A Better Course

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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According to a recent Neuromarketing post, the worst way to respond to an allegation about your product is by referring to it in order to refute it; that repeating allegations only reinforces their existence in people’s minds – and in some cases, presumably, introduces the rumour as new information. By this reasoning, are the current […]

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This CNN article on product placement for pharmaceuticals raises another interesting question about how we, as audiences, react to product placement – does the reference to the product necessarily have to be positive? Frequently, references to named drugs in popular culture are negative – the addictive properties of Vicodin have formed plots in more than […]

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Working for a business school means that my opportunities to explore product placement as part of my job are extremely limited. However, it’s something that I notice, consciously, in the movies and TV that I watch. This year, I’ve been noticing a lot of clustering in the product placement – it’s not evenly distributed throughout […]

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Despite my respect for it as an excellent piece of business development, I’ve remained slightly unconvinced by the Starbucks / iTunes crossover. There’s no clear reason, other than one entirely motivated by marketing (“We appeal to yuppies. Maybe we should talk.”) why the two brands should work together; and whilst I’ve no doubt it will […]

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Last week, I talked about looking at what your audience want from your product, and how to supply that. Fueled By Ramen, a record label who seem to be adapting extremely well to the new music industry, have traded heavily on something that might have been seen to be peripheral to the main product – […]

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The toilets at Soba are a superb example of a business instigating a conversation with its customers. It’s also almost certainly a mistake. The door isn’t meant to be a toilet door; it’s got a long, thin window on the left hand side. For the sake of decency, this is covered with paper on the […]

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