A Better Course

Nivea advert
Originally uploaded by Alexandra Mitchell

One of my most hated adverts of the moment is this one, for Nivea moisturiser. It is unreadably bland - what is actually going on? How does it relate to the tagline, “Look ready to face the day”?
There are some conclusions that we can draw about what’s going on here. [...]

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Bad copywriting is something I complain about quite a lot - sometimes it’s because it’s poorly proofread (and I start planning the Alex Mitchell School Of Copywriting), sometimes it’s trying too hard to be something it’s not, sometimes because one tiny phrase just annoys me. Today, I’ve seen two bits of copywriting I really liked.
The [...]

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In case it doesn’t come across clearly enough on this blog, I’m a complete geek about branding, particularly the idea that a brand can come to “own” a single word. One of Nader Tavassoli’s exercises in presentations is asking everyone in the room to say the single word they think of when they hear the [...]

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Last night, I went to see a talk by Stephen Butscher of Simon Kutcher & Partners talk about loyalty schemes. I’ve been interested in this since the adliterate post on the basis of loyalty (little love lost for loyalty schemes, there) and wanted to see if anything would change my mind.
Simon made a point halfway [...]

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There’s been a lot written and said recently about brand engagement - essentially, the idea that if someone uses something related to your brand, they will be more likely to trust (and by extension buy) your product further down the line. Even more problematically, this has frequently been with reference to brand’s Facebook applications. I’ve [...]

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Matterbox is one of the more fun marketing ideas I’ve seen recently:
Matter is a collection of a dozen or so enticing or intriguing physical things, each one from a different company, occasionally delivered to your house in a distinctive box on a Saturday morning.
I was going to describe it as one of the better ideas, [...]

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There have been a series of interesting posts on viral marketing recently - advergirl on ElfYourself:
this was not just a random great idea from some creatives loopy on spray glue fumes. It was a the winner of a very well-funded test of over 20 holiday sites - each of which was intended to be viral… [...]

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Mike Migurski has a fantastic post about designing for sustainability, using the example of NIIMI’s Towel With Further Options. From the blurb for the towel (emphasis mine):
Towels take every day dirt and gradually become damaged. In accordance with such changes, you can downsize the towel with “further options” from a bath towel to a bath [...]

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When I read The Long Tail last year, I was disappointed at what I percieved to be a lack of working through the implications of living in a ‘both/and’, rather than an ‘either/or’ business climate. However, reading the Mr Splashy Pants analysis (briefly; Greenpeace’s campaign was a lot more successful than expected and they didn’t [...]

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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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