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....
Nestlé, the world’s largest packaged food company, announced last week at an investor call that their next area of focus is establishing direct channels of communication with their consumers. Quite a big statement of intent from a business anchored in established distribution channels. Buoyed by...
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...
Here at Sonder we talk about businesses communicating from the inside-out by starting with their owned assets first. It’s a way for businesses to communicate with more authenticity, effectiveness and clarity. Now, if you think of inside-out communications as a fractal, whereby the same principles...
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...
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same…” This is taken from one of the most inspiring reads we’ve recently come across. And not from a modern doyen of entrepreneurship, but a 100-year old poem by Rudyard Kipling....