The economist have released this presentation about managing a client’s temptation to slash their marketing and advertising budgets in times of recession. This sort of response is not unusual for these unsettling times and as an argument it makes a lot of sense. But I’ve been thinking, not necessaily how we can persuade clients to maintain budget levels, but why clients feel they can make the cuts in the first place. They know the arguments better than anyone, they probably agree with the thinking, but yet they still cut them. Why?

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Plenty of brands have been experimenting with Crowdsourcing over the last 2 years…Best Buy asked people’s views on how they could improve Toshiba and HP laptops, enacting the changes through their Blue Label brand; while Dell and Starbucks both set up community platforms to source consumer’s thoughts on how to improve their services. But 2009 looks set to be the year the potential of the crowd is tested even further; rather than simply listening to the crowd a few brands are turning to the crowd to actually create their ware from scratch. 

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There’s a few very good digital tech blogs out there including Cybernetnews, Mashable and ReadWriteWeb, each of them regularly post about the latest apps on the block; here’s one from ReadWriteWeb about a bunch of apps that have stood the test of time and another from Mashable about top sites for web savvy families. The developer community churn out thousands of apps a week, each one claiming to revolutionise our lives for the better, unfortunately the majority of these apps are likely to fail. Having said that a good deal of them will emerge from the market-place victorious, with a few healthy rounds of funding and a few million users to boot.

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As a Leeds United fan I’ve met my share of super-fans, those displaying such a quixotic level of support for their club that it consumes every part of their life - including their moods and general disposition. But, Leeds United is also well known for its intensely loyal and active wider support base (those who love the club but understand it is just a game) evidenced by the weekly gate receipts of 30,000+ and leedsunited.com having the 5th highest traffic in all the land; this is made all the more remarkable when you consider they now reside in the old 3rd division. I think one of the main reasons for this strong support base is actually the existence of a strong super-fan core, which acts as a powerful and firey centre generating a kind of gravitational pull on the wider fan base. 

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On Nov 1st Jim Stengel (ex P&G Global Marketing Officer) launched a new kind of marketing consultancy with an extremely lofty ambition:

 “to accelerate a movement to deeply rethink and transform the roles and meaning of marketing and branding.”

When Mr. Stengel starts to talk about branding needing a rethink people sit up and take notice, but when Mr. Stengel quits his job and sets up a consultancy with the sole aim of accelerating said rethink, everyone in the industry should probably pay very close attention. His central tenet is that marketing should be more about defining what a company does - beyond making money - and how it can make customers’ lives better, he calls it ‘purpose-driven marketing.’  But this isn’t the first time someone has called for a radical rethink of the marketing processes and structures. 

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Blow me down with a feather, if I didn’t get a call from Orange, my mobile provider yesterday.

I was surprised because usually when I need to get hold of them it’s a nightmare.

When you call them you have to navigate up to five layers of computerised options, none of which ever seem to offer the alternative you are looking for and all of which are constructed to try and lead you to a pre-recorded message rather than a real life operator. read full post »

Just signed up for a free ‘Matterbox‘, an idea I heard about via Lloyd Davies on a Seesmic video post. (I wrote two posts about Seesmic yesterday: I’m already dangerously addicted and just found myself checking in whilst waiting for an airplane).

Matterbox is an imaginative joint venture between Artomatic and Royal Mail. In a world of increasingly intangible stuff, they’ve set up to champion the physical: ‘real’ things you can hold and touch. As they say at the Matterblog.

Sure, this will take time, but if digital media continue to dominate even more aspects of our lives, there’s going to be a growing demand for the need to get to grips with things. Matter is a long-term project,

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