Marketing
Seth Godin’s appearance in this talk show is constrained by the format: a talk show requires “controversial sound bites” and leaves little room for deep analysis of a given issue. That’s up to us, and the ideas he repeats here – “get ready for a ‘forever recession’ by reinventing yourself”, “learn by doing”, “go ahead and do it”, “take risks” – are worth considering during the weekend.
Brazil keeps making the news pages everywhere, nowhere more than in the Financial Times – sometimes the extra attention doesn’t translate into quality reporting. That’s not the case with recent FT articles we highlight in this post, but even so, the articles are all about things one can’t predict, control or truly get to know… So perhaps the most interesting of the recent FT stories on “Brazil”, so to speak, was a “Business Diary: Nizan Guanaes” piece highlighting one of our true geniuses in advertising.
Groupon’s IPO filing is finally here, and the revenues growth curve is staggering. The company makes no money and doesn’t expect to make any so soon (it’s expanding extremely fast). There are plenty of doubts about the sustainability of its business model, competition and – much more importantly – margin of safety, especially given the preliminary level of disclosure and a few corporate governance quirks such as a dual-class share structure and a preference for “earnings before all the bad stuff” metrics. Yet it’s a business that one almost has to follow for insights on how these companies can impact anything from traditional retailing to data analytics. We suggest previous posts in Buysiders.com for background.
We use an article out today on the retail banking sector’s use of socialmedia to highlight a previous, more relevant article by the same source (Booz & Co.’s Strategy+Business). The second article is called “The Rise of Generation C” and is well worth the time.
Very interesting article on ReadWriteWeb about a Facebook acquisition and one hypothesis of the reasoning behind it. As we pointed out in our post “Marketing revolution”, and as this guy wrote so well, for some companies “going local isn’t enough – (they) want local plus social plus targeted”. Plus mobile, and deals… Other companies aren’t standing still: one of our readers sent us a video of Google’s relatively new “Hotpot” service, and don’t forget Groupon, the subject of our New Year’s Eve bonus post.
“Tipping Point“, anyone? This video (found via @journalistics) is an interesting summary of the challenges and opportunities of online marketing. Since it’s also a promotional video for mBLAST, it should be taken with a grain of salt – there’s a bit of over-simplification going on.
As we said in the previous post, setting aside some time to read “building block” material is vital. Now for the more serious material: this first article had us thinking about Marketing/ Advertising in the “sooner-than-we-think” future, and how disruptive some technologies can be. It’s one of the most interesting fields these days, but as usual we wonder a lot, ponder a lot but try to do very little, that is, we only act with very strong conviction.
Seth Godin’s thought-provoking presentation about the importance of being different. Obviously a bit of a stretch. On many areas of your life you DON’T want things to change, but in many others you certainly want to experiment. The trick is to figure out where the novelty effect can be successful and balance the effort with [...]
