|
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: Ilya Vedrashko
Have run into a couple of articles discussing the advertising side of Joost, an upcoming video delivery service from the makers of Skype and Kazaa. (From their site: "Joost uses secure peer-to-peer technology to stream programmes to your computer.
by: Michael Hoexter
In my previous two posts, 1I outlined Ulf Bossel’s Electron Economy 2concept and the importance of the electric grid as an energy transmission medium for now and the foreseeable future. If we are serious about reducing our carbon emissions, an electron economy, an economy in which most powered devices use electricity, is the only feasible alternative for the next several decades.
Continue reading "The Electron Economy Part III: The Challenge of Mobile Energy Storage" »
by: Danah Boyd
Over the last couple of weeks, i've been telling loads of folks to go read Jean Twenge's Generation Me and i realized i should probably share it with all y'all. Unlike most books on generations, this is a social psych analaysis of different behavioral characteristics over the decades. Translation: there's a shitload of data here. The book is a bit too pop psychology for my tastes, but it makes it very accessible.
by: Jon Miller
What's the fundamental difference between a Chief Marketing Officer and a VP of Marketing? It's not a question of experience or organizational size, and it doesn't matter what your business card says (mine says VP Marketing). It's a question of how you act, the extent and scope of your responsibility, and how you are perceived by the organization.
by: David Wigder
Part II of an interview with Bruce Ertmann, Corporate Manager of Consumer Generated Media, Toyota.
by: Ilya Vedrashko (via Business&Games)
A March 2007 study of 1,085 Second Life avatars by CB News / Reperes found that "brands are still far from having succeeded in exploiting all of their SL potential. For instance no RL brand introduced in SL has succeeded in establishing a strong presence in the minds of residents."
Continue reading "Study: Low Awareness of Brands in Second Life" »
by: Dick Stroud
The image (that you will need to open to view) is from an article in a Millward Brown news release.
As the article says:
by: Gary Hayes
The Second Life builds I did for Telstra BigPond and ABC TV (interview with me at SLOZ and also here at CeBit about this) have been very successful (via The Project Factory) and I have been ’sucked’ into doing several keynote, panels and seminars about this exciting development.
Continue reading "My Virtual World Brand Talks and Comparative Data " »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
Business Week in The Coming Virtual Web article: "The Internet of the future, and the vast wealth of information and services on it, will look different: slicker, more realistic, more interactive and social than anything we experience today through the Web browser. "Three-dimensional virtual worlds will, in the near future, be pervasive interfaces for the Internet," says Bob Moore, a sociologist who studies virtual worlds at Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC, the legendary Xerox lab in Silicon Valley."
by: David Armano
What can brands learn from social experiments?1. A passionate community is the lifeblood of your brand. Without it—a brand is hollow.
2. People want to interact with your brand—to be a part of it somehow, to make it their own.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
This very interesting report by Forrester analyzes the levels of user participations in social structures online (see an earlier post on a similar report by Hitwise and the Yahoo pyramid):
Continue reading "Forrester Segments Social Computing Behaviors" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
Dr. Philip G. Zimbardo
has been a Stanford University professor since 1968. Zimbardo’s career is noted for giving psychology away to the public through his popular PBS-TV series, “Discovering Psychology,” along with many text and trade books, among his 300 publications. He was recently president of the American Psychological Association.
by: David Armano
What is this visual saying? You write it. If it makes sense, I'll add it to the post with your name and a link. Have fun.
by: Nancy Baym
At the end of a long and interesting post, Henry Jenkins writes:
by: C. Sven Johnson
With all the discussion about “design thinking” and “innovation”, I found some quotes in an article on Appliance Magazine’s website that are probably more mainstream than the “hype” crowd would care to admit.
by: Roger Dooley
The more complex a decision is, the more thought and deliberation it requires, right? As intuitive and seemingly obvious as that statement seems, new research shows that it’s not true, at least in some kinds of situations.
by: Nancy Baym
Does the internet compete with “real life”? This has been one of the (most annoying and) most repeated concerns for about twenty years now, and the answer still seems to be “no.” Digital media are changing our patterns of behavior in important ways, but they are not leaving a decimated trail of old ways in their wake.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
source: elatable
This is the famous Yahoo! Pyramid that represents "phases of value creation" at Yahoo! Groups as outlined a year ago by Bradley Horowitz, the company's head of technology development.
by: Dick Stroud
A rise in the number of niche services (often age related) means that social media is no longer the preserve of the young. My recent blog postings about the numerous 50-plus social networking sites is testament to this fact.
