Marketing departments tended to be marginalised rather than margin focused. Professor Michael Thomas stated: Marketing as a discipline is more vital than ever, marketing as a department is increasingly failing to match up to expectations. The marketing department is critically ill; only urgent treatment will enable it to fulfil the role that is now clearly staked out in the minds of top management.
• Marketing departments undertake an ill-defined mixture of activities, • Marketing departments have been over-indulged, • Marketing departments rarely lead the drive to enhance business performance, • Marketing departments are often too short-sighted, • Marketing departments are being marginalised, • Marketing directors and managing directors disagree, • Marketing directors overestimate their contribution. Even in the 1970s a familiar cry echoed across the business community: Q. What do marketers need to do to become more professional? A. They need to come to terms with finance, and they need to demonstrate that they are the professional experts in respect of marketing information and as a consequence we must come to terms with Information Technology.
Marketing & Strategy Innovation Blog PolicyTool for Social Media is a policy generator that greatly simplifies the task of creating a working social media policy. Answer about a dozen and odd questions and before you can hop across to Facebook, your policy is ready for your to copy paste anywhere. Based on my answers (and relative lack of paranoia) here's what a policy for my own company (if and when I start one) would look like: Twitter and Facebook Follow Foursquare ? 2010 Is the Year of Location-based S... 10 Mar 2010 at 5:04pm by Futurelab It is a truth universally acknowledged that everybody makes predictions at the end of a year about ‘the big thing for next year’. Sometimes they’re right and sometimes they’re wrong. And sometimes you only really start to notice trends and change when you are in them. In social media it is becoming clearer and clearer that the big thing for 2010 is location-based tools. 3D Commercials, Different Dynamics 10 Mar 2010 at 4:34pm by Futurelab 3D entertainment has finally gone mainstream. Although three dimensional movies have existed for decades, they were largely gimmicky and had significant viewing problems. Now, James Cameron’s Avatar brought 3D to the big screen in a way that amazed audiences and convinced studio execs that the world was ready for 3D movies. Innovative Innovation 9 Mar 2010 at 4:34pm by Futurelab Guest Post by: Denise Lee Yohn A few weeks ago, Forbes ran an article (http://www.forbes.com/2010/01/22/retail-marketing-products-barbie-hyunda...) entitled, “Innovation Beyond Apple.” The piece de-briefed a discussion among executives from a range of consumer goods companies including HSN, Mattel, and Chrysalis, an incubator company for emerging brands. It challenged readers to think about innovation differently, and many of the points resonated with me. Lost Number 9 Mar 2010 at 3:57pm by Futurelab Microsoft's new Windows Phone 7 OS will not run any apps developed for its previous versions. It has put its proverbial foot in the sandy marketplace and said no to expectations that all versions of Windows run all the applications ever written for it, and traded "backward compatibility" for a "clean slate." The Digital Photography Industry Is Now at Its Industry Breakpoint, It Is Rea... 8 Mar 2010 at 3:39pm by Futurelab The digital camera market has enjoyed some growth the last few years but I think it is reaching a point where sales will be flat or in a slow decline with the exception of DSLR. Digital camera has almost completely replaced earlier film models, and already camera makers have begun emphasizing DSLR or special features for customers to upgrade to. The Future of Lifestreaming 7 Mar 2010 at 5:14pm by Futurelab Vodafone Group’s user experience / concept development group has put together a brief video clip that explores the future of lifestreaming. There are some unique interactive visualizations in the style of Minority Report, exploring concepts such as "the magnetism of data," "location awareness across time" and the "serendipity of discovery." Very interesting stuff. A big hat tip to Mark Krynsky for finding this. Should Anonymous Comments Be Allowed in an Online Community? 7 Mar 2010 at 4:34pm by Futurelab Should people be allowed to leave anonymous comments in online communities and forums? It’s a question that has been debated many times and people have different perspectives on it. Some say that “No, if people don’t say who they are then its easy for discussions to get out of hand”, whereas others say “Yes, if you want people to be honest you need to allow them to be anonymous”. Cap and Trade Derails Climate Ethics, the Motive Force of Carbon Mitigation ?... 6 Mar 2010 at 4:34pm by Futurelab In the first part of this piece, I discussed how the fractured structure of cap and trade is either non-functional or marginally functional. In the second part, I pointed out how cap and trade, due to its structure, is largely non-responsive to the ethical power of the climate action movement and concerned political leaders. Here I offer a context within which individual effective policy instruments can fit together. In Recognition of Good Taste 5 Mar 2010 at 5:39pm by Futurelab "Good taste" is rarely used to describe great advertising, but Domino's is going to town with it. It just announced that it has doubled its quarterly profits after telling its customers that it had fixed the taste of its pizzas. It didn't "improve" things or follow any other standard operating procedures of the marketing world; in fact, it violated some of the basic tenets of advertising, such as telling the truth. Convince with Simple Fonts 5 Mar 2010 at 5:09pm by Futurelab Do you need to convince a customer to complete an application form? Or, for a non-profit, do you need volunteers for a charity event? In both cases, you will be more successful if you describe the task in a simple, easy to read typeface. Research by Hyunjin Song and Norbert Schwarz shows that the way we perceive information can be affected dramatically by how simple or complex the font is. In particular, their work found that a simple font was more likely to get the readers to make a commitment. Here’s the whole story… Cap and Trade Derails Climate Ethics, the Motive Force of Carbon Mitigation ?... 5 Mar 2010 at 7:34am by Futurelab In the first part of this post, I outlined how the components of cap and trade don’t work together to cut emissions. 2. Cap and Trade’s Perverse Ethics Threaten Climate Policy EffectivenessWhat Fiction Writers Can Teach Us about Writing Creative Briefs 4 Mar 2010 at 5:29pm by Futurelab Recently, Guardian invited prominent authors to list out their 10 rules for writing fiction. It became a popular feature, collating the wisdom of several authors and even overflowed into a part two. Reading it, I wondered if a few of these rules can be picked out and applied to something closer home - like writing a creative brief. It does seem like a stretch as the two activities are possibly diametrically opposite, if nowhere else but in our own minds. Websites that Suck Increase Stress 4 Mar 2010 at 5:04pm by Futurelab We know that slow, balky, and confusing websites aren’t a good thing. Traffic metrics show this, as does conversion data. Google, whom some think of as passively indexing the web, believes quick-loading pages are essential to a good user experience. Google is, in fact, actively trying to speed up websites (and keep their search users happy) by making page load time a ranking factor. (See Barry Schwartz’s article at Search Engine Land describing Google’s Matt Cutts commentary at Pubcon.) Cap and Trade Derails Climate Ethics, the Motive Force of Carbon Mitigation ?... 4 Mar 2010 at 4:34pm by Futurelab In this 3-part post, I will outline how cap and trade’s composite structure contains within it fault lines that help defeat its and the climate action community’s goals. In this first part, I will sketch out the components of the cap and trade hybrid Newsfeed display by CaRP
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