Achieving Accountable Marketing: Six Critical Value Levers Must Be Pulled byMichael Dunn April 13, 2009 issue Senior management continues to push marketers to demonstrate a strong return on investment, demanding more accountability and evidence that marketing investment is driving business growth. It requires marketers to demonstrate disciplined planning, rigorous tracking and evaluation and, above all, continuous improvement in performance. They must also show cause and effect, quickly diagnose the root causes of any spending performance issues and make timely, fact-dr.......

Achieving Accountable Marketing: Six Critical Value Levers Must Be Pulled byMichael Dunn April 13, 2009 issue Senior management continues to push marketers to demonstrate a strong return on investment, demanding more accountability and evidence that marketing investment is driving business growth. It requires marketers to demonstrate disciplined planning, rigorous tracking and evaluation and, above all, continuous improvement in performance. They must also show cause and effect, quickly diagnose the root causes of any spending performance issues and make timely, fact-dr.......

7 Tactical Reasons To Use Mini Campaign WebsitesBy Jerry BaderHow many websites should your company have?That's a question that comes up often in discussions with clients, but perhaps the idea never crossed your mind. Why would any company need more than one website? Not to be glib but the answer is as many as you need, but how many is that?If you're a large corporation it is fairly obvious that you need a separate site for each brand you offer, and a separate site for corporate background material and perhaps investor information.But what if you're a small or medium-sized company with a limit.......

Risky Business: When Personalities Promote Brands byMya Frazier April 20, 2009 issue In the online spot, the bootmaker’s executives—including its head of “values marketing,” Jay Steere—are the talent. Amid a surreal forest landscape with a watercolor hue, Steere touts the brand’s online social networking site and “Earthkeepers” campaign aimed at recruiting one million people to become part of an online network to “inspire environmental change.” Is Timberland’s campaign setting precedent for other brands to promote their values alongsid.......

“Goodbye Consumer – Hello Citizen”How America's new administration and economic crisis is re-calibrating the consumer mindset.by Patt Cottingham©2009 Patt Cottingham All rights reserved. The New Citizen Brand MindsetJust yesterday when credit was oh so easy you could build credit card castles out of the dozens of plastic credit cards that would arrive each month in the mail. Houses forgot how to be homes providing safety and security, and turned into leveraged lending machines. And so we all went out and bought our "stuff", some of it necessary – most of it not. Or .......

Marketing Strategies that Build Value byBarry Silverstein April 6, 2009 issue Value building is not a new concept. In good times and bad, smart brand marketers have always recognized the need to build value and differentiate—to make their brands a little better than competitors by adding a new feature, creating a special promotion or forging a unique alliance with another brand. What’s different today is the targeted relevance of value building. Faced with a protracted global economic recession, established brands are searching for ways to add maximum value witho.......

Scott Hamilton of Allign, recently spoke about Internal Branding at a CICAMA meeting. Following are some insights I gleaned from that talk. Enjoy! The information presented in the talk came from six years of experience through over 550 focus groups. In a nutshell, internal branding is the foundation for your brand’s external image with a main purpose of creating a rational and emotional connection to your brand. In 2007, the domestic budget for external marketing was 445 billion, while the budget for internal branding was less than 1 billion, which is still a 120% increase since last yea.......

terms of branding, companies need to learn to run at the same pace internally as well as externally. Building a truly world-class brand requires that the company makes sure that all of its internal processes, practices and symbols, fit its brand values. If the company’s brand is playing the role it should in creating value for the company, it should be viewed as a simple cohesive framework for organising all of the internal practices and processes and making sure they work towards creating the desired customer experience. Succesfull companies do not see one single department as custodian of .......