Click image to enlarge.
Continue reading "Social networking expanding across demographics" »
by: Guy Kawasaki
Seth Godin
provided me with a copy of his new book, The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick), and I think it will definitely get people to think about life. To give you a taste of what’s in the book, here’s an interview with Seth about the topics of perseverance and quitting.
Continue reading "The Big Dip: Ten Questions with Seth Godin" »
by: Jennifer Rice
Five words or less. Use consumer language, not "clientese." Follow the 4D rule. These are a few of my guidelines for writing positioning statements that are compelling and executable.
by: Alain Thys
About 5 months ago I had the honour of sharing the stage with Chris Anderson and Ilya Vedrashko on the Marketing3 conference by MediaPlaza in the Netherlands. As I'm still getting requests for the slide-deck, I've now uploaded it to Slideshare for your perusal, ripping and comments below.
by: Gary Hayes
YAY! Jackie my LAMP cohort and Paul Bennun (a new LAMP mentor on the next lab in Tas) won their development awards categories! more later…Writing this on various jetlagged Europe to Australia plane hops so excuse any fragmentation of style – will be tidying and adding links and speakers quotations (to bring it to life) when I get back to Oz, compiling them on the last leg from Bangkok to Sydney. This is actually posted from the surreal Bangkok international sci-fi tube airport in a bleary haze from the previous cramped eleven hour flight (OK enough boring travel detail)…
Continue reading "Virtually There - 04 Milia 2007 Vignettes " »
Continue reading "Why The Environmental Issue is Cool Again" »
by: C. Sven Johnson
I recently used the scientific term “free radical” to describe a blogger whose writing I enjoy. I used that descriptor to mean someone who doesn’t think about issues and problems the way others studying them might. It is, in my opinion, a very designer thing; and I don’t mean that in the applied arts context.
By: Stefan Kolle
Coca-Cola has launched a contest to design a virtual experience vending machine. Also see the press release here. My co-contributor Karl Long already wrote a fairly positive review, but I'm afraid I have to add some negative points of view here.
Continue reading "Coke Virtual Thirst: A for effort, C- for execution" »
by: Karl Long
Coke is working with new marketing company Crayon to launch a competition in Second Life, the name of the project is VirtualThirst and involves the general public and residents of Second Life designing Coke vending machines that deliver “experiences”.
Continue reading "Coke and Second Life - More Social Media and CGC Experiments" »
by: Gary Hayes
A great 3rd day at Milia and a much broader spectrum of issues discussed around the many Milia halls. It started with the world’s most advanced broadband nation with Dr. Hyun-Oh Yoo giving us a rare insight into the worlds most culturally integrated social network – Cyworld in South Korea.
Continue reading " Alternate Media Distribution Games - 03 Milia 2007 Vignettes " »
by: Jennifer Rice
I read in the WSJ a couple days ago that agency/client relationships are becoming harder to sustain… not surprising as marketers are under increasing pressure to drive results.
by: David Wigder
Part I of an Interview with Bruce Ertmann, Corporate Manager of Consumer Generated Media, Toyota...
Continue reading "Engaging Green Consumers through Consumer Generated Content" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko (via Business&Games)
TV Station Manager is an indie game of the simulation / tycoon genre that puts you in the shoes of, surprise, a TV station manager. Wonder if it can be used for training; will run it by the agency's media guys to see how accurate it is.
by: Gary Hayes
(Thanks to Rory Sutherland of Ogilvy for that image). A brief, as at mid conference, ones mind is too distracted to put together a reflective, long format piece for a media blog (well I suppose that’s the nature of blogs!) – and also there is very little time to sit back and write this stuff (yes being in Cannes is not all free parties and hanging around the beaches – well for sad people like me it isn’t 
).
Continue reading "Brest Feeding the Media - 02 Milia 2007 Vignettes " »
by: Alain Thys
When were you last delighted as a customer?
No seriously, take a second and think back. When was the last time a brand or business served you to the point of true "delight"? Even if you're less of a nitpicker than me, I bet examples don't come easy. In fact, Bain recently found that while 80% of senior executives believe they deliver superior customer service, only 8% of their customers agree.Continue reading "How to Delight Your Customers (10 Thoughts)" »
by: Jon Miller
I came across some awesome benchmark data about B2B marketing budgets, courtesy of SiriusDecisions. Thanks to Mou Mukherjee of cadenceblog for sending me the presentation in the first place. (If you are not familiar with SiriusDecisions, you should be -- they are doing some of the best research available on B2B marketing and sales. This presentation was part of a webinar they did with Rainmaker called Bridging the Gap Between Sales & Marketing.)
