On fully unleashing the human soul

I can’t tell you how many times, as a marketer, I’ve heard discussions that start with “how can we get consumers to…” Usually those sentences end with a desire on the part of the company to have consumers change in some way that is clearly beneficial to the company but of dubious benefit to the […]

New initiatives are often evaluated looking only at the incremental sales they will generate. The cannibalized sales are subtracted off of the total sales to yield the incremental size of the new business opportunity. This does not make sense. It relies on an untenable assumption and will force you to undervalue innovation opportunities. The assumption […]

It seems to be the nature of large institutions to kill interesting ideas. Whether those institutions are governments or large corporations, there is an inexorable march towards blandness. Think of an idea or vision as a crystal. It has a distinctive shape marked by jagged edges and depressions. Whether you think it good or bad, […]

It would seem they are both. Brands are sets of associations and impressions in the minds of consumers. Brands are the cumulative effect of the actions that marketers engage in with respect to their products and the experiences that consumers have as a consequence (direct or indirect) of those actions. Brands are, in a sense, […]