IS THE PRINT INDUSTRY DEAD?

POSITION: NO, IT’S NOT

Print has been a dying medium for most of my adult life. Now more than ever, people seem to want to kill it off once and for all.
Yes newspapers have been on the decline. Numbers don’t lie, and there’s no denying that as a marketing medium, print has serious challenges ahead of [...]

5 MISTAKES BRAND MANAGERS MAKE

During the years I’ve worked with various brands and brand managers, and have studied other brands to see how they’ve been developed, I’ve spotted some mistakes that brand managers make on a regular basis, which can often be the difference between failure and success:

Relying too much on data and research: Let me make this [...]

PERSPECTIVES INTRODUCES 200 WORD MICRO DEBATES

Perspectives is excited to introduce our newest feature, “200 Word Micro Debates.”
Each debate will spotlight two professionals with opposing viewpoints on a given marketing or business-related topic or questions.  Participants will have up to 200 words to make their case, with no opportunity to see the opposing argument before it’s published. Readers will then be [...]

RISK TAKING IN MARKETING

EXCERPTED FROM: PERSPECTIVES ON MARKETING
Is a risky concept worth trying if failure means potentially losing the account (or, for a marketing director, losing your job)?
Risk-taking is a major part of life and can bring tremendous rewards. It’s important to remember, however, that risk-taking can be extremely dangerous if the risk involves tampering with something that [...]

CREATIVITY AND THE CULT OF BLAME

Creativity.  Has the word or concept lost its meaning?
Recently, I’ve found myself scratching my head over this.  As more and more of my agency peers express frustration with their clients’ lack of appreciation for creativity in marketing – apparently, brand managers increasingly define “creative” as “not strategic” – I’ve started wondering if maybe they have [...]

SOCIAL NETWORKING IS NETWORKING – NOT MARKETING

It seems as if in every marketing journal you open these days, a so-called social networking guru blabs on endlessly about the ways businesses should use social networking as  part of their marketing mix. Whether it’s urging marketers to Tweet or companies to set up Facebook Fan Pages, social networking is here to stay. These [...]

KEEP WALKING

Every so often you see a commercial or a video that is produced for a brand and you are left almost speechless.  A spot or a video that truly captures the essence of what the brand stands for and illustrates a human connection to the product.  Unfortunately, for every one of these great videos you [...]

CONSUMERS’ ‘BACK TO BASICS’ FORCES LUXURY BRANDS TO CHANGE

High ends luxury brands have boomed over the past 20 years with seemingly nothing to stop their mega-growth. These brands understood this recession would have an impact, but were they prepared to reinvent themselves to play on a new game board with a new deck of cards? They were accustomed to making the rules and [...]

AN INFLUENTIAL MANAGER DOESN’T BELIEVE IN BRANDING. NOW WHAT?

Welcome to my world. This could be a really complex discussion or a really simple one; I’m going to go with simple. Here’s the bottom line: Influential and effective managers generally manage business units or support groups that generate profit or cut expenses in a way that is material to a company’s bottom line. They’re [...]

PRICE, BRAND, QUALITY OR SALESPERSON: WHAT MATTERS MOST?

Buyers consider many factors when evaluating proposals, and salespeople must identify those factors that are most important to each request if they want to land an order. Each of these factors – price, brand, quality, and salesperson – can play a pivotal role in a buyer’s decision-making evaluation of vendor proposals, but in different ways:

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