A Better Course

• New and Improved! Latest, Greatest Way for Marketer to Shoot Himself in Foot! | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  Despite the rhetoric used to excuse fad-chasing, marketers are NOT obligated to keep current. They are obligated to be effective.
  (tags: marketing marketingprofs fad)
• No. 1 Book, and It Offers Solutions – New York Times
  Patients play a role, too. We’re entranced by the wonders of modern medicine and fooled by our byzantine health insurance system into thinking that we’re not really paying for all those unnecessary spinal fusions.
  (tags: america bookreview nytimes healthcare)

• Holiday Spirits Lift the Liquor Industry | Business Week
  This is about more than an increase in sales; more subtle marketing strategies are at play during the holiday season. “In many cultures, premium spirits are considered a gift of distinction that shows your esteem for the person you are giving to.”
  (tags: businessweek alcohol business marketing)
• Alltel Feature Turns Voicemail to Text – New York Times
  ”It’ll appeal to a broad customer base … people who are in meetings quite regularly and can’t take a phone call — it’s very useful in those settings,” said Wade McGill, Alltel’s senior vice president of product management.
  (tags: technology nytimes telecommunications)
• Are Web 2.0 Tools Dumbing Us Down? | Marketing Profs Daily Fix Blog
  multi-tasking boosts levels of stress related hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline—prematurely aging us. In the short term, the confusion and fatigue hamper our ability to focus and analyze, but in the long term they cause (our brain) to atrophy
  (tags: marketingprofs technology brain stress)
• Neuromarketing » Cool Products and Neuromarketing
  The interpretation of this result is that subjects evaluate the cool products in terms of their ability to enhance social image. We also see a strong anticipatory response in the prefrontal part of the brain involved in making predictions about reward.
  (tags: neuromarketing advertising branding brand science cool)
• On Facebook, Scholars Link Up With Data – New York Times
  “For studying young adults,” said Vincent Roscigno, an editor of The American Sociological Review, “Facebook is the key site of the moment.
  (tags: data facebook nytimes socialnetworking social statistics research)

• Luxury goods | Less exuberant | Economist.com
  It is tempting to think that luxury goods are isolated from the broader economy, because customers are rich enough to ignore it. But the industry’s expansion into a broader “aspirational” market, by selling to the merely affluent, makes it susceptible
  (tags: theeconomist luxury economics)
• Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads – Bits – Technology – New York Times Blog
  “But users should be getting paid for the time they spend on the Internet and the friends they draw to their pages.” Interesting opinion.
  (tags: facebook technology nytimes advertising)
• For Managers, Ignorance Isn’t Bliss | Business Week
  “Because they have rarely failed theyave never learned how to learn from failure.” Instead, they’re apt to “screen out criticism and put the ‘blame’ on anyone but themselves.Their ability to learn shuts down precisely at the moment they need it”
  (tags: management leadership businessweek cleverpeople morganstanley personaldevelopment)
• Red Dot Awards: Inspired Design | Business Week
  By playing, “readers” not only learn about business ideas within a global market, but also broaden their knowledge about the services and processes of IPOS.
  (tags: reddotawards businessweek corporatefinance design)

• apophenia: Who clicks on ads? And what might this mean?
  While the ad world is obsessed with clicks because they can measure those, ad receptivity is more than just clicks. TV ads have been tremendously successful without the clicking option. Brand recognition is an acceptable outcome from the POV of many marke
  (tags: advertising danahboyd online socialnetworking class demographics research zephoria)
• Online Spin » Blog Archive » Outing The Heavy Clickers
  Ninety-nine percent of Web users do not click on ads on a monthly basis. Of the 1% that do, most only click once a month. Less than two tenths of one percent click more often.
  (tags: advertising online clickthrough statistics mediapost)

• Leadership Is About Doing, Not Saying | Business Week
  I was impressed by the high-minded beliefs the company espoused and the care that was put into the… one of the most smoothly professional presentations on ethics and values I have ever seen. Enron spent a fortune packaging these wonderful messages.
  (tags: businessweek leadership corporateculture words)
• What Great Managers Do | Business Week
  The payoff for capitalizing on employees’ unique strengths? You save time. Your people take ownership for improving their skills. And you teach employees to value differences—building a powerful sense of team.
  (tags: harvardbusinessreview businessweek management coaching leadership)
• WE THE ROBOTS » Archive » Brit
  HEY TEAM! AWESOME!!!
  (tags: marketing corporateculture funny comic robot)

