Gerald Zaltman: How Customers Think: Essential Insights into the Mind of the Market
We heart Jerry. His groundbreaking methods reveal the true drivers of customer behavior. You'll never be satisfied with a focus group again. (*****)
Ben McConnell: Citizen Marketers: When People Are the Message
Could we heart this book (and its authors) more? NO. Essential reading for anyone in marketing in 2007.
Martha Barletta: Marketing to Women: How to Understand, Reach, and Increase Your Share of the World's Largest Market Segment
Fantastic description of the biological drivers of the differences between how men and women think and behave.
Radu Stern: Against Fashion: Clothing as Art, 1850-1930
Fascinating description of how fashion expressed underlying social values and tensions. Wonderful visual history of fashion in the western world 1850-1930.
Eric Ericson: Design for Impact: Fifty Years of Airline Safety Cards
A fascinating visual history of how graphic designers have tried to equip airline passengers for disaster
Charles Yang: The Infinite Gift: How Children Learn and Unlearn the Languages of the World
Fascinating description of how humans learn language skills.
Sina Najafi: Cabinet 22: Insecurity (Art and Culture)
Cabinet magazine (it's a quarterly) is a provocative roundup of interesting cultural phenomena
Ron Galella: Disco Years
A larger than life homage to the personalities and habits of Studio 54's most infamous patrons. A fascinating document of American culture's excess and quest for self expression.
Adam Morgan: The Pirate Inside: Building a Challenger Brand Culture Within Yourself and Your Organization
What can we say, we heart Adam Morgan. A primer on how to blow up the old push marketing approach to brand and substitute a customer-driven "listening" approach.
Bruce Sterling: Shaping Things
A manifesto for the future of design, impeccably crafted by Bruce Sterling and ehnahced by the delicately emphatic graphic intelligence of Lorraine Wild.
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Ads That Know What You Want
Online marketers take a shine to ads tied to internet users' personal interests. In the process, they're increasingly tracking people's activities across networks of websites.
Not.
McDonald's is paying hip hop artists to mention Big Mac in their music. Great way to get closer to the valuable urban frequent visitors who make McDonald's successful - or is it?
On the surface, it seems like a textbook Active Branding "do" - associate your brand with what the target's passionate about.
But McDonald's got it wrong. What defines Hip Hop in American culture is its authentic and unprovoked/uncontrolled commentary of society. You can't get much more establishment than McDonald's - and if McDonald's starts being the subject of hip hop music, I just don't want to listen. Nor will anyone else, methinks.
It's just more of the same old push marketing vibe, with a saucy new hip hop beat.
A better approach would be something similar to what Toyota is doing with the Scion record label. Help promote artists that aren't getting airplay. Help find the next Eminem. Tap into regional nuances in hip hop. There are a ton of amazing talented rappers out there that we haven't heard yet. Risk is good...but be motivated to contribute rather than simply exploit.
It had to happen sooner or later, I suppose. Consumers get all these groovy new gadgets that enable them to talk to each other - and then they cut the mainstream media out of the conversation.
Exactly what happened recently in China as public opinion against Japan raged.
China banned almost all coverage of the public protests in mass media. But this hardly mattered - because the conversations flew around via e-mail, text message and instant online messaging.
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The ungerground noise grew so loud that last Friday the Chinese government moved to silence it by banning the use of text messages or e-mail to organize protests.
At one time a powerful story about consumer empowerment in the new digital age - and a reminder that some habits are hard to break.
Just imagine how different American public opinion might be if it were influenced person to person by email and text message instead of many to one by talking head media operatives.
Whoops, was that out loud?
Click to read the full scoop from the New York Times online.
No no no, silly rabbit, it's not XXX-rated marketing, it's viral marketing.
SN Brussels Airlines has launched a viral campaign that combines movie, web and user interaction. The campaign, which is called Passion Film, allows you to integrate a personal text message into a movie ad and thus, to twist its plot.
Check out this cool viral idea now. And let us know what you think!
Check out this amazing (quick) video history of how media and marketing will change over the next 10 years: year 2014 video.
It's an interesting look at how interactive marketing and media will continue to radically change the marketer's relationship with the consumer.
It's really cool! And thought provoking.
What do you think about their ideas? Post a comment and let us know.