Continue reading "B2B Marketing Budgets - Data From SiriusDecisions" »
by: Joel Makower
Yahoo! Inc. has just announced that it will become carbon neutral by the end of 2007, yet another big climate commitment from another big company.
Continue reading "Yahoo! Spins a Web of Climate Influence" »
by: Mark Rogers
Recent figures from the IAB indicate that UK online advertising has reached £2bn. This number has already outstripped radio and newspapers and is chasing down television (at £3.9bn). The internet’s proportion of ad spend in the UK is the highest in the world.
Continue reading "Online Brand Building - a Case Study from Avis Europe " »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
A YouTube video by Intel showing the company's vision of the future: interconnected devices with voice recognition and sleek interfaces. (via Engadget).
Original Post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/future-according-to-intel.html
by: David Wigder
“Brands will not be able to opt out of [being green]. Companies which do not live by a green protocol will be financially damaged because consumers will punish them. In the longer term, I do not think they will survive.” – Lee Daley, chairman and chief executive of Saatchi & Saatchi UKby: David Jennings
There's an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times about how we arrive at collective judgements of cultural products.
Continue reading "Cumulative advantage versus the wisdom of crowds" »
by: David Jennings
There's an interesting article in Sunday's New York Times about how we arrive at collective judgements of cultural products.
Continue reading "Cumulative Advantage Versus the Wisdom of Crowds" »
by: Roger Dooley
When viewing sexy pictures, will men or women focus more on the faces of the participants? Surprisingly, men tend to look at the faces more than women, according to a new eye-tracking study conducted at the Center for Behavioral Neuroscience (CBN) in Atlanta.
By: David Armano
For the past several years, since this whole "Internet thing" has really taken off—we've been told that handing over control in your content, your brand, your PR, etc.—is risky business. Well it is—there are no guarantees. Remember the Chevy Tahoe ads? Give your consumers a blank piece of paper to write on and you don't know what they'll say about you.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
My friend Rekha told me about this optical shop up at Harvard Square called Eye Q Optical. They recognize that choosing the right frames can be a difficult job. They do a smart thing. They take a Polaroid snapshot of you with the glasses on so that you can show it to your friends and see what they think. Word of mouth by design.
by: John Caddell
I had lunch with a former colleague yesterday, whom I hadn't seen in ten years. She related to me this story:
Last year we had a pilot of a new performance management system for our employees. The trial group was 4000 people. We had spent a lot of time on the pilot and gathered a lot of data. At the end of the trial, the VP of Human Resources printed out all the comments that had been received on the survey forms. He took them home one night and read every single one. Then he came in the next day and said, "We can't roll this system out." And that was it. The trial was very expensive. We'd gathered lots of data, lots of numbers, but the final determinant was what he read in those comments.
Continue reading "An anecdote on the power of business narrative analysis" »
by: Michael Hoexter
In my previous post on the electron economy, I discussed the desirability of building out the electricity-based energy system as a means of harnessing most renewable and carbon-neutral forms of energy.
by: Joel Makower
One of the things you're likely to see at your workplace in the next few days is some focus on the environment. It's coming up on Earth Day, of course, the time of year when even hardnosed CEOs' thoughts turn green, at least for the moment.
Continue reading "Can Human Resources Departments Save the Earth?" »
by: Dick Stroud
Fitness First, claims to be the largest gym, health and fitness club group in the world, has done a survey (8,000 respondents).
Over 93% of the over-50s claim to ate healthily, 84% said they were careful about alcohol consumption and three-quarters avoided additives in food. A total of 55% were content with their body shape and nearly four in five had a good work/life balance.
By: Stefan Kolle
As you may have noticed, we recently started a new blog, Business and Games. We want to become the one source of all relevant information about the cross-section of business and gaming - starting from in-game advertising and adgames, but also looking into such developments as Serious Games and application of gaming concepts in education. The main body of conten is currently provided by Ilya Vedrashko, which you know as one of our top contributors, but we will be adding more contributors shortly.
By: David Armano
As you probably already know—I'm a big fan of the "T-shaped" mindset. So much so, that I dedicated the notion of it on my personal Website. The first time I read about this was in an Article in Fast Company written by IDEO's Tim Brown. The article is called "Strategy By Design". It's a must read.
