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Organic or Synthetic?
In the human world, organic is better. In the business world, synthetic is better. Why? There are several reasons, so let me give you a high-level overview. Organic Eating serves an organic system – us. We are organic (well, most of us are…) so it is better to use organic things to sustain ourselves. Sure, “traditional” growing practices yield larger harvests at lower production costs. It even saves us a few dollars more at the grocery store. The question remains, though, is it good for us? Hundreds of people argue that organic food (grown without hormones, pesticides, or the use…
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Master Brand
By “master brand” I mean umbrella brand. The brand that covers multiple product lines that hold individual brands of their own. Take Proctor&Gamble, for example – few recognize the P&G name, but almost everyone knows Charmin, and Pepto Bismol. Understanding the attributes of your master brand is just as important as understanding those of your customer-facing ones. More often than not, someone else will be distributing Pepto Bismol – but the distributor never directly interacts with the Pepto Bismol brand. Their experience is as a customer of Proctor & Gamble, even if P&G doesn’t see it that way. If your…
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Marketing Sustainability
When I went to graduate school, I was given the opportunity to specilize in one of three fields: logistics, marketing, or sustainability. Those of you who know me can probably guess my reaction to the logistics offering – I’m fairly good at it, but I don’t enjoy all of the technical aspects that go into planning a supply chain system. Oddly enough, my reaction to marketing was pretty much the same. At the time I put marketing, sales, and advertising into the same bucket. Swimming around in the muck with them were teleMARKETERS, pyramid scheme scam artists, and a whole bunch…
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Mindshare
A lot of people tell me how funny the word “mindshare” looks. It’s a made up word that, apparently, has a completely artificial definition. I like things that way. It appeals to my deep desire for ultimate control over things (insert ominous, evil cackle). Really now, “mindshare” is one of the most valuable concepts in marketing. Everyone knows “market share.” It’s the portion of the market your brand owns. For example, Nike owns a HUGE percentage of the atheletic apparel market. The second concept of marketing is the “heart share.” While you might not be familiar with the term, I…
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YouTube
I’m a big fan of YouTube. I’ve always been impressed by the deluge of quality content put out by amateur video producers. As fun as it is, though, I never really thought about the business applications of YouTube until recently. We all loved show-and-tell in Kindergarten. We got to see what cool new toys everyone else had, and I was always excited to see the newest Transformer my friends had. It was one thing to see a picture of the robot in a magazine, but hearing about all the cool things it could do and actually seeing it transform brought…
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‘Negative’ Equity
The negative aspects of your brand are just as important as the positive ones. Marketing missteps and managerial mistakes in the past should be embraced as learning opportunities, not errors. No company can ever be perfect, and forcing a squeaky-clean image of perfection on your brand can actually kill it – no one is perfect and no one will trust anyone or anything pretending to be so. I try to refrain from discussing politics in this space, but Hillary Clinton has given us a perfect illustration of this point. Several times in the past she has referenced a trip to…
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Brand Equity
Finally, a metric for measuring the comparative equity in a brand name across markets, industries, and products. For years, people have talked about brand value and brand equity in difficult to define terms. Brand value was one of three things: 1) the current financial worth of a brand entity, 2) the future financial worth of a brand entity (valuation), or 3) the allowable premium businesses could charge for branded goods over generic goods. It is nearly impossible to have a meaningful discussion on brand without defining which brand value we’re talking about. Here is my definition: Brand Value = The…
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Fresh Marketing Theory
I never really liked the way McCarthy’s four Ps of marketing (product, price, place, and promotion) were presented. It was all too theoretical and dry. Beyond that, no one seemed to care about the customer – as a customer myself, this always upset me. This morning, I got an email about a new marketing theory – the ‘five Ps’ of marketing. Someone with much more time than I have has taken it upon themselves to create a customer-focused model. I really think it’s about time, too, since we (customers) are the center of the marketing universe. Here’s a snippet of…
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The Power of Social Media
A colleague of mine forwaded me a very thoughtful article about Social Applications from the MIT Sloan Management Review. I have been trying to explain to people for a very long time the power of social networking sites, blogs, and user-contributed media. Apparently, people are starting to catch on. Here’s a great example of the negative power these tools wield over your business: To understand the dramatic implications of this shift, consider what happened in 2006 when Brian Finkelstein, a law student, was having trouble with the cable modem in his home. A repairman from Comcast Cable Communications Inc. arrived…
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Brands and Partnerships
A friend of mine recently brought a partnership between Mercy Corps and Wal-Mart to my attention. She was concerned about the partnership because the missions of both organizations seem fundamentally misaligned. Here are my comments on this specific partnership: Partnerships only works when the brands involved are marching towards the same goal. While Mercy Corps’ overal principle of “teaching to fish” and Wal-Mart’s of cost leadership might not be in alignment, this says nothing about their goal. Mercy Corps wants to teach famers about building sustainable enterprises that can, in turn, benefit their local communities and economies. Wal-Mart wants to…