momorantings

As adopted in October 2007 by the American Marketing Asosciation. Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large. I hope you find that communication to be as clear and useful as I did.

Thanks to Ben's fabulous post , I read this one about flexible identity. The fact that the visual representation of a brand can be flexible and still recognisable perhaps illustrates that brands are molecular, mean different things to different people and that single messages are overly restricting. Designers know that people are smart enough to recognise variant logoes. Marketers should have similar faith in their ability to receive a number of different messages without becoming confused and know that this way lies the elusive grail of being able to engage with them in richer ways.

It has been a grueling month, and many apologies to those of you who read regularly, however Arena Stage has now officially relocated to its temporary offices in Arlington, VA and the groundbreaking for the Mead Center for American Theater is being held this Wednesday. I think I am finally starting to get a little comfortable, and am ready to start writing again. Thank God I finally figured out how to use our new phone system. Many of you are probably wondering how our PURL (personalized URL) campaign went. I will go into more details in a later post, but the PURLs worked out great. Each of our subscribers were given a personalized website that they logged into which provided them step-by-step directions from their house to the new theatre, restaurant discounts, interactive seating map showing them the location of their new seats, and other important information. Our subscribers really loved it. However, I do have one word of caution: it seems the rather new technology doesn't se...

A lot of the talk about the interesting concept of branded utility being the wave of the future seems to me to focus too much on the brand and not enough on the utility. If you ignore the latter, you'll end up with gimmicks and there will be no consumer memory of your actions. This might be because the cited examples are always sexy products like Nike ID, but Tide got it right and proved (maybe emphasised) that even "boring" commodity products can have a huge impact. It's all about remembering that little things make a real difference.

When I first saw Buglabs modular "computers", I had no real idea what they were but I knew that they were worth watching. Then they won an innovation prize at CES and more people started paying attention. More impressive for me is that this uber-geeky business is not acting like a geek business. Here's their first sales announcement . If this were 1997, this post would be chock full of blinking content as we announced our store's opening with pride. Instead, we'll be only slightly more subtle as we open the padlocks, and welcome you in to browse around. I want to take a moment to (and boy is this going to sound odd) potentially discourage certain shoppers: For those of you who have ZERO programming experience, this isn't a great time to buy a BUG. It'd be like having a Web browser on your computer in 1988 (which would've been quite a feat, by the way): the platform works, but it doesn't have much going on. Right now, and for the next few month...

"There are no solutions, there are only rearrangements of problems." David Mamet: November So quit procrastinating, analysing and planning, just get out there and do something.

The photo is of Taylor's diner in Independence, Oregon on the occasion of its closing in November 2006 - not because it wasn't profitable but because the newest Taylor generation have careers elsewhere. It's reproduced here courtesy of Dave Gorman who, last night, presented the first UK showing of his tremendous new film Unchained America documenting his attempt to cross the USA coast to coast in a 1970 Torino station-wagon while patronising only independent hotels, restaurants and gas stations. "Paying Mom & Pop and not The Man." This romantic quest was inspired by his revulsion at the homogenous experience of touring the US as a performer that prompted a desire to find the true independent spirit of America. In doing so, he has created a lovely film about the changing face of small-town America that is filled with the humour you'd expect, but also with innumerable quiet insights into business and customer service - as was the Q & A session that fo...