Downturns are tough on everyone and are not to be taken lightly. We'll all have to do more with less. But luckily for marketers, we're surrounded by sources of inspiration at times like these. In every category there is a "challenger" seeking to compete with a leader and trying to do more with less.
Figuring out when and how to fire someone rank is one of the most difficult challenges any manager will face. Some instances are easy: Stealing, illegal workplace behavior and breaking sacred company rules all clearly are reasons to let someone go. What is more difficult to determine is whether an underperforming employee should be let go.
When the economy bounces back, you might find that what motivates consumers to choose or not choose your brand has changed. This is critical learning that needs to be sought now, not after you launch a shiny new post-recession ad campaign.
It's imperative that marketers project their propositions empathically, infusing all of their communications with the understanding that the marketplace is grappling with degrees of frustration, concern and even depression.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Profero, one of the hottest digital shops in the U.K., is expanding into North America this month with a New York outpost. The agency brings a growing list of U.S. clients, including Colgate-Palmolive, Johnson & Johnson and Western Union, along with a global network of about 400 employees, with nine offices spanning Europe and Asia.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — A few months after opening its platform to outside application developers, the company plans to announce today that it will let advertisers directly manage, through a self-service tool, their branded profiles on MySpace.
CHICAGO (AdAge.com) — Faced with persistently unsold tickets and a bevy of would-be attendees priced out of the action at area colleges, the Pittsburgh Penguins in 2006 started sending news of available, severely discounted seats to college kids' cellphones on the mornings of home games.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Research firm Millward Brown recently took its annual look at which "brand" — that is, the stuff of a product or service's intangible relationship with consumers — contributes the most to its overall value. But No. 6 comes as a surprise. It's Tide, the Procter & Gamble laundry detergent, which has performed a feat of marketing derring-do by balancing numerous extensions with a consistent brand approach.
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) — Lately, the $3 billion-plus Gatorade brand has been getting winded. While it controlled 82% of the category last year, that's down more than 10 share points from two decades ago, when it owned 93% of the market
LOS ANGELES (AdAge.com) — Howard Schultz insists he's returning Starbucks to its roots, but he's doing it with mass-marketing tactics once anathema to the original brand.
BATAVIA, Ohio (AdAge.com) — In the days when Mr. Whipple charmingly squeezed the Charmin, the scatological details of the product he endorsed were only obliquely addressed in marketing. But today the marketers that once used cute puppies, puffy clouds and quilting ladies as proxies for softness in toilet-tissue ads have become a lot more direct — and are selling more product as a result.
VENICE, Italy (AdAge.com) — A predominant theme running through the presentations and panel discussions at this year's Venice Festival of Media was that in today's advertising marketplace, there is no end to the competition for two roles the media agency is vying for: the seat at the right hand of the marketing team, directing its advertising spending, and the role of content czar.
DETROIT (AdAge.com) — Even as gasoline prices creep close to $4 per gallon in some markets, consumers are increasingly choosing to buy based on brand benefits rather than price or location.
SINGAPORE – Admax, the online ad sales network, has secured a contract with MochiAds to bring the company’s 2,000-strong online-games advertising network to the region.
The latest Neural magazine is available in the best book shops. This issue is dedicated to new media art in China. It contains an essay by Timothy Murray on The Paradox of Chinese Art in the Age of Technology, another by Brian Holmes on China urbanism, industrialization and culture, a review of the 11th Microwave festival in Hong Kong, a presentation of the online project The Great Firewall of China, etc.
There are book and CD/ DVD reviews, highlights on various musical, artistic or activists projects and as usual, chief redactor Alessandro Ludovico has carried out a series of interviews, this time with 8gg, Yao Bin, Zen Lu, my pals at we-need-money-not-art and i have been been submitted to some parallels quizzes, etc.
Now you’ll know what to answer when someone asks you “I keep reading about contemporary art in China but btw, what is happening in the field of new media art over there?”
Related: 8gg big.
This is site is run by Sascha Endlicher, M.A., during ungodly late night hours. Wanna know more about him? Connect via Social Media by jumping to about.me/sascha.endlicher.
