:: The Marketing Fresh Peel :: 2007 July archive

The Big Boys of Brands

Posted by Chris Wilson July 27th, 2007

Coca-Cola Crop BusinessWeek has released a stock pile of information on the world’s biggest players in global branding for 2007.

CATEGORIES: Advertising, News, Branding

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Mick Jagger, CEO

Posted by Chris Wilson July 26th, 2007

Rolling Stones Lips Logo The regular Peelers know that I, on occasion, like to make references to bands and artists in the music industry, using them to create analogies and examples to marketing and branding.

In similar fashion, Stephen J. Dubner over at Freakonomics calls the Rolling Stones front man, Mick Jagger, the “Profit Maximizer” and compares him to a “supremely smart” CEO, for his direction of the Stones for the last 30 or so years.

I’ve said it before. I think there is a lot that can be learned from bands and artists in the music industry, and their approaches to business. There is an amount of freedom in the industry that allows them to explore different methods and keep pushing the limits.

CATEGORIES: Branding, Music

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Your Clients Need Legos

Posted by Chris Wilson July 25th, 2007

Legos Car

Clients know what they want. In fact they know exactly what they want and when they need it.

They want a website redesign, or to formulate an identity for their newest product line development. Or they need an outdoor ad placed at that perfect spot where the road construction backs up traffic for hours everyday. Or they need a total ad campaign, ready to launch by the end of the week.

What Most of them don’t know, is why. Why do they need all of this?

It’s very easy for marketing to become a list of items to mark off on a checklist, and to think that if I’m doing this set of things then “I’m marketing.”

This is a trap that marketing pros like myself sometimes fall into. Here’s a simple analogy to help the idea of integrating your marketing plan stick a little better.

Marketing is like building something out of Legos. The pieces will fit together in just about any way that you can imagine. But if you want to build the race car pictured on the side of the box, then you have to make sure that all the pieces are put together in just the right way to build that race car. If they leave pieces out or try to throw in pieces from other Lego sets, then they will probably fit together at first, and you won’t notice that anything’s wrong until you step back and say, “What the heck is that? It looks like a mini Ford Edsel?”

It’s the same in marketing. Websites, blogs, magazine ads, direct mailers, TV ads, mobile text ads, and even that social network your programming team is building around your product, are just pieces that fit together to send a consistent message. And the better they fit together, the stronger the message will be.

I need to get my clients some Legos.

CATEGORIES: Blogs, Advertising, Marketing

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Facebook Adds the Firefox Boys to the Team

Posted by Chris Wilson July 20th, 2007

We are past the point of viewing Facebook as a company that’s likely to get bought up by the Yahoos and Googles of the world. Late yesterday, news broke that Facebook has acquired Parakey, which is a start-up company run by the co-founders of Mozilla Firefox, Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt.

The company’s press release states:

Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook’s team to work on the development of Facebook Platform and the company’s website.

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

“Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years,” said Ross. “We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

This acquisition further emphasizes the direction that the company has taken with its recent extensions to the Facebook platform and gives us an idea of the role that Facebook is likely to play in the future of the web. Parakey, is shooting to build a Web operating system, which falls in nicely with what Facebook has been up to lately.

If you haven’t checked out Facebook lately, then you should. It’s not just a social network for college students anymore. Some of their new features have taken social web to a whole new level.

CATEGORIES: Social Networks, News

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