According to the Australian Institute of Company Directors, companies, government and society as a whole are suffering from “excessive short-termism”. One driver of this is visibility. As the AICD notes, “In a world where information is ubiquitous and everyone is digitally connected, the short-term impact of decisions can become widely known within a matter of … Continue reading
An almost absurdly simple point made recently at EffWeek 2017 should give marketers cause to reconsider their content marketing expectations and efforts. To state the obvious, driven by the ‘content is king’ mantra, almost every brand is churning out more content. This all modestly adds to the 2.5 quintillion bytes of data that according to … Continue reading
Recently a growing number of voices have been questioning the logic and value of social media marketing. But in the main these views are overwhelmed by the ubiquitous support for all things social. This post summarises a range of these dissenting arguments to help invite greater debate about why and how brands should use social … Continue reading
The view that a brand should tell a story rather than just have a ‘positioning’ is not new in marketing circles. However, for CEOs who often already see marketing as the ‘soft’ side of their businesses, investment in story-telling may seem too esoteric a notion, and one with questionable commercial benefit. But the outcomes of … Continue reading
Over the past few years it’s been in vogue for brands to do what not long ago would have been unthinkable. To point out their flaws, openly admit their mistakes and offer products that are deliberately less than ‘perfect’. More often than not, proudly so. Imperfections are the latest phase in the brand authenticity movement. … Continue reading
This web ad from Japan for the Tosando Music School is the latest viral tearjerker. In testimony to its crafting, you won’t need to understand Japanese to follow it or to be touched by it. At a time when brands are building increasingly complex digital communications programs, and are turning to oblique forms of branded … Continue reading
Fans of sports movies will recognise that the title of this post borrows from Al Pacino’s famous coach’s speech in the American football film, Any Given Sunday. “You find out life’s this game of inches, so is football. Because in either game – life or football – the margin for error is so small. I … Continue reading
According to Richard Branson, “Complexity is your enemy. Any fool can make something complicated. It is hard to make something simple”. It’s ironic then how much marketing tends to overcomplicate things, given that Branson is one of the profession’s most popular pin-up boys. Our last post for 2013 held a comic mirror up to some … Continue reading
Comedy can help us see things that we’re usually blind to, or that we simply prefer to ignore. As put by writer Mary Hirsch, “Humour is a rubber sword – it allows you to make a point without drawing blood.” The ad industry, for all its foibles, often manages to laugh at itself. And in … Continue reading
There are two paradigm challenging forces at play in marketing today. One is obvious – the shift to digital and social media. The other is somewhat less widely known but no less significant, being the new understanding of consumer psychology offered by behavioural science and neuroscience. What isn’t recognised is that the frameworks they suggest … Continue reading
