The best marketing of 2010? For me, it’s the Charity category that takes the cake. It’s not an easy category to market, and in many cases, you have to really fight for support and fight even harder for donations. I love seeing the strategies and the ideas they implement to get us to donate our hard earned cash, and Movember I think is definitely the best I’ve seen in a long time.
In my previous blog I told you my thoughts on buying ‘local’ versus ‘imported’, this blog however is about a vital reason to actually buy local over imported: the carbon footprint associated with getting the product to my door.
Each year I write a Christmas blog. Each year I’m full of hope. Each year I’m glad to be alive and each year I pray the world will get a little better.
One of the most told stories at Christmas, second only to the Gospel’s nativity, is ‘A Christmas Carol’. This Dickensian classic, tells the story of individual reformation by a certain Ebaneza Scrooge whose life is transformed by the visitation of three ghosts. The story has always intrigued me because it has so many timeless messages and because of a personal reformation of my own.
Dickens wrote the book at a time when England had forgotten the spirit of Christmas and the treatment of the poor by the upper classes was at its most heartless. I suspect it was a ‘pricking of the Country’s conscious’ and its ability to awaken our deepest awareness is still impacting and effective today. I wonder what Dickens might have made of today? What, in the year 2010, might he have written that could have begun the process of transformation for us twenty first century occupants of planet earth?
There’s an elephant in every board room – and it’s us the marketers. Let’s not kid ourselves, left brain managers don’t think much of right brain marketers’ opinions. Why should they?
When opening a new business, the first weeks of marketing are often the only advertising your customers will ever actively pay attention to, or even seek out. After that, they glance at it, grab key information, or ignore it, depending on how you have ‘positioned’ yourself in their mind. If implemented correctly, it can be the most successful marketing you will ever do. Something I saw recently for a brand new business in their first weeks of trade however, sent shivers down my spine: ‘opening sale – 20% off’.
Good typography has its own personality. It can help a brand stand out in the marketplace and is a very important part of good branding. Done well, the shape and form of the letters can say so much more than what they actually spell out.
Yesterday Apple announced, for the first time in 10 years, the availability of the Beatles’ music catalogue on their iTunes Store. This is great news for the fans of the band who do not already have digital versions of the music. So why has the announcement attracted criticism from the many fans of the Apple brand? This simple PR announcement has turned into quite an interesting marketing case-study of how hype can be damaging to a brand.