The days of Mad Men-type agencies are gone – and not just because we’ve moved on from casual misogyny and heavy-drinking lunches. The scope of marketing and advertising has expanded, technology has advanced at lightning speed and no one agency can expect to have all the competencies and specialized knowledge necessary to serve all of their clients’ needs. Even large agencies don’t have everything that’s needed for international campaigns across many different platforms. Continue reading
Most marketing or HR directors would love to have several high-quality employee testimonial videos to support the company’s employer branding efforts – particularly when it comes to recruitment. They also say, however, that it’s one of those difficult and expensive tasks that they just don’t seem to be able to manage with available resources. Frankly, I disagree that producing testimonial videos for employer branding is difficult – or expensive. Continue reading
As millennials enter the global mainstream in business, companies need to look closely at how they are set up to ensure they attract, motivate and retain the best talent. The same goes for how they interact with customers and other external stakeholders. Continue reading
It’s either a CMO’s dream scenario or his/her worst nightmare: The entire marketing department gathered in a workshop and told they should put all their branding ideas on the table – and that every idea is welcome. But how do you extract really useful concepts from it all while ensuring everyone feels their input is valued? How do you get results from a branding workshop?
As the demands swirl around high-performing teams, it gets hard to keep the Big Picture in focus and easy to lose inspiration – particularly with the long-game nature of B2B marketing. Stepping out of the everyday and breaking the routine can be the antidote and team-building events can bring back some of the magic.
I’ve run plenty of B2B branding workshops over the years. Big Ideas come out of them, whether they’re team-building or educational exercises for corporate marketing departments or brand creation/makeover projects of all sizes – but it’s all about picking the winners.
A good direct mail can be worth its weight in gold. But you need to get the content just right. Here are some tips to help you on your way. Continue reading
The boundaries between your personal and professional brands are getting thinner every day. Whether we like it or not, we all have a personal brand. Some may flaunt it more consciously than others, but at some level most of us want to make a good impression. Continue reading
The disciplines and craft of journalism have changed corporate communications – for the better. New opportunities to cut through the noise and engage an audience abound, partly because so many companies still seem to believe that bragging about themselves in buzz words is the best way of making sure their target audience will understand the value of their brand.
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Whether B2C or B2B, user experience (UX) is about building the customer-brand relationship. When we use a service or product, we don’t just interact – we connect. The experience you have can even become more important than the product and service itself. It’s all about the emotions. Continue reading