The last time I tried to redeem a Groupon, I arrived at the sushi restaurant to find an “out of business” sign in the window. The restaurant had launched a daily deal promotion six months before. Half-price sushi at a good restaurant is a great deal for consumers (more interesting than the eyebrow waxing and air duct cleaning deals I [...]
The unrequited hype of the Facebook IPO last week echoes the unrequited hype many brands experience with social media in general. There’s a get rich quick mentality – a “Like Grab”. Many brands believe if you just build it, the audience will come. The problem is that this sets the false expectation that social media is easy. Social media holds [...]
I heard someone say recently that the difference between networking and not working is one letter. I’m amazed how many LinkedIn requests are indiscriminately sent to acquaintances or strangers without even personalizing the generic invitation message: “Since you are person I trust…” Recently LinkedIn modified the generic message, but the same behavior is there. Many of these interactions start and [...]
The world needs wild ideas. But every wild idea faces a road of obstacles to bring it to life. The hard work comes after the brainstorming rumpus when you have to bring others along. Few of these obstacles are as rough as the devil’s advocate. IDEO founder Tom Kelley once called the devil’s advocate the single greatest threat to innovation: [...]
There has never been a greater level of marketing clutter. Yankelovich Consumer Research charts that “we’ve gone from being exposed to about 500 marketing messages a day back in the 1970s to as many as 5,000 a day today.” At the same time, marketing communication is often little more than a string of adjectives: bigger, better, faster, cheaper, etc. So [...]
One of my favorite idea killers is the statement, “if it were really a good idea, someone would already be doing it.” In innovation, we often fixate too much on the competition. We benchmark and validate ideas based what everyone else is doing. This cycle of one-upmanship makes it hard to launch something truly new and different. It also creates [...]
Should campaigns be media-driven or idea-driven? Lately, it feels like the media tail is wagging the campaign dog. Many campaigns are built around a media platform, as if the media platform alone was the big idea. Most of the Foursquare campaigns I see feel like that. Sometimes marketers forget that media platforms are enablers to big ideas. They aren’t the [...]
Every time I buy a new technology product, I wonder how long it will last. I salivate over anything new from Apple. But, I’ve had a number of Apple products fail recently. My Apple Time Capsule, marketed as a “revolutionary storage device”, died after just two years, unfixable, losing all the files it was designed to store. My two-year old [...]
Mobile is the next frontier for marketing. Not all mobile marketing is spam, of course, but many current campaigns feature exactly that — unwanted, unsolicited SMS text messages. The potential of mobile marketing is far more powerful — location-specific, time-based, highly personalized messaging. It has the potential to offer real utility to consumers. But the current state seems more geared [...]
The gamification bandwagon continues, promising customer engagement and loyalty. What some marketers miss is that gamification means a lot more than badges, points, mayorships, and leader boards. Those game mechanics don’t necessarily create experiences worth playing. If you build it, they won’t necessarily come. More importantly, gamification can’t make an un-engaging brand engaging. It may be the shiny new thing, [...]
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