about what works and what doesn’t; testing lets your customers vote with their actions.
Continue reading "3. Test everything – but don’t over test" »
by: Joel Makower
It's long been axiomatic that energy efficiency is the awkward stepchild of renewables -- that is, that it's sexier to install cutting-edge renewable-energy technologies like solar panels than to engage in more prosaic (and less-visible) measures to get more value out of each BTU or barrel.
Continue reading "Can Energy Efficiency Be as Sexy as Solar?" »
by: Roger Dooley
How important is a strong brand image? A new study presented at the Radiological Society of North America (RSNA) shows that people presented with known brand images processed them in areas of the brain associated with positive emotions, while unfamiliar brands took more effort for the brain to process and activated areas of the brain associated with negative emotions.
Continue reading "Brain Branding: The Power of Strong Brands" »
by: Jon Miller
The main reason B2B companies use online advertising is to drive traffic to their website. But that only means they got a prospect to click. Once there, the marketer has just a few seconds to convince that prospect to stick around, read more, and perhaps share some contact information so the company can continue the dialog.
Continue reading "2. Landing pages, landing pages, landing pages" »
by: Jon Miller
The tradeshow must die – at least as a way for B2B companies to drive leads. The same dollars invested in webcasts, online demos, videos, and other online methods are more measurable and more effective. The same is true for other offline marketing methods.
by: Jon Miller
What’s the latest thinking in B2B marketing? What techniques and trends are today’s best practice B2B marketers using to drive more revenue and demonstrate accountability?
By: David Armano
2006 is almost over and I need your help (feel free to pass this around). I'd like to do one more visual before the end of the year, but I need YOU to provide the content in the form of an answer to this question:
What was the most significant event/aspect of 2006 in regards to marketing, advertising or user experience?
by: Dick Stroud
This is an interesting article about advertising and age in the US.
by: Roger Dooley
Earlier this year, we wrote Priming the Customer, which briefly covered some fascinating research in the area of priming.
by: Alain Thys
Ilya, Stefan and myself will be at the Marketing 3 conference in the Netherlands for the coming few days so if you happen to be there too, drop us a line. If diaries match, perhaps beers are an option :-)
For those who need extra budgetary encouragement, note that on 30th November and 1st of November participation is "free" .
By: Ilya Vedrashko
I was preparing slides for the marketing 3 conference and hunting around Second Life's malls for a good illustration and by chance teleported to Caliente City Mall.
by: David Polinchock
It's not often you hear people remark That's exciting while leaving a bathroom, but that seems to be the guest reaction so far to the new Charmin bathroom in Times Square. And, as you might have read at Experience Manifesto: Customer Experience Crossroads: It's all happening at the loo, bathrooms are no longer something in the back room that no one talks about!
by: danah boyd
Discussions concerning network neutrality have been occurring in the blogosphere for years now. Yet, at family events like Thanksgiving, i'm reminded of how incomprehensible this issue is to most educated people in this country. I'm curious if others out there are having difficulty explaining this issue (and its significance) to their parents, cousins, and other relatives who think email is a recent invention? What tactics have you taken?
by: Dick Stroud
The Reader's Digest Association is bought by a private equity-backed group for $2.4 billion.
The deal does not change RDA's overall strategy, says the president and CEO, in a letter to employees.
Continue reading "Whatever Happened to the Readers Digest?" »
By: Ilya Vedrashko
"In one small swing for man, but one giant promotional stunt for a Canadian golf equipment company, cosmonaut Mikhail Tyurin set himself up for a shot that would put Tiger Woods to shame.
Continue reading "Astronaut Misses First Golf Shot in Space" »
By: Guy Kawasaki
Check out this study by Prof. Kathleen Vohs of the University of Minnesota (Go Gophers!). She tested the hypothesis that thinking about money can create social barriers. Here is a description of what she did:
by: Dick Stroud
Grandparent Marketing Group claims to be the world's first communications company to specialize in the grandparent market. Well certainly there are no companies in the UK making that claim.by: Roger Dooley
Those who are fans of commercial technologies spinning off from military or government research will be happy to know that the field of neuroscience is getting plenty of attention and government funding.
By: Ilya Vedrashko
Wired runs a great feature on Lonelygirl15. Besides all the behind-the-scenes stuff, the article offers a glimpse into a future of TV:
By: Ilya Vedrashko
Telegraph: "A glowing green logo drawn by scientists on the wing of a genetically altered butterfly could herald the day that the insects are adorned with adverts and slogans.
