A Better Course

Over the Christmas holidays I went home for a week. As is often the case at the end of the year, my family discussed what we’d enjoyed over the last year, which in turn became myself and my father trying to ’sell’ each other our favourite things from 2007 - in my case, Last.fm and [...]

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Originally, I started a generic post on the business or marketing books I’ve read this year. But there’s only really one book I want to write about, because I think the ideas in it are incredibly important to anyone in marketing or product design. These ideas are also the ones that seem to be the [...]

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Ann Handley on Marketing Profs Daily Fix writes about confirmation emails as a means of building a brand. Her example (quoted there in full and here in part) is a confirmation email from CDBaby:
We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the [...]

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It would be interesting to see how many people went to the Overstock website from a Facebook Beacon news item, versus how many people went there from an article or blog post complaining about Facebook Beacon.
Given the degree of closeness of most people on Facebook to most of the people on their friends list [...]

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Russell Davies writes about the personalised advertising promised by social networking that “the people who can be arsed to do a little bit of research [...] plunge into a kind of direct marketing uncanny valley where the more desperately they try to personalise their message the more I’m reminded that they’re not really my friend”.
The [...]

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Two charity campaigns have been interesting in the last few months. The most recent is Oxfam’s “Rubbish Presents” campaign:

Advertising their line of gifts in time for Christmas. It’s likeable because it’s obviously self-mocking; the celebrities in the advert look genuinely distressed, the language used (”Speak out against the horror of”) is an exaggeration of the [...]

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Following yesterday’s post I’ve been thinking a lot about narrative; both the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the stories we tell our (potential) customers about our products.
Some marketing or advertising seeks to fit their stories into existing narratives - innocent do well at marketing to those who already identify as “a healthy person”. [...]

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I recently went to see a talk by Radha Chadha on the rise of luxury brands in Asia, about which she has recently written a book. She had moved from India to Hong Kong a decade ago to work for an ad agency and, fascinated by the attitude to luxury brands that she noticed both [...]

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Chris writes about using marketing and advertising techniques in the design process - starting from the point that ‘a lot of “experience design” is actually just designers doing people-grounded marketing’. This is interesting to me, considering that I’ve got a post to write about how good design is good marketing, and how they two can [...]

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Another interesting post from Neuromarketing, this time about subliminal branding - how one’s positive feelings towards a brand increase after viewing the logo a number of times at a millisecond level. It’s interesting in terms of Free Rice, another site that’s been doing the rounds - there’s a really uncluttered interface, but once you’ve answered [...]

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