momorantings

We live in a youth-obsessed but ageing world, a world where the elderly are often ignored. Well we do in the first world. Elsewhere, the vast majority of populations are heavily skewed to the under 30s, yet respect for elders is pronounced. Why that is and whether it will change seem to me to be important questions for marketers to ponder.

Spurred in part by an excellent article written by Chris Jones of the Chicago Tribune , in the past month, there has been a lot of talk about cultural organizations using Groupon (an online, mass discount website). Just like any mass discounting method, using Groupon should be a well thought out strategy. Used correctly, and it can work very well. Used incorrectly, and it can be very costly. Things to remember about Groupon : It is out there for the world to see and it was designed to be used by social media, so that it is picked up and passed along at a very rapid pace. From some of my previous posts on this blog, you probably know that I am a fan of what I call "ninja discounting." Very rarely do I use mass communication to advertise and promote discounts, preferring instead to use one-to-one direct marketing techniques aimed at very strategic recipients. If I need to discount, then I want to make sure that I can control who gets the discount so that it flies under the

On an obscure train journey one afternoon this week, I sat near a microcosm of marketing myopia - three executives working in the promotion of horse racing in this country. In the space of ten minutes (and in their own words) they revealed a number of common marketing/business traits. 1) Assuming homogenous demand. One of the three was bewildered by the fact that while Chester racecourse had booming attendance in recent years this was not reflected in the static television viewing figures of their racing. The answer is that Chester, an idiosyncratic historic venue with a tight oval track, is a great place to visit. But, because of this, the racing is also idiosyncratic,harder to follow on screen and less appealing to those who bet. She was wrongly assuming that viewers wanted the same thing on their screen as they did when attending in person. When you put yourself in the customer's shoes, you have to remember they have different shoes for different occasions. 2) Diversifying the

Where I questioned Coke's lack of local distinction last time, today I'm bemused by what I perceive to be Old Spice's defensive localisation. The ad above is one of a series that has appeared recently. This one refers to jet fighters and punching as designators of the manliest man in town, another cites monster trucks and tool boxes. To me, the tone of voice is completely at odds with the intelligent wit of "the man your man could be" that is also airing here. It's much more aligned with the status quo of the marketplace and seems to be designed to appeal to (or more precisely not alienate) the traditional Lynx/Axe customer. But, unless you're the market leader, your marketing must surely be designed to change your world in some way. A status quo in which you're floundering is exactly what you're fleeing and any hint of trying to sell your product in the same way the competition does should be avoided.

You've probably seen the video above. It was posted in January and has over two million views on YouTube. A UK version was apparently launched today in the hope of repeating the viral trick (though it appears to have been online since early July and as of this morning had not managed that feat, having only been viewed 3,000 times). I don't get it. There are no media regions in the digital world and thus think global, act local must mean more than repeating the same stunt in different countries and posting it to the web. If it's interesting the first time, then it will have spread and "we" will all have seen and have no interest in seeing it again. Or am I missing something?

I think I have always been attracted to arts marketing because it allows me to use both creative as well as scientific talents. To this day, I might be the only person to graduate from Missouri State University with a major in speech and theatre education and a minor in mathematics. So it should come as no surprise that I take a very scientific approach to marketing. In every campaign I lead, I constantly manipulate variables and note outcomes in an attempt to continually improve upon previous results. The easiest variables that marketers turn to are design and pricing. How many times have you tested a carrier package? an offer? pricing strategy? Probably quite a few times. Now think about how many times you have tested different timing schemes for putting products on sale. This was the first year in my tenure at Arena Stage where we experimented with using timing as a variable. For almost as long as we have had mini-subscriptions, we have put them on sale at the exact same time as our

Overheard on a train: We'll give the marketing agency the message and image we want to convey and we'll just get them to make it look nice.

Many people think that the art of the headline is to attract attention. Well, the one above ticked that box for me but when I delved deeper, I discovered that the noise was emanating, irony of ironies, from a "marketing" company upstairs (read phone sales training company) and that the closure was voluntary, not enforced. The art of the headline is not just to attract attention. It must also impart information and lead to something that doesn't disappoint. Addendum: If you utilise multiple meanings in your heading, then you must deliver on all of them. This is advanced practice and should only be attempted by experts.

Before enjoying an epic of epic-ish epicness last night, I was assailed in my cinema seat by a horrible advertisement featuring inane vox-pop proclamations extolling the wonders of cinema. That's right, my enjoyment of the cinema experience was diminished by an advertisement preaching the joy of the cinema experience to people who were already sitting in a cinema! The screen real-estate was there, the audience was there and the had an ad, so the marketing geniuses decided to throw them all together. No doubt because there was no incremental financial cost and it would gain eyeball attention. It took me back to the bad old days when magazines would call up an old colleague to tell him that he'd paid for space in their next edition and what did he want them to run in it. His answer was usually the same tired old ad he'd run in the previous edition. Advertising opportunities may be abundant, but to undervalue them like this is to reveal a failure to comprehend that the scarce