By: Ilya Vedrashko
New Scientist is celebrating its 50th anniversary with a special compilation of forecasts for the next 50 years gathered from the leading scientists. Among the most directly relevant to advertising is this one from Elizabeth Loftus:
by: Joel Makower
The most provocative statement of the past half-century on the role of business in society came in an essay in the New York Times, written by a fellow named Friedman.
Continue reading "Milton Friedman and the Social Responsibility of Business" »
A recurring theme in quite a few of our neuromarketing posts is the apparent contest between the amygdala, a brain structure long thought to be the seat of emotions in the brain, and other brain structures thought to be responsible for higher cognitive functions like reasoning and problem solving. Now, neuroscientists at Yale University have demonstrated that the amygdala plays a role in working memory, a function which plays a key role in higher cognitive functions.
by: Alain Thys
I'm preparing for a speech I'll be giving at the Marketing 3 conference in the Netherlands where I'll be "über-coolly" flanked by Chris Anderson, Stefan Engeseth and Ilya Vedrashko (makes me wonder what they were smoking when they called me :-) While I won't use this video, I did want to bring it to your attention, as it elegantly brings home a point I've been making for a while, possibly related to the mid-life anxiety of just turning 40 :-)
Continue reading "I Want to Be in Advertising ... The Video" »
By: Guy Kawasaki
Woz and I did a one-on one-chat for the Commonwealth Club on November 16, 2006 as part of his iWoz
Continue reading "The Top Ten Things I Love Most About Woz" »
By: Karl Long
After wandering around the eerily quiet “Dell Island” on SecondLife it struck me that most of the buildings in SecondLife are built to mirror buildings in the real world, with stairs, and impenetrable walls, windows etc.
Continue reading "If People Could Fly What Would Buildings Look Like?" »
by: Dick Stroud
International Luxury Travel Market (ILTM) has done some research showing that more than 70% of the 400 luxury travel suppliers surveyed thought clients were looking for more authenticity when selecting a holiday. A further 59% stated holidays needed to be more experience-led and enriching than ever before.
Continue reading "It is al about authenticity and ‘experiences’" »
by: David Wigder
Carbon Trust (CT) predicts that by 2010, the UK consumer market will have reached a tipping point: Purchase decisions will take into account climate change impact and how companies are actively addressing it.
Continue reading "Climate Change in the UK Market - Part II: Consumer Tipping Point" »
by: David Wigder
The Carbon Trust, a UK government-funded think tank, makes the case that many companies’ brand value – a key component of the market value measuring intangible assets - is at risk from climate change.
Continue reading "Climate Change in the UK Market - Part I: “Brand Value at Risk”" »
by: David Wigder
An Interview with Rachael Ostrom, Director, Consumer Marketing and Advertising, Aveda
Since its founding in 1978, Aveda (an Estée Lauder Company) has been leading the personal care product industry toward a more sustainable future.
By: David Armano
In a recent post I wrote about my dislike of the word elite in the context of describing Technorati's top percentile of blogs. Some of you agreed, some didn't. It's all good.
By: Karl Long
One question that comes to mind as I read the excellent UIE article The Freedom of Fast Iterations: How Netflix Designs a Winning Web Site, what would have Netflix looked like if a big interactive agency had been involved?
by: Dick Stroud
What is the one thing all grandparents have in common? No prizes for the answer – grandchildren.
The grandparent/grandchild relationship is not always one made in heaven but it is very often very strong. That must be good news for marketers.
Continue reading "Grandparents are good news for marketers" »
by: Dick Stroud
According to a recent survey by the National Association of Female Executives, the problems caused by the menopause are a big issue for many of its members.
by: Joseph Mann
It's no secret that marketing to a busines-to-business audience is very different than marketing to a business-to-consumer one. A recent Silverpop study1 on the clickthrough effectiveness of various email marketing creative seems to bear that out:
Continue reading "Email Creative: B2B is from Mars, B2C is from Venus" »
by: Lynette Webb
Click image to enlarge.
I find this statistic amazing. I knew that people used search engines to find out about all sorts of things, of which recipes were one. And I knew that laptops in particular were increasingly finding their way into kitchens thanks not least to the joy of wifi. But meals accounting for 2.5% of all Yahoo’s queries every day? I’d not anticipated it was quite that pronounced. No wonder they’ve launched Yahoo! Food. :-) I’m curious now as to how it compares to other search engines. Is this something that is particularly skewed to Yahoo or does the same apply to Google?
Continue reading "over 1m of yahoos daily 60m queries are related to meals" »
By: Guy Kawasaki
Amanda Congdon was one of the first, if not the first, videoblog sensations. As a host of Rocketboom, she had approximately 300,000 viewers in the spring of 2006.
