The B.S.
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Brand Strategy = Business Strategy Wednesday, February 6th, 2013
Appearing every Wednesday evening through April 17, at the School of Visual Arts in New York, our CEO to discuss Business Strategy: Defining the Brand. He quotes Peter Drucker: "The business enterprise has two - and only two - basic functions: marketing and innovation. Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs. Marketing is the distinguishing, unique function of the business." And Rudyard Kipling: "...words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind..." He says things like "snap the…
George Kingsley Zipf On Becoming A Category Leader Monday, February 25th, 2013
In the 1930s, Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf found that the most-used English word - the - occurs about one-tenth of the time in a typical text; the next most common word - of - occurs about half as often as the first; the third most common word - and - occurs about one-third as often as the first. What emerged was Zipf's Law, one of probability distribution, asserting that the frequencies of certain events are inversely proportional to their rank. The New…
Anthropology Inc. - Yes, You're Being Watched Tuesday, February 26th, 2013
This report in The Atlantic, describes the disruption in corporate research, evidenced by the increasing deployment of social scientists to conduct field research and the art of ethnographic mining, making online surveys and dinnertime robo-calls superficial by comparison: When clients are confronted with...anthropological research, they often discover fundamental differences between the businesses they thought they were in, and the businesses they actually are in. For example, the Korean electronics giant Samsung had a major conceptual breakthrough when it realized…
Innovation's Obstacle: Focus Groups Tuesday, July 23rd, 2013
We are not fans. Of focus groups. As client advocates and owners of their trust, we have yet to recommend the use of focus groups. The reason is focus groups are a crutch, serving the needs of those seeking security in the familiar. In contrast, the very basis of our work at WHISPER is in finding the unfamiliar - the category-defying narrative, authentically packaged to advance the disruptive market opportunity for new growth. Douglas Van Praet agrees: Focus-group…
Best Super Bowl Ad? Monday, February 4th, 2013
See all the ads that aired during the U.S. broadcast of the National Football League's Super Bowl here.
generation On: Making Their Mark On The World Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013
So how did you spend your day Monday, January 21? In the United States, a president was being inaugurated on the same day an iconic figure in American history was being remembered. For many, the Martin Luther King Day holiday is about people offering themselves as citizens to assist on any number of projects and needs within their communities, acting upon our innate human need to help others. Understanding this core need and assisting pre-adults to activate…
Alexis de Tocqueville As Brand Strategist & Marketing Expert Tuesday, January 22nd, 2013
The power of emotion behind decision-making comes from what might seem a surprising source. Alexis de Tocqueville, a young aristocratic French lawyer, traveled to the United States in 1831 to study its penal system. His visit resulted in the classic De la démocratie en Amérique, also known as Democracy in America, a 19th century masterpiece of United States cultural and political analysis. de Touqueville offers this insight of the power of imprinting upon the human mind, and how these…
Competitive Analysis, And The Search for White Space Thursday, January 17th, 2013
Understanding how competing products are positioned and messaged allows you to learn from their mistakes and successes, and act in a distinct and powerful way. A competitive message analysis - a taxonomy - is key to this understanding. This taxonomy - a classification by message categories and by strength of engagement - answers the following: How do competitors position themselves?What types of conversations are common among them?Do their communications project a similar attitude?Do their similarities…
Marketer David Ogilvy: Jargon Is The Hallmark of a Pretentious Ass Sunday, March 9th, 2014
The power of the effective use of words, demonstrated by the "priceless and pricelessly uncompromising wisdom from a cultural legend: iconic businessman and original "Mad Man" David Ogilvy." On September 7th, 1982, Ogilvy sent an internal memo to all agency employees, titled "How to Write." Among his teachings, Mr. Ogilvy's advice on the use of jargon: Never use jargon like...reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass. Some 30 years later we would add words and phrases such as solution, innovation,…