By: Stefan Kolle
OK, maybe this is slightly off topic - but let's just pretend it's a part of our discussion on Grey Marketing. A group of over 90 (some over 100) year olds have been brought together as a band to record The Who's My Generation. Taking place in the Abbey Road studios, a lot of wonderful references are made for the careful observer.
Continue to watch this must see video!
Continue reading "A Secret Corporate Weapon: The Brand Pathway" »
No matter how good a designer we are, they are times when we face mental blocks that disrupt our design thinking. So in times like these, how can we then boost our creative juices? Here’s another exciting post by our resident contributor py, helping me fill in while I’m off beating my head on some other issues!
Here are some tips inspired by the best, on how we can unleash the creativity from inside us:
by: Karl Long
In a brilliant post on nform.ca, information architect Gene Smith of the Atomiq.org blog outlined the 7 building blocks of social software. This pulls together the work of various people including Matt Webb and Stewart Butterfield and provides a framework that I think is valuable in thinking about social software.
by: Roger Dooley
Last week we posted about Seth Godin’s Joy/Cash Curve and Buying Pain. We think that at least some marketers already understand the problem Godin raises and are trying to address it. One auto brand, Lexus, goes out of its way to, as Godin might put it, to add joy to the process of buying, not to mention owning, a car. From a neuromarketing point of view, we might view their efforts more as pain reduction.
by: John Caddell
Let's first pose a problem. You've put in place a new performance evaluation system and spent a year conducting reviews using it.
How's it working out for you?
Continue reading "What in hell is Most Significant Change?" »
by: Dominic Basulto
In order to breathe more life into its stable of consumer brands, General Mills is embracing a new strategy of open innovation. The company hopes to follow in the footsteps of companies such as Kraft and P&G, who are at the forefront of the open innovation movement.
by: Dick Stroud
by: Ilya Vedrashko
Eric Webber says he doesn't buy all this new-age transparency twittering and prefers his conversations with clients and publics fully clothed and not naked at all, thank you very much: "But it seems to me that all this talk of being "totally transparent" is overrated and takes things entirely too far. What's worse, it's just not honest." He's so getting shredded.
by: Yann Gourvennec
Is this another sign of the times, the after-shock after 10 years of Dilbertish hard-talk against managers or just the result of a profound transformation of the employment landscape? It’s probably hard to tell exactly but last december, the FT came up with an interesting article about how managers were perceived in this day and age.
Continue reading "devalued manager status could explain collaboration / wikinomics surge" »
By: Stefan Kolle
We reported earlier on the Alternate Reality Gaming (ARG the band Nine Inch Nails (NIN) is using to promote it's latest album. For a full overview of all the (brilliantly conceived) activities that have taken place, a Wiki has been set up. I suggest to take a look.
Continue reading "Silly retreating battles - how the music industry once again misses the point" »
by: Lynette Webb
Continue reading "Product Quality and Brand Image Is Determined by Google" »
by: Roger Dooley
The concept of marginal utility, a favorite of economists, is fairly simple to illustrate: a $20 bill is more useful to a financially strapped college student than, say, Bill Gates. Researchers at the University of Cambridge in England have now demonstrated the effects of marginal utility on both brain activation and speed of learning in an interesting series of experiments, as reported by Scientific American in Money Talks: A Brain Image of a Microeconomic Theory. The researchers began by assembling two groups of students, one composed of students with few assets and low income, and one with wealthier students.
by: Danah Boyd
I still hate memes, but i love Nancy. And i wasn't going to do this because there's nothing i hate more than talking about what has made me successful (mostly because i hate admitting that i'm successful). But i've also been spending a lot of time lately mulling over questions from undergraduates asking how they can be me and worrying about elder academics who tell me that i don't deserve the attention that i get.
Love what Peter Guber
had to say about the in-theatre experience in the current issue of US Airways magazine. This is something that many companies and industries do -- they forget about what they're really about. So theatres try to compete with home theatres, rather then talking about what makes them a different and unique experience. And we watch brand after brand compete with the wrong thing, rather then remember their our unique values. As Mr. Guber says, they forget what they're selling and devalue their own proposition.
by: David Armano
(click for larger image)
Thanks to Karl Long, I got a early heads up that my BusinessWeek article has already gone live. The title is "It's The Conversation Economy, Stupid": go and check it out if you have a few minutes to spare. And special thanks to Helen Walters from BusinessWeek who did some fantastic editing on the piece. I really enjoyed that process, and it made the writing much better.
