A tale of two retail experiences

Lots of nonsense is talked about brands.

Especially these days when the entire marketing community seems to have gone beardy weirdy, believing that cosumers and brands are now best buddies. This approach largely ignores the small issue of capitalism – the way that businesses extract a profit from the consumer.

For me the primary service a brand delivers to a business is in getting consumers to do things that are irrational and often against their best interests – to trade-off price, quality or service. If not why would a business have them?

And two retail experiences pointed this up to me in their very different ways – Wholefoods Market and Ikea.

Blogging goes mainstream

For a while now Todd Andrlick has been compiling a weekly ranking of Marketing blogs called the Power 150. Earlier this year he expanded it outside the US to create a Global Power 150, and for the first time blogs like Russell’s, John’s, Gavin’s,James’ and mine got included.

So authoritative is this ranking that Advertising Age has decided to adopt it as it’s official benchmark for marketing blogs and bloggers (in part as a way of communicating how influential or not a bloggers voice is, when quoted editorially) and will host and run the Global Power 150.

What is exciting is that the industry is starting to take the blogosphere seriously and has, in return, given it a univeral standard to judge the potency of its individual voices.

One wonders whether the UK marketing and advertising press will start to support its indigenous maketing blogs in a similar fashion, rather than seeing them as a quirky and colourful fringe activity.

Let the BBC’s troubles be a lesson to us all

The BBC is in trouble.

It stands accused of endemic audience deception – most specifically over the fabrication of phone and interactive competitions where the participants have no chance of winning and the declared winners are either fictitious or members of the production staff.

Oh and there was some argy bargy about the Royal Family as well but any opportunity to give the parasites a kicking is fine by me.

Now thats what I call collective intelligence

A while ago Gavin Heaton and Drew Mc Lellan asked a bunch of us bloggers to contribute to an e-book about the Age of Conversation. We were each to contribute a chapter of 400 words about our take on the subject. As more people got excited about the project and spurred on by the idea that the profits would go to a children’s charity more bloggers got involved, with just over 100 of the world’s leading marketers, writers, thinkers and creative innovators finally co-authoring the book.

Not only is this likely to be a bit of a ground breaking read (I certainly liked my 1/100th of it) but its also a fascinating experiment in the wisdom of the crowd and and ferocious speed of collective self publishing. A book that is about half the length of an average novel has been conceived, the authors found, written, edited and published in hardback, softback and e-book formats in about 3 months.

And if it is all nonsense (which I would really suggest quite strongly it is not) then Variety gets stacks of dosh out of it.

Buy a copy now.

No really buy a copy now!

You can get the link to buy and all full list of the authors by continuing to read below.

In defence of the brand monologue

The word monologue has acquired a rather pejorative meaning in the world of marketing.

Monologue, where the brand addresses an audience and puts forward its point of view (as happens in traditional one to many advertising), is seen to be out of step with the idea that markets are conversations and depend on a dialogue of equals between brands and customers.

More than that, brand monologues are assumed to narcissistic, self referential, and disrespectful of empowered consumers that don’t have to or want to take that kind of shit from anyone least of all businesses.

Well I want to make a stand for brand monologues – right here and right now. Indeed I am going to insist that great dialogues start with a passionate monologue.

The pen is mightier than the trackpad

I know this is way off topic but I can’t help myself.

I got given a Wacom tablet for my birthday recently and I think I am in love.

It looks fantastic, its brilliant for drawing and as a way to zip around the screen it kicks seven types of shit out of my trackpad. It even comes with a mouse that gives my mac a right click – weird.

Go and get one and love yourself forever.