momorantings

Big or small. We like them all. At M&S you'll find beautiful bras to fit all sizes, at gorgeous prices. If nature has blessed you with more than your fair share, you certainly won't be charged extra for it. That big boob is all in the past. Bra £18. Knickers £8. If you're going for "clever" it's better to be really knowing and consider what an impersonal body and double-entendres actually say to a customer who's also been exposed to ideas such as the campaign for real beauty and whom you're hoping to make feel good about themselves. Or perhaps I'm wrong and it's all good fun.

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. Never more so than is exemplified by the recent trend for medical research to be condensed into simplified blurbs that are reprinted in mainstream media in an effort to drum up publicity. The supposed findings are recalled while the underlying research is ignored. As marketing increasingly draws on neuroscience and other academic areas, there's a real danger of the same thing happening. Witness the recent tweetstorm about a study in the Journal of Consumer Research and the blogpost about it here . The headline thought that will get marketers overly excited is encapsulated in this statement from the actual paper. "The participants were unable to recognize that a particular brand had been paired with either negative or positive images. Therefore, we were able to create an 'I like it, but I don't know why' effect," That's fine by me. It's another in a long line of academic studies trying to understand the way the b...

It's strange how the online message of personalisation and focus has failed fully to permeate the offline world. Back in 2008, Kevin Kelly explained how to build a business on the back of 1000 True Fans and everyone knows the cost of acquiring a new customer to be greater than retaining an existing one. And yet, we have bad health-clubs. Health-clubs that provide loss-leader offers to get you to join up and then rely on inertia-selling to keep you paying rather than nurturing you. Health-clubs that don't reduce their charges during hot, sweaty low-attendance summer months. Health-clubs that assume your loyalty until it's lost. No wonder they have a churn business - they assume that's the business they're in and do nothing to rectify it. They don't reward loyalty, they don't keep in regular touch throughout membership and they don't offer new tailored services that might build that loyalty. Recently, I happened to see a letter that my gym sends out a few...

All over central London, 250 elephants are blending into their surroundings. This one is in Carnaby Street, the one below is in Golden Square. They surprise people. They delight people. Whenever you chance across one you see people staring, smiling and posing for photos. Serendipity and joy combined. That's just what the marketing doctor ordered right? So I feel a little churlish noting that when my abiding reaction is that of a missed opportunity, of wondering why they didn't go the extra yard. But the point is that I noted the elephants, assumed they were connected to some sort of promotion and did exactly nothing. Yes there were notices, but I didn't take them in. I was more intrigued by the elephants themselves and people's reaction. The moment was lost or, at least, not maximally exploited. Yes, people will be talking about the elephants, but where was the call to immediate action? Where was the invitation to do something then and there via their ubiquitous digita...

This week I had the strange experience of being the only audience member I knew. This was at a lecture venue where, in the past, I have been concerned that I knew too many people and was therefore too close to the online echo-chamber. Those often brilliant lectures have tended to be about neuroscience, social networks and anthropology. Marketing-related individuals know this to be the latest seam of official knowledge that must be mined for sound-bites and hence I've had no shortage of company in the bar afterwards. The marketer-free lecture was a discussion of comedy and featured the writers and producers of some of the biggest TV shows on both sides of the Atlantic. I couldn't understand why I was alone. Sure, there was no mention of brain chemistry, but apart from being a fan, it seemed obvious to me that comedy can tell us so much about cultural landscapes, concise communication and connecting with people. Confirmation came from Caryn Mandabach (producer of The Cosby Show, ...

Successful marketing, they say, is dependent on understanding your customers. Implicit in that is the need to understand how people assimilate information, about how they come to decisions, and about how they learn. One part of that is to submerge yourself in learning theory and the psychology of persuasion and behavioural change. Another, I've discovered by chance recently, is to learn something new. Something that has nothing to do with your work and which preferably you can learn with a group of strangers and a number of teachers. It's a humbling experience and that's reason enough to do it. But you'll also come to appreciate the peaks and troughs of learning; the variety of teaching methods, personalities and vocabularies; the ones that work for you and maybe why they do and others don't; and you'll witness all of the above as it relates to a random group of people. I won't labour the metaphor, but as well as learning what you went there to learn, you...

So, the esteemed Bill Thompson complained about computer problems delaying his flight and that reminded me of a train debacle some years ago. SouthEastern trains, clearly knowing a thing or two about the internet, noted my comment and retweeted it and thereby amplified some bad publicity about themselves. That and the fact that it was truncated suggests to me that this was an automated, "cost-efficient" communications initiative. Nobody read the comment. Nobody realised that it related to a hellish five hour stay trapped on a snow-bound train with no power, consequently flooding toilets and lamentable customer communication and service. No, they just thought any mention of their name was good publicity and sought to have it reverberate across the air. There's a world of difference between monitoring what people are saying about you online and being part of the conversation - if that's what you really insist on being. It can't be long before someone exploits this ...

The xkcd blog asked their readers to identify/name colours in a survey . I don't know why they did it and I'm not sure they anticipated getting over five million judgements, but that's what happened. The graphic above shows the result of some subsequent analysis into gender differences. Are women more interested in colours, more visually astute or have they been over-educated in bogus terminology by fashion marketing? Are men more decisive, visually illiterate or are they just disinterested in colours? Who knows? What I take away from this is a reminder that we all have different opinions and passions about the simplest things and that your customers' nuance is not going to be the same as yours.

The global economic crisis has made almost every industry reexamine its business practices in an effort to reduce costs, find efficiencies and tap new sources of revenue. A sector with perhaps some of the most significant changes has been media outlets. Television stations are now requiring reporters to also function as their own cameramen and video editors. Some stations are heavily investing in online media as their revenues from broadcast commercial sales shrink ( Pepsi decided not to advertise during the Super Bowl for the first time in 23 years ). Print media outlets are rapidly shifting content and focus to online domains, and if they already had robust online presences, some like the Washington Post are looking into other sources of advertising revenue, such as developing iPhone applications. Reviewers and culture writers are seemingly a dying breed as news outlets consolidate resources and rerun content from other providers (the Los Angeles Times regularly runs articles from ...