• Nokia Won’t Play iPhone’s Tune | Business Week
  “Comes With Music,” as Nokia is calling the service, seems aimed at preventing Apple from dominating mobile music. Consumers will have less incentive to buy music from iTunes if unlimited downloads from Nokia’s service are included in the price of a phone
  (tags: nokia apple music telecommunications businessweek)
• Penny Arcade! – Interesting Choice of Words
  Activision CEO Robert Kotick dropped the quote from the first panel of the strip completely without irony. No doubt a phrase like that is “hot talk” for the financial set, but when they’re speaking within earshot of the community, they might want to be mo
  (tags: marketing business m&a activision blizzard computergames pennyarcade publicrelations)
• swissmiss: a dialogue with public space
  A dialogue with public space, by Robin Howie; “We have largely surrendered our sense of ownership of public space to that of corporations and corporate entities”.
  (tags: design dialogue swissmiss robinhowe)

• How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook — Facebook — InformationWeek
  Emails from Facebook are eyeball bait, intended to send you off to Facebook, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” […] As more users flock to it, the chances that the person who precipitates your exodus will find you increases.
  (tags: facebook social web2.0 directmarketing advertising corydoctorow informationweek)
• Skype Out? | Business Week
  eBay’s users were largely satisfied with the ability to communicate via email. When eBay purchased payments provider PayPal it was the de facto payment mechanism for eBay purchases. eBay users didn’t seem to migrate en masse from email to Skype.
  (tags: businessweek innovation disruptive ebay skype)
• Map that named America is a puzzle for researchers | Reuters
  “The shape of South America is correct” said Hebert. “The width of South America at key points is correct within 70 miles of accuracy” Given what Europeans are believed to have known at the time, it should not have been possible to produce this map
  (tags: reuters map history america)

• An Antifashion Classic Returns – New York Times
  Ugliness does not necessarily stop shoes from becoming popular — some might point to Uggs, Crocs and Birkenstocks — but when it comes to Dr. Martens, “it seems like I’ve heard a lot of talk about them coming back, but I haven’t seen people weari
  (tags: docmartens nytimes branding brand advertising productplacement)
• Friending, Ancient or Otherwise – New York Times
  In tribal societies, forging social bonds is a matter of survival; on the Internet, far less so. There is presumably no tribal antecedent for popular Facebook rituals like “poking” [or] virtual sheep-tossing
  (tags: facebook anthropology nytimes)
• LiveJournal Sale May Revive Six Apart | Business Week
  Six Apart has a business model. It’s roughly breaking even and it has focus and new cash in the bank. My take: This is just the preamble. In the next year, we’ll either see bigger, bolder moves by Alden or we’ll see Six Apart sold to the highest bidder.
  (tags: livejournal sixapart businessweek blogging web2.0 business)

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 entire town of Portland waved ‘Bon Voyage!’ to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Sunday, November 18th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did.

She asks whether this is over the top. I don’t think there’s any question that it is; it’s clearly vastly overwritten for an email that’s meant to convey the information that your order has shipped. It’s also affected and cutesy to an extent that comes close to cynical. But, I still think there’s some value in that.

It reminds me of a workshop I was in with one of our marketing professors; he read aloud a (customer-facing) newsletter from a ‘fun’ brand. This was, if anything, more affected than the confirmation email from CDBaby. It ran to about seven paragraphs. In the discussion afterwards, everyone in the workshop agreed that none of us would have written it. Some people mentioned they would consider resigning if they’d been asked to put their name to it.

But that, clearly, was the point of the exercise. Someone wrote that newsletter and someone put their name to it; having a brand that’s strongly identified with a value will make many people feel uncomfortable, and will put a lot of them off. That doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t work to build a strong brand, but it does mean that you need to feel an affinity with the brand you’re building. Even though the CDBaby email makes my skin crawl, it’s good to know that someone believes in what they do enough to write it in the first place.

• Hold that thought! Tools for retaining creative knowledge in an advertising agency at St Edmonds Lab
  Staff source between 50%-75% of information relevant to their work from other people. More than 80% of an organisation’s digitised information resides on individual hard drives and personal files. Individuals – rather than the organisation – control the
  (tags: agency advertising creative web2.0 stedmondslab)