A Better Course

• Neuromarketing » Comfort Shopping: Sad Customers Buy More
  new research shows that sad customers are likely to spend more money when shopping. Merely watching a sad video clip caused subjects to pay nearly four times as much for a water bottle than subjects who watched an emotionally neutral clip.
  (tags: neuromarketing marketing happiness research)
• Generation MySpace Is Getting Fed Up | Business Week
  The average amount of time each user spends on social networking sites has fallen by 14% over the last 4 months, according to ComScore. MySpace, the largest social network, has slipped from a peak of 72m users in October to 68.9m in December.
  (tags: businessweek myspace advertising socialnetworking)
• Defining a Job | Business Week
  Specify the outcomes for which each individual is responsible, and let each worker determine how much time is required to do the job well. Task-based makes sense in a knowledge economy. Many corporations are there already—but just haven’t acknowledged i
  (tags: businessweek employment knowledgeeconomy)

• Market Segments, Misunderstood | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  [They] would have misunderstood their customers if they’d only focused on the profile for the obvious, broader beer-drinking segments of Gen X-ers or men. Instead, they dug deeper than the usual consumer profile and get to the heart of the matter
  (tags: marketingprofs marketing segmentation demographics advertising)

• Advertising Ads : iain tait | crackunit.com
  Some obvious causes of invisible web marketing properties: It’s just not plugged in to the rest of the web properly, it’s not interesting or talk-able enough, it’s just plain rubbish and no-one wants to see it.
  (tags: iaintait advertising online marketing viralmarketing)
• How Much Does it Buy?
  Ever wonder how much stuff companies and governments can buy with the massive amounts of money they spend? How Much Does It Buy? is a currency converter for those of us who aren’t day traders. Via swissmiss
  (tags: howmuchdoesitbuy online finance)

• Planning for Fun: A broken Egg?
  On one hand we have them quite loudly recalling thousands of credit cards, whilst simultaneously on the other we have them touting 0% deals in the pages of the national press
  (tags: egg citigroup publicrelations planningforfun markets)

• Neuromarketing » Super Bowl Ads – A Pick for Neuro-Worst
  Food marketers in particular have to be aware of product contagion – mere proximity of items in a shopping cart caused the disgusting characteristics of one product to transfer to an adjacent item.
  (tags: neuromarketing superbowl food marketing advertising)
• Brand Autopsy: Howard Schultz Must Blog
  Jesse is onto something when he writes, “Schultz professes to love Starbucks customers but has no apparent interest in hearing from us.” We know Starbucks, as a company, has refused to blog and refuses to participate in online conversations.
  (tags: brandautopsy starbucks online web2.0 howardschultz)

• February 04 2008 | Dinosaur Comic
  Great insights from T-Rex
  (tags: business comic book dinosaurcomics formula)
• adaptive path » blog » Peter Merholz » Our Forthcoming Book: Subject to Change: creating great products and services for an uncertain world
  EXPERIENCE AS STRATEGY “All that matters to customers is their experience.” Therefore firms need a plan for the experiences they will offer, a plan so strong that it will guide decisions on how the experiences are marketed, maintained, and managed.
  (tags: adaptivepath strategy customerservice product service experience book)

• Quality over Green: Nike’s New Air Jordan | Business Week
  The athletic-goods behemoth hopes that athletes, sports fans [..] will be drawn to the Air Jordan XX3 as they have been to previous shoes in the Air Jordan line—because of its performance and brand connotations, rather than the green factor.
  (tags: businessweek nike sustainability airjordan strategy marketing)
• Meme Huffer: “Don’t talk to me, I’m working on some communications”
  An agency should be all about people bouncing ideas around, right? Getting the right people together to solve problems? OK, we all need a distraction-blocker, but do we really want an agency full of solipsists
  (tags: memehuffer planning advertising creative office collaboration lackthereof)
• Business Articles: How Star Women Build Portable Skills – Harvard Business Review
  When stars switch firms, their performance dims, along with their new company’s market value [..] Except when the stars are women. According to Groysberg, talented women who switch firms maintain their stardom, and their new employer’s share price hol
  (tags: women harvardbusinessreview borisgroysberg research business)
• I Believe in Advertising | Advertising Blog & Community » Adobe InDesign: Quarkbuster
  Under a layer of “mould”, a flyer resembling a recipe book showcased Adobe InDesign’s superior freshness and offered recipients a free trial download.
  (tags: adobe advertising ibelieveinadvertising directmarketing directmail malice negativeadvertising)

• New shrew-like mammal in Tanzania | Reuters
  A new type of shrew-like creature with a snout similar to an elephant’s trunk has been found in the mountains of Tanzania, the first new species of the mammal found since the 19th century, scientists said.
  (tags: animal science reuters awesome)

• Marketers looking to break rules should be ready to go ‘splat’ – Kellogg School of Management
  As consumer segmentation technology advanced, Target made mistakes early on by targeting too narrowly, but the chain has since realized that “it’s not just about one particular guest; it’s about all your customers.”
  (tags: marketing kelloggschoolofmanagement target targeting directmarketing niche)
• Yahoo’s Vision-Goes-Here Strategy – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  The call sounded like a committee of actuaries talking about the results of a mid-tier life insurance company. Yahoo has problems, but it is #2 in one of the fastest-moving markets ever.There’s got to be something exciting to talk about.
  (tags: yahoo nytimes publicrelations online)

Katy tagged me as a thinking blogger – thanks Katy! – and immediately after this I realised it’s quite hard to come up with a list of five.

Participation rules:

1. If you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote (here is an alternative silver version if gold doesn’t fit your blog)

And onto five blogs that always make me think:

1) Neuromarketing
Neuromarketing’s still a new discipline – I’ve started to read articles (of varying ambivalence) about it. There’s a lot on the limitations, as well as the implications, of recent findings – and I think it’s useful to think about response on that kind of level, not least because it’s a radically different perspective on advertising from that that occurs immediately.

2) Bob Sutton
Given that I work at a business school, it’s interesting to see it from the faculty point of view. There’s also the fact that it’s a fairly privileged position – so it’s interesting to read about who you meet, and the conversations you have, as a member of Stanford faculty. Again, good because different. It’s possible that there’s a theme developing here.

3) Tom Fishburne
A branding blog which I found when I was looking for images of an ad (this one) I wanted to write about and – to my chagrin – never wrote the post because I was reading the rest of the blog and the many, many cartoons.

4) tecznotes
About neither marketing not business education; mostly, but not always, about design. There’s an incredible level of abstraction in the thinking here. I like posts that I need to read more than once, and most of the writing here fits that category.

5) adliterate
The marketing I do is relatively close to the product, and I’ve enjoyed reading the different view of campaigns from adliterate. The first post I read on this blog was The death of serendipity, and I can’t stop thinking about it; there’s so much in there.

(Incidentally, my bonus sixth blog – which doesn’t really fit this meme – is again Stanford related. The Stanford Jackson Library blog has been something I’ve enjoyed subscribing to; some of what’s posted there isn’t relevant if you aren’t at school there, but it’s mostly a really interesting news and research digest.)