Last week I had the pleasure of an evening with Jennifer Hawkins. Of course she looked other-worldly, yes her dress was captivating and, no, I’m not in a daydream. However, I also wasn’t the only one with her on the night, in fact more than...
A highly decorated FMCG CMO once said to me, “who the hell wants to build a community around yoghurt?”. He was talking about one of his own products and he was talking about the agency world’s obsession with ‘building a community’ on social media. It...
Owned media assets are often an afterthought in campaign communications. The forgotten child of marketing, owned media is often relegated to transmedia mediocrity whereby the campaign creative is simply dropped into all owned channels with nary a thought to the role owned media can play....
A monk once told me the secret code for loyalty. Even now I cringe at the intent behind my asking him the simple question, “what is loyalty?” You see, at the time, I just wanted to know how to address a common marketing goal –...
Can you remember the last Coca-Cola TV commercial you saw? What was it about? Who was in it? Who was it for? What was the tagline? If, like me, you can’t answer these questions, don’t worry, I’ve got another one for you: Have you seen their new...
Let’s start this week with a quiz. The following phrases were recently researched amongst 2,000 UK and US consumers by agency Wunderman: ‘non-traditional’, ‘trendy’ and ‘ground breaking’. I wonder if you can work out what the research found? Were they: a) The top ranked phrases Marketers...
In the early 1800’s, John McAdams recognised that the roads in England were in terrible condition and caused major issues for transportation. He realised that if you raised the roads above the adjacent ground, covered first with rock and then stones and then bound with...
Marketing is changing at a faster rate than it ever has before. Yet marketing practitioners simply aren’t evolving at the same pace. In the analogue age, marketers researched where lots of people congregate (TV, sport, music), sized them, profiled them and then ‘matched’ segments versus...
Happy New Year from the Sonder Insider! Goodbye to 2016 then, a year when the world said “we’ve had enough” and voted against the status quo, against doing things the way they’ve always been done, against mediocrity. Whilst this is an oversimplification of events in Europe...
Being “busy” is often a default response when asked “how are you?”. It’s an easy and expected response, but a mindless one that’s become largely meaningless. Sadly, busy is considered a status symbol according to a group of US academics. You can see the Harvard Business...
