How the Disco Versus Punk Rock Wars of the 1970s Help Us Think About Marketing Today
It’s often hard to look at trends objectively if you’re living through them, but marketers have got to ask themselves whether what they know today will be proven false tomorrow. Disco music was the sound of the summer of 1979: Chic, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were at the top of the charts. The Bee […]
Think Black Friday is big? It’s nothing compared to China’s Singles’ Day
Black Friday – the day after Thankgivings Day – is known as one of the biggest shopping days in the calendar. However, Black Friday nothing compared to China’s Singles Day 11:11. When the clock struck midnight on 11 November 2018, so began the world’s biggest shopping spree. Singles’ Day or, as its officially called, the […]
The phrase ‘that might work in practice, but does it work in theory?’ is invariably attributed to economists. Unfortunately, the theoretical aspect is also what holds precedence in marketing degrees in many of our universities. In an article on Medium in 2016, Tribefire founder Daniel Palmer described studying marketing at university as “a frustrating waste […]
How the Disco Versus Punk Rock Wars of the 1970s Help Us Think About Marketing Today
It’s often hard to look at trends objectively if you’re living through them, but marketers have got to ask themselves whether what they know today will be proven false tomorrow. Disco music was the sound of the summer of 1979: Chic, Donna Summer and Gloria Gaynor were at the top of the charts. The Bee […]
We need evidence-based marketing to save us from fads and fashions
It is all too easy to base marketing strategies on hope, fear, what has worked in the past and what others are doing, but the best marketers will hinge their decisions on the facts. In 1836, French physician Pierre Louis conducted one of the first clinical trials in medicine. At the time, the removal of […]
How to be a modern day marketing mystic
Marketers no longer need fortune-tellers or clairvoyants to advise them what will happen in the future, a quick look at Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon’s results suggests where the industry is headed. Since time immemorial, humans have longed to learn what the future holds for them. Soothsayers, fortune-tellers and clairvoyants have targeted that particular market […]
One word sums up why now is the best time to be a marketer
The level of opportunity open to marketers today means marketing’s golden age is now. The challenge, however, is working out which opportunity to seize first. Believe it or not – and given all the bad news around marketing in the last few months, many people do not – I believe today is the best time […]
Being seen as an ‘influencer’ doesn’t make you a good marketer: in fact, ‘influencer lists suck’
Marketers should be more concerned with doing their day job and making an impact that way than trying to top a list of marketing influencers. You may have seen that Klout – the influence-scoring app that analysed your presence online and gave you a score about how influential you are – recently closed. Klout may […]
The Days of the FMCG Marketing Hegemony are Numbered
Why the FMCG Big Brand are Trapped and What B2C Can Learn from B2B Brands Working in consumer marketing is seen as the apex of the marketing career pyramid. Indeed, it is taken almost for granted that consumer marketing, and, in particular, FMCG marketing has the best brands, the best agencies and the best talent. […]
Recruitment is broken. Badly. Yet, there is a war for talent.
Ever applied for a job that you were perfect for, only for you never to heat from them again? And there is a ‘war for talent’? Is it just me or does anybody else think that recruitment is broken? Many of you reading will have applied for a job, one that you thought you had […]
Brands in the West need to follow the lead of China and find their own ‘red envelope’ strategy
Chinese New Year provides a perfect reason to look to the East for inspiration on how to innovate in one of the big untapped markets: mobile payments. Today is Chinese New Year, called the ‘Spring Festival’ in China, when everyone travels to their provinces to celebrate the most important holiday in the calendar.Tradition sees Chinese […]
Why Rich People’s Habits Today are the Mainstream Trends of Tomorrow
Rich people used their money to buy bling, now they use it to buy goods and services that give them back their time – and one day, so will we all The 1987 Oscar-winning movie Wall Street, with Michael Douglas and Charlie Sheen, is iconic for a number of reasons. First, it was the definitive […]
Six Seismic Trends Changing Retail Forever
Technology is changing the way retail consumers search, discover and buy. As a result, retailisrethinking strategies and reshaping how they deliver. Here are the top trends that coming to the high streets, shopping malls and online shopping around the globe in the next few years. #1 The Rise of Voice and the Death of the […]
Want to be a Marketing Success? Change your Mindset.
Marketers are prone to a fondness for their own ideas and beliefs. Erase these from your mindset to succeed. The mind of a marketer can be a delicate thing. We like to think that we’re logical, reasonable and objective in our insight. The truth really is that we’re all bad at being objective. We prefer […]
How to be a Marketing Machiavelli.
The path to leadership doesn’t always match the advice being dished out so perhaps marketers should look elsewhere for inspiration. The biggest challenge for the marketing leaders of the future is making sense of the plethora of literature on leadership.Mmost teaching on leadership is filled with recommendations about being authentic, honest, modest, truthful and never, […]
The (digitally) illiterate CEO
Imagine you are an airline recruiting for a new CEO, and they admitted they did not really know anything about aircraft economics, aircraft leasing or airline distribution. Unlikely they would be hired, I’m sure you agree. It’s just as impossible to imagine any CEO of any retailer openly admitting they did not really understand this […]
Future marketing leaders will need a compass, not a map
In an uncharted world of exponential change driven by technology, marketing leadership means depending on judgement as much as data, and personality as much as skills. When discussing leaders and leadership, it’s a good idea to be clear about definitions. There are 17,623 […]
There are no such things as ‘industries’, only ways of serving the customer need
Short-term thinking will lead brands to disaster. Instead marketers must understand the value their product provides the customer to be better prepared for the future. At some point in its development, every industry can be considered a growth industry, based on the apparent superiority of its product. But in case after case, industries have fallen […]