Category: Branding

Is this the age of “the transformative CMO”? According to The Korn/Ferry Institute, it is, and it has the goods to back it up. The organization, which “generates forward-thinking research and viewpoints that illuminate how talent advances business strategy,” has published a white paper on the topic, which can be downloaded here. The Institute’s premise is that “as organizations strive to set themselves apart from competitors, marketing has taken on new prominence throughout the business process.”

"Leadership" has changed when a decentralized group of people can take down a government. "The Value Chain" has changed when the customer is no longer just the "buyer" butalso a co-creator. "Human Resources" have changed when most of the people who create value for your organization are neither hired nor paid by you.

MarketingProfs guest blogger Ted Nelson of Mechanica shares insights from his company and Fast Company's in-depth survey of nearly 700 marketers for its Branding Forward Project. It has been said that marketing is one of the few corporate disciplines that regularly confronts unsolicited opinions from every other department. This can make working on the marketing frontlines, actively bobbing and weaving through regular cycles of technology and consumer disruption, either an incredibly exciting endeavor or a very dangerous one. To help marketers enjoy more of the excitement and less of the danger, Mechanica recently partnered with Fast Company to create ...

This is a story about using Customer Loyalty research to create lasting and believable marketing benefit messages. I recently had the pleasure of refreshing the brand and marketing statements of one of my clients, Jazzit (http://www.jazzit.pro), a software company that creates financial statement and reporting templates for accountants. Their software is amazing with extremely happy customers, but their messaging was lagging behind in terms of telling their great story. In particular, and something that is typical in many B2B SME technology firms -- they had the problem of empty and unfocused marketing benefit statements.  What are "empty and ...

by Brooke Howell on February 7, 2012 in Social Media, Understanding Your Audience This guest post is by Brooke Howell, SmartBrief’s small business editor. Follow her on Twitter at @SBStartup, and sign up for SmartBrief on Small Business for more great news and advice to help build your small business. You put a lot of effort into writing each of your blog posts. Then you Tweet it and put it up on Facebook, LinkedIn and your other social networks, only to find no once clicks through.

These days, everyone is consuming content differently. My mom has a netbook, I have a laptop, my friend has a 27″ iMac, my girlfriend and I have smartphones and her mom has an iPad. Since your content is now being viewed on more devices and browsers than ever before, you have to design it with that in mind. Websites that adapt to things like screen sizes and operating systems are known as responsive designs, and this list of 10 sites shows off the future of the flexible Web. 

1st February 2012 by Harrison Weber

31 fluffy marketing buzzwords to avoid in your marketing communications. Let's be honest—marketers have quite the repetitive vocabulary, and we tend to get in the habit of using the same words obsessively around like-minded people. To the outside world, we could be repeating the phrase "meat-and-potatoes, meat-and-potatoes" over and over, and it wouldn't make a difference. So to optimize our communication's effectiveness, let's strategize more efficient messaging to change the perception around marketers' conversations and engagement. Whatever that means.