Musings of a Marketing Maven

A while ago, Forrester Research analyst Brian Haven asked who’s at fault when there’s a serious disconnect between the brand promise conveyed by the advertising campaign, and what a person experiences later. Is it the agency or the company (brand owner) that’s accountable?

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From everything I read, the advertising industry can’t wait to get its hands on the next big untapped inventory of screen “real estate” and consumer attention — our mobile phones.
Google’s rationale for developing and promoting Android, their mobile OS platform, has to be largely motivated by the billions they hope to earn by enabling mobile [...]

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The relative success or failure of most projects is determined at the outset, by how well the project is defined and scoped, roles clarified, and expectations set. This is critical if you aim for high-impact results.

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I wince when direct marketers trumpet their expertise at managing so-called “conversations” with customers or prospects. It must be that their definition of a conversation and mine are really different.
Poor DM execution often reveals how far vendors really are from what truly matters in conversation: listening and responding appropriately to what the other party says.

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Bloggers who prefer WYSIWYG writing and editing tools will appreciate Windows Live Writer. It’s a desktop application that lets you compose new entries when offline, preview the post as it will look online, and then upload it to wherever your blog is being hosted.
Although no doubt optimized for Windows Live Spaces (Microsoft’s blog hosting world), [...]

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Sometimes I just want to get the best possible audio quality out of my iPhone, and that’s when I pull out some audiophile headphones.
Take a look at these daisy-chained adapters!

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Well, it took a couple of hours to backup the hard drive and then install Leopard on my MacBook Pro. So far, so good. It’s been fast and very reliable.
I haven’t done a thorough test, but so far, most of my applications are working just fine. The notebook recovers from sleep even more quickly than [...]

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