What's the Idea?

People sometimes jokingly ask me “What is the idea? referring to the name of my consultancy. My answer, borrowed from Sergio Zyman of the Zyman Group, is “sell more stuff, to more people, more times, at higher prices.”  That’s the ultimate goal of marketing, no? The quadruple crown.  Interestingly, unit sales, market penetration, per capita [...]

Google built a business, quite well I might add, on perfecting search and search usability. They funded the business with advertising.  The brand play was not to be the world’s greatest advertising platform (something Yahoo and AOL didn’t understand), it was all about search. 
Back in the day (last week, hee hee) Google search was all [...]

The real art of brand planning is in knowing what not to say. When brand planning, I use something called the 24 Questions to help find the money. Once the money is found, job two is how to position. For this a number of hunting and gathering techniques are used; tools that are now vastly improved thanks to the Web.

“Chrysler looks beyond BBDO for advertising” is the headline on Ad Age Digital this morning. BBDO has always done great work for Jeep, but Jeep was an iconic brand with a branding idea.

I’m a big Steve Rubel fan. A social media savant and thought-leader, Steve is on the road for a couple of weeks looking for new media insights. He visited with Robert Scoble yesterday and I’m sure for him is was a moment of truth.

One of the biggest cultural phenomena in America today is what I call ADD-ification. We all have attention deficit disorder. We can’t sit still and we’re always in a hurry. When was the last time you drove your car without some form of entertainment — using the time to think? Thought so.

The pop marketing term of the last couple of years has been “dashboard.” As a brand planner who advocates “windshield” planning rather than the more common “rear view mirror planning” approach, I get the dashboard metaphor.