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The Case for Micromanaging Your Online Marketing Initiatives

Remember when marketers could put together programs and execute them with a carefully planned schedule?  There was time to get everything just right before rolling out new messages and materials. 

With the popularity of the social web in the 21st century, those slow-moving strategies and tactics must be replaced with flexibility, adaptability and ever-changing foresight.  Timeliness is more important than ever, and if you drop the ball, the members of the social web are standing by ready to point out your error for the world to notice and discuss. [Read more…] about The Case for Micromanaging Your Online Marketing Initiatives

Captive Brands – The Rebranding of Store Brands

Even though store brands have lost much of the stigma they held 10 or 20 years ago as cheap knock-offs, there is still a certain level of negativity surrounding them.  Apparently, the negative brand impression was strong enough that companies like Wal-Mart, CVS and Walgreens are now calling them “captive brands” in an attempt to make them more palatable to a broader audience.

Retailers make more money selling their own brands then they do selling products from other companies, so it makes sense that a push to rebrand store brands is a popular new trend that’s catching on quickly.  Manufacturers are noticing that the rebranding effort is working as captive brands slowly steal market share from brands that once controlled the vast majority of categories on retail shelves.  [Read more…] about Captive Brands – The Rebranding of Store Brands

Brands Embrace Gastrosexuals

Thanks to a study paid for by food company PurAsia, a new demographic has been named – the gastrosexual.  What’s a gastrosexual you ask?  It’s a new term used to refer to men who like to spend time in their kitchens, and it’s a term that brands targeted to the overall male demographic are embracing quickly.

Imagine the Porsche kitchen or Peugeot salt and pepper shakers.  Don’t laugh – both are already a reality.  German luxury kitchen maker Poggenpohl already created the new P7340 kitchen for the gastrosexual crowd complete with Porsche and Peugeot branded design elements and products. [Read more…] about Brands Embrace Gastrosexuals

BusinessWeek Launches Business Social Network – Business Exchange

BusinessWeek has joined the social networking bandwagon with its own social network called Business Exchange.  This social network is a bit different from the Facebooks and LinkedIns of the world though.  Instead of being a place to make connections, poke people, compare movie preferences, and the like, Business Exchange is meant to be a place for members to share great business-related content, making it more of a social networking/bookmarking site than a true social network.

The first thing to note about Business Exchange is its professional tone.  This isn’t the social network for high school kids.  Instead, this is a social site for business professionals looking to connect and share information.  Members share content they like online by bookmarking it into a wide variety of broad and niche topic categories such as Branding, Business Law, Business of Beer and more.  Since the site is still new, users can even suggest topics to make the site even better. [Read more…] about BusinessWeek Launches Business Social Network – Business Exchange

The Social Web is Not Lost on Baby Boomers

A recent study by The NPD Group out of New York reports that 41% of baby boomers (people ages 44-61) have visited social networks such as Facebook, MySpace or LinkedIn, and a full 61% have been to websites that offer streaming or downloadable video. 

Over the three months prior to the survey of 11,600 consumers online, over 57% overall had visited social networking sites with baby boomers stopping an average of eight times on social networking sites during that three month period. [Read more…] about The Social Web is Not Lost on Baby Boomers

This One Time, at Brand Camp

Never let it be said that marketers and branding people can’t poke fun at themselves!  If you thought branding wasn’t funny, think again.  A new book was just released by Tom Fishburne called This One Time, at Brand Camp that is filled with sarcastic and witty cartoons related to marketing, branding and business. 

I found out about this book from Tom Fishburne’s current virtual book tour through Post2Post, and I’m glad I did.  John Moore’s Brand Autopsy is one of Tom’s stops on his virtual book tour, and John posted links to a number of Tom’s branding-related cartoons on Flickr in his review post.  As far as Tom is concerned, no branding or marketing topic is safe from sarcasm.  [Read more…] about This One Time, at Brand Camp