Marketers: Bastards of the Business World

Exxon vision is perilously short-term

From Commodity to Brand and Back Again

9 Digital Trends For 2010
1: Facebook replaces personal emailQuestion: Google has it, Hoover has it (in the UK anyway), TiVo had it, lost it and has somewhat got it back. Xerox had it, but nobody really cares anymore. So what is it?It's when a brand name becomes the verb associated with its use. So rather than searching, you Google, or TiVo when digital recording a television show. Arguably an even more powerful synonym i

The Anti-laws of Luxury Marketing #16
16. Keep stars out of your advertisingIn traditional marketing, stars of stage and screen are very often used in advertising: there is nothing like a David Beckham for selling sunglasses or shaving cream. Nestlé has also got in on the act, with premium brand Nespresso calling on the services of George Clooney, and Nescafé recruiting the famous English soccer player Ian Wright. Nestlé, the world’s number one in food marketing, knows wh

Brands and the Ladder of Life
One of the typical questions marketing people ask themselves is, What’s the lifetime value of a customer?Presumably a company benefits by keeping its customers satisfied over an extended period of time. Nice idea in theory, but this kind of thinking often leads a company down the wrong path.Take Saturn, for example. Here was a brand built on the ultimate in customer

Uniting Naming and Promotion
X-13D? What kind of name is that for something you pop into your mouth?Doritos turned naming conventions upside down with its savvy plan in 2007 to generate buzz – and, oh yes, a new name – for its new flavored chips. How? By submitting suggestions on the Web, prompted by these eye-catching black bags of cheeseburger-like chips with the 'classified' moniker.“This is the X-13D flavor ex

When The Name You Want Is Taken
You've just found out the name you want for your brand is owned by somebody else. So, the temptation is to say, "Let's move on."Not so fast. Names are property, and can be bought and sold (or leased) like real estate.Coors licensed the name of its upscale beer Irish Red from a long-defunct brewery. Yves St. Laurent bought the name of its Opium fragrance for only $200 from two elderly perfumers.The 1999 relaunch of National Ai