Continue reading "The End of Thought Leadership (As We Know It)" »
by: Joel Makower
With the greening of business moving swiftly into the mainstream, there's been a renewed focus on greenwashing -- "what corporations do when they try to make themselves look more environmentally friendly than they really are," in the words of the watchdog group Sourcewatch.
The increased scrutiny isn't necessarily a bad thing. Companies should be held accountable for what they say and do. And there are plenty of examples where companies have attempted to apply a green sheen to their far-from-perfect environmental records. In the early 1990s, a handful of consumer-product companies were publicly spanked for their misleading green statements by the U.S. Federal Trade Commission as well as a consortium of state attorneys general led by Minnesota's then-AG Hubert Humphrey III.
by: Roger Dooley
My fellow FutureLab blogger, David Widger, wrote an interesting post, How Many Green Marketers Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb? In it he notes that fluorescent bulbs have proven difficult to market, despite today’s lower bulb prices and dramatic energy savings. The big issue is cost. At our closest Home Depot, for example, individual compact fluorescent bulbs can cost about $2 in a pack of five or six, and about $5 individually. A four pack of incandescent bulbs, meanwhile may cost a mere $1 - just 25 cents per bulb. According to Widger, a fluorescent bulb can save $30 to $100 over its lifetime. One would think consumers would gladly pay an extra dollar or two per bulb to save many times that in energy costs, not to mention less frequent bulb changing and a positive environmental impact.
by: David Armano
Some exciting things are in the air. This Sunday, BusinessWeek will be publishing a 1300+ word article I've written around the "Conversation Architect" mindset. More of that to come on Sunday evening. And in true conversation/co-creation fashion—Drew McLellan and Gavin Heaton are spearheading a collaborative e-book effort titled "The Conversation Age". I'll be contributing by designing both the cover as well as talking about "conversation architecture" and "the relationship renaissance".
by: David Polinchock
I've been traveling this week, so I'm behind in my writing. This was in Ad Age this week and speaks to the clutter problem from both the advertising and consumer POV. In fact, we've added an introduction to our presentations where as I begin the presentation, the a/v team will start to crank up a veritable cacophony of noise, getting louder & louder until it's impossible to hear anything at all. Then we stop it and bring up a slide with:
Continue reading "Advertising Age - Caught in the Clutter Crossfire: Your Brand" »
by: Ilya Vedrashko
NY Times runs a great story (via Idea City) about 3D scanners and printers. A lot of it is about the author's experience with using different models, but he also touches upon something AdLab had posted before: the "Napsterization", as he calls it, of physical objects as they turn from atoms to bits and then to atoms again: "The legal landscape, though, may not be ready for the Napsterization of three-dimensional things. Most of the cute, small tchotchkes in my house that fit on the turntable of the NextEngine scanner I tested are copyrighted. Zapping up a new version might run afoul of the same laws being used to fight the piracy of songs."
[Update] Slashdot discussion, very insightful.
Earlier:
Fortune on Personal Fabricators
Sears Carries Cheap Fabricator, Enters Second Life
Original post: http://adverlab.blogspot.com/2007/04/ny-times-on-rapid-prototyping.html
by: Ilya Vedrashko
In addition to the "consumer-generated ads" marketplaces AdLab's covered, there are few others on this conveniently compiled list:
OpenAd.net: "the world's first online marketplace for buying and selling advertising, marketing and design ideas [that has] over 7,000 Creatives in 115 countries offering their work to a growing number of international clients."
by: David Jennings
Blogging is clearly one of the major trends in music, media and entertainment. It makes complete sense for the major labels to use the process in a creative way to encourage, discover and communicate with new artists.
Continue reading "SonyBMG believes blogging is the answer to discovery" »
by: Roger Dooley
A frequent topic here has been research showing that buying things, particularly items seen as being overpriced, activates the pain centers of the brain (see The Pain of Buying, Painful Sushi and Other Pricing Blunders, and Brain Scans Predict Buying Behavior).
by: Guy Kawasaki
At the Elite Retreat I gave an off-the-cuff answer to a question concerning getting the attention of venture capitalists. My buddy Wendy Piersall blogged about my answer, and it was a very popular. However, to truly help entrepreneurs, I’d like to provide a cogent list of the tips to get the attention of a venture capitalist.
