momorantings

This Facebook spoof encompasses a useful lesson. If you bother truly to visualise your customers' experience and do so in as exaggerated way as you dare, you may get a feel for what you could be doing wrong.

My one prediction of 2008 is that Juno will be in your top ten list of best movies, so imagine my exasperation when the first TV spot I saw was in the middle of sports programming. What made someone think that the mindset of the audience for live horse-racing would chime with that for a sharp youth-oriented movie that's garnering awards wherever it goes? I know media buying is replete with deals, but the thinking here can only be that of relatively cheap TV exposure and that is box-ticking of the worst sort. If you can't afford more relevant spots, then spend the money in another way rather than do something that shows disdain for the audience and, even worse, disdain for what you're marketing.

Over the past few days, the blogosphere has largely reverted to its primordial incarnation as the playground of the geeks. There have been interesting debate and wonderful acts of humanity not to mention all manner of prescriptive projections of future human behaviour (predicated upon technology of course). However, my ultimate take-away has been a reminder of the rigidity of geek thinking. Perhaps it’s down to their technical detail-orientation, but it’s remarkable to see the virulent reaction of a geek to another person’s argument if it doesn’t correlate exactly with their own worldview. As we move toward marketing 2.0 or the new marketing , the lesson, of course, is that despite their volume, the geeks are not the majority. There’s a lot of inspiration to be gleaned and ideas to be considered, but it’s not the early adopters who ultimately shape the future. It’s the people who use stuff who do that.

Ask people to name their most hated vegetable and it's generally agreed that the answer will be sprouts, yet annual sprout sales in the UK are worth £35m. That's allegedly 47,000,000 units of distress purchase and judging by the supermarket tonight, most of them are bought this week. It's not the season of masochism, so why the paradoxical behaviour? Because people have bought a story that convinces them that sprouts say Christmas like no other vegetable. Because people can joke about them and because people see other people doing it.

Where else in the world would an atheist comedian and the head of an international religion overlap in a radio show, chat without interruption from the host and be recorded on webcam? The BBC can still be remarkable.

Campaign magazine's 2007 round-up awards campaign of the year to the Gorilla and reports 9% year on year increase in weekly sales - (in October I assume) though as I said before the June 2006 weekly sales were down 25% due to the salmonella scare. The same magazine also brings home to me how many smart people I've got to know this year and credits many of them with both great blogs and actual work too. Trebles all round!

Lazy blogging I know, but I wanted to share comments I contributed to two interesting debates on other blogs recently. Marketing isn't any harder than it used to be - it's just that people forgot that it centres upon product development and meeting customer needs and instead got obsessed with pretty words like branding which is all too often skin-deep rather than a reflection of the DNA of a business. No marketing isn't harder, but getting away with sub-standard behaviour very definitely is. (Collaborate Marketing) It’s a myth that most categories are commodified - a myth perpetrated by arty agencies who want to pad their book rather than be a little dull and focus on product attributes. (The Kaiser Edition)