Description:
Marketeer David Wolfe's journal about ideas, people and events in the Marketing Revolution.
Contents:
WalMart's Sustainability Campaign
P.S. to yesterday's post: See this piece http://tinyurl.com/ygxdoz4 from today's Fast Company Now Daily email report -- which if you don't get you should. Check out the hot link items as well.
The Maturation of Walmart
Who am I – now that I’m not who I was? As indicated in my last post those words form the title of a new book by a friend. Everyone reading this can aptly ask their selves that question because we are indeed never who we were at any point in life. However, certain milestones in our developmental journey through life that stands out more prominently than others. The onset...
Dissolving a Brand’s Persona to Reveal its Authentic Essence
A good bit of our youthful psychic energy is spent trying to look better than we really think we are. Call it the marketing of the self. In societies modern and primitive this timeless ritual plays a crucial role in perpetuating the species. Randy males compete with each other to wrest away the affections of comely lasses who are just as much consumed with marketing themselves. Humans, of course, are...
Worldviews: Key to Understanding the Difference Between Brand Persona and Brand Personality
Paraphrasing George Burns’ famous witticism about sincerity, authenticity is everything in marketing. If you can fake that, you've got it made. My good friend Joe Pine and his partner Jim Gilmore, authors of The Experience Economy recently came out with a new book on the growing importance of authenticity in business entitled simply Authenticity. From the earliest snake oil salesmen, authenticity has been a high priority in marketing and sales....
Branding: How Many in Marketing Really Understand What Branding Is About?
Brand husbandry is one of the least understood functions in marketing.
How the Subjective Voice in Market Messaging Differs from the Objective Voice
“I’m being logical, damn it!” shouted the CFO in a client company as he slammed his fist on the conference room table. This man of numbers never brought emotions into his decision-making, or so he would have me believe. Ever since French philosopher Rene Descartes postulated the foundations of modern scientific methodology, emotions have been viewed as a kind of cerebral funhouse mirror that distorts truth. The irony of that...
A Big Reason Advertising Effectiveness Is Falling That You’ve Probably Never Heard About
You never wake up with quite the same brain you woke up with yesterday. The brain, the theater in which your reality plays out in your mind, is in a constant state of change. This never-ending process began in utero when new neurons formed in your fetal brain at the lightning speed of 250,000 cells a minute. Ultimately you ended up with about 100 billion neurons. Neurons are very social...
Why Almost Everything You Thought You Knew About Marketing Is Wrong
Whether a marketer should bone up on the brain is passing beyond optional. Not that surveys and focus groups were ever as goof for divining truths about consumers as those conducting them claim, those research methods are now OUT. In marketing matters, neuroscience, along with ethnography, is IN. Advances in neuroscience over the 25 years I’ve been an avid reader in the subject are astonishing. As I’ve written before, the...
The Emerging Importance of Behavioral Science in Economics and Marketing
I bet not many of my readers can't wait till the next book on economics comes out. Well, rarely having any interest myself in such books, I have been quite surprised by the extent to which two recent books from high priests of the dismal science held my attention. The first book I read was Dan Ariely’s Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions. Ariely is a pioneer...
A Millennial's Guide to Millennial Guides
While many marketers are making the Millennial Generation out to be far different from any other generation in history, they are unwittingly using the same words to describe Millennials as their counterparts in marketing used to describe boomers three and four generations ago.
From Hucksterism to Healing
(This post first appeared here on June 18, 2004) When I first introduce an audience to the idea that marketing is morphing from hucksterism to healing, I often see in some people's faces their suspicion that I’m preaching from some New Age gospel. Most of those faces relax to reflect greater openess to my claims after I display logos of a few companies that have taken on the role of...
Traditional Consumer Research Can't Do the Job
As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain, and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality. Albert Einstein What in the world was Einstein on when he, the 20th Century’s greatest scientist, made that statement? Imagine him telling some corporate suit after reading a company financial statement or a numbers-studded proposal for a new marketing campaign, “Your numbers do...
The Neurorevolution in Marketing
Reader Tony Kirton, a specialist in brand management and former marketing executive in BMW, Audi and Volkswagen has brought to my attention an engaging podcast series on the brain. He believes that new insights into the workings of our brains are certain to lead to a transformation in how we organize and run companies and market our products. I agree with him without reservation. I read my first book about...
Does Progress in Marketing Depend on Professors' Deaths?
Next week I am to deliver a talk on an historical moral shift taking place in marketing. My audience will be composed mostly of academics. The occasion is a conference at Bentley University, “Conceptualizing Conscious Capitalism,” May 28-29. Conscious capitalism is a term coined by Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohammad Yunus to describe the practice of business enterprises to consciously fulfill social needs. My talk will describe how marketing is...
The End of a Myth: The Rational Man Theory of Markplace Behavior
Objective reality is more illusion than substantive. Every magician knows that how we perceive something is often determined less by what we see and otherwise sense than by what goes on in our brains. Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran’s engaging book Phantoms in the Brain brilliantly supports that claim. He cites numerous examples showing how the brain generates illusory renderings of reality. One of the most common examples of illusory reality is...
Embracing a New Consciousness
Before Newton made his larger than life mark on history, people in western societies viewed life largely through the lens of a cognitive platform laid down by the Church. Of course its representations of reality were grounded in faith rather than in science. The laity was expected to accept these representations without questioning their validity. But Newtonian science changed that. It altered how people both inside and outside of science...