Continue reading "How to Get the Attention of a Venture Capitalist" »
by: Karl Long
Putting People First blog just posted about a survey that strategy consultancy McKinsey just conducted with executives about web 2.0 technologies and found significant interest and support, but they still shy away from blogs:
Only 16% of the companies surveyed said they were investing in blogs, compared to 63% for web services, 28% for peer-to-peer networks, and 19% for social networks.78% identified web services as the Web 2.0 technology/tool most important their their business.
Continue reading "McKinsey Reports Businesses Loving Web 2.0… Except Blogs" »
by: Karl Long
I think the concept of marketing using “big games” or ARG’s is one of the most exciting marketing concepts that has emerged in recent years. The way it combines customer experience, co-creation, word of mouth, and customer engagement and lets not forget FUN, makes it a very powerful tool in a marketers repertoire. As Trent says though this is not just about marketing but a new form of entertainment.
by: Danah Boyd
I love Etech. This year, i had the great opportunity to keynote Etech (albeit at an ungodly hour). The talk i wrote was entirely new and intended for the tech designer/developer audience (warning: the academics will hate it). The talk is called:
by: Dick Stroud
I received a brochure from The Adventure Company about its “inspirational holidays for the active over 50s”.
This is a classic example of age-silo marketing. You put a gated wall around the age group and say only the oldies can enter.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
And finds there isn't any. Check this out:
That's an answer to the question Business Week asked ad agencies: "Appearing at the top of Google Search results is a more effective form of brand-building than a national TV campaign." True or false?
by: Joseph Mann
Just as consumer Web video exploded last year with Google Video, YouTube, JumpCut, etc., is this the year Web video will take off in business-to-business usage? An article in BtoB Magazine seems to say so:
"Online video is becoming the killer application of the Internet as b-to-b marketers embrace it as an integral part of their marketing programs, using it in such disparate formats as 15-second banner ads and long-form documentaries..."1
by: David Armano
"I speak with marketing professionals every day (both client and agency side) who are defining social media strategies but are not themselves active users of social media services, much less students of them. They market on blogs, but aren't themselves bloggers (or even regular blog readers.) They define strategies for social networking but don't themselves use social networking sites like MySpace or Facebook.
by: Karl Long
An old friend and colleague just sent me these notes he had written up for the Virtual Worlds 2007 conference that just took place in NY.
main point being there is a lot of stuff happening out there and SecondLife is just one player.
DEFINING QUOTES:
“We are at the silent movie stage.”
“This is one freaky, geeky 21st century we are moving into.”
“A lot of this is going to happen and a lot of it is not going to happen.”
Continue reading "Conference Notes From Virtual Worlds 2007" »
by: Jon Miller
Here are 22 new B2B marketing blogs. Thanks to everyone who liked the list and who let me know about new blogs. As always, here is the complete Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs as well as the updated B2B marketing blog OPML file. (Right click and and save-as, then import to your reader).
Continue reading "Updates to Big List of B2B Marketing Blogs" »
by: David Wigder
Answer: We may never find out as long as the sales model remains flawed.
Fluorescent light bulbs have proven difficult to market. First, consumers have not demonstrated a strong willingness to pay a price premium for the bulbs. (While the price has fallen in recent years, the cost of a fluorescent bulb is still more than 3x the cost of comparable incandescent bulbs.) Second, despite the fact that each fluorescent bulb can save between $30 and $100+ over its lifetime, consumers resist paying today for promised savings in the future.
Continue reading "How Many Green Marketers Does It Take to Change a Light Bulb?" »
by: Dick Stroud
This article appeared in Advertising Age (US) - thanks to Chuck Nyren for alerting me.
It states the same and often repeated message: “the advertising industry should start taking note of the 50-plus consumer”.
by: Ilya Vedrashko
Inspired by KZero's map of brand presence in Second Life, I thought about compiling a more usable list with SL URLs and everything, but then I found a fairly complete one over at SL Business Communicators wiki. Instead, I flew around the world and took a few snapshots of islands I hadn't seen before.
by: Joel Makower
In recent years, we've seen the rise of the "social entrepreneur," a new breed of individuals with innovative solutions to society's most pressing social problems, as Ashoka, the global association of social entrepreneurs, puts it. These individuals are often visionaries, creating innovative enterprises, products and services, and business models, some for-profit, others nonprofit.
Continue reading "The Untapped Potential of Social Entrepreneurs" »