Liberating Management from Newtonian Consciousness
There has been little argument about the cause of the 2008 Crash: collapse of the U.S. housing bubble, followed by an implosion of financial markets. But those explanations fall short of accounting fully for what precipitated the worst financial crisis 80 years. A solid case can be made that the root cause of the 2008 Crash lies in how we organize and run our businesses, governments and personal lives. In...
The Case Against Newtonian Consciousness
The remarkable story of her own stroke told by Jill Bolte Taylor at a TED conference helps us better understand the global shift taking place in human consciousness. Her story provides a rare, even possibly never before seen view into the workings of the human brain. If you haven’t watched this extraordinary video and can spare 18 minutes click through to the TED site now. Then come back to this...
A Global Shift in Human Consciousness That Will Affect Us All
This being the last day of the first month of this year, with no postings thus far in January, I started this day feeling a bit guilty for giving my devoted readers so little to chew on in recent months. Google is going to find out about this and demote me. Currently Google gives Ageless Marketing a 6/10 ranking which is pretty good. But I must do more postings to...
Season's Greetings from the World’s Largest Plant
(This is a reprint of an essay I have run before, usually at this time of year. As we leave the Winter Holiday Season and head off into a new year, I think this essay has special significance for what we face in 2009. The year is beginning amid the most unsettled conditions in generations. Many are predicting further decline in equity markets and consumer confidence is at its lowest...
How Japanese Marketers Aim to Increase Sales in Older Markets by Changing Human Nature
While America’s economic wizards try to figure out how to extricate us from the worst economic downturn in seventy years, their Japanese counterparts are trying to change human nature in an attempt to restore vigorous health to the Japanese economy. According to an article in the Washington Post this week, a push is on in Japan to reverse the buying behavior of “elder boys.” For a dozen consecutive years Japanese...
The Roots of My Optimism
Nature endowed our frontal lobes with the ability to look beyond the present moment into time ahead. However the farther cognitively removed we are from the present, the more likely our predictions about the future will prove wrong. This is especially true when some disruptive event explodes in our midst to nullify our customary way of seeing things. The printing press did this over five centuries ago. The Internet did...
The Financial Meltdown We're In Was Made Inevitable 35 Years Ago
“As the percentage of the older population increases, and especially as young adults decline in absolute numbers, fewer, not more, dollars will flow into the economy. “For the first time since the end of World War II, residential real estate will begin to depreciate on a national basis – a phenomenon which might come to be called the Great Real Estate Recession. (A study by the National Bureau of Economic...
The The Hobgoblin of Lazy Marketing and Research Minds
For those who don’t click through to comments on yesterday’s post, I feel I must repeat here Ronni Bennett’s comment about the use (and misuse) of generational labels: This is a topic that irritates me at the other end of the generational divide. Elders - by which I mean anyone older than Boomers - have been erased from existence by the media which have been using "boomer" as a synonym...
The Mythology of Millennials
I just finished reading a posting on the corporate blog of a research firm that I really respect. But this posting did nothing to extend that respect. It was more drivel about Millennials, surely the most confusedly-defined generation of all. Before getting into the details of why this posting was so disappointing, it’s worth sampling the wide variations in how Millennials are defined. On the first page of a Google...
Why Lemmings Drown Themselves and Companies Go Bankrupt
Everyone knows that overpopulation turns lemmings toward the sea to correct the problem. That’s kind of what happens in stock markes from time to time. When irrational exuberance lifts stocks to unsustainable levels, investors destroy value by dumping stocks so fast that supply far outpaces demand and prices precipitously plummet. Too much of anything triggers correction in due course. It must be a law of nature. No one would attribute...
We Know Less about Our Motivations than Consumer Research Commonly Supposes
We’ve seen some strange ideas about the sources of human behavior coming out in the mainstream press over the past few years. More and more it seems, our hallowed concepts of volition and self-awareness are appearing to be as much an illusion as the apparent flatness of Mother Earth. Gary Klein’s provocative Sources of Power destroyed the Defense Department’s illusion that people under fire in the battlefield reason through their...
Say It Ain't So, Dove
I am stunned. I feel cheated. I am mad. Damn mad! For several years I have been touting Dove’s Real Beauty campaign as a high-minded example of authenticity in consumer marketing. Imagine my dismay, then, when I discovered in the May 12 issue of The New Yorker that the real beauties in Dove’s Real Beauty campaign are not real. The success of the Real Beauty campaign still validates my original...
The Silent Generation Revisited
Reader Anita Landis of the GlynnDevins ad agency in Overland Park, Kansas sent me the URL to an article on the Silent Generation that ran in the June 29, 1970 issue of Time. I found the article by Time Associate Editor Gerald Clarke fascinating from several perspectives. First, it was written by a member of the Silent Generation who had bought into the idea that it was every bit as...
On Sloppy Scholarship and the Silent Generation
Sloppy scholarship sometimes makes me mad. I especially get upset when it shows up in a widely esteemed newspaper like the New York Times. Why? Because many people in important positions will take on faith claims made in the great gray lady of U.S. journalism irrespective of their accuracy or lack thereof. Last Sunday’s editorial section carried such piece. It was titled, “When the Time Make the Man." In it,...
Home
|
