What Nurtures Confident Entrepreneurs?
The Tidal Wave That Wouldn't Turn
4 Values at the Heart of Good Experience Design
Valentine's Day: A Global Perspective
This week, people all around the world will make very similar consumer decisions: buying a card, ordering flowers, getting chocolate, and booking a nice restaurant. With Valentine’s Day fast approaching, it seems that we are celebrating our feelings in a global village of love and romantic consumption. But is there more to the event than meets the commercial eye?
How to Design a Sharing Market
What Makes MBAs Stand Out?
Today I deviate a bit from standard protocol and write about MBA teaching. That’s because I just saw a great ft.com interview featuring the Ross School’s Dean Alison Davis-Blake. She had an important message: Business schools must change their tactics for MBAs to get jobs.
How Beyoncé Made Market-Based Feminism Work
Adjusting Your Marketing Across Cultures
Celebrating getting the book through Turkish customs, the absurdity of waiting and paying for your own work reminded me of cultural differences. In 1966, Cateora and Hess wrote “Marketing principles are universally applicable, and the marketer’s task is the same whether applied in Dimebox, Texas or Katmandu, Nepal.” Today we know better: even with global technologies and economic development, cultural differences abound and affect a marketer’s job.
Target Canada: Why It Failed
Creating the New Man
Chivalry may not be dead, but today’s “modern man” is much different from days of old: he applies moisturizer and even wears makeup. While you may accept this as the norm (or find it shocking that we are even calling attention to it), it’s important to acknowledge it hasn’t always been this way. Sure our fathers applied Brut and Brylcreem, but these were basic items, commodities of sorts. Today it’s much more complicated.
My 5 Most Read Blogs in 2014
One year ago, following a bet with the doctoral students, I started blogging about marketing and consumption topics. This was my first post. Since then, I have spent one hour every week on the subway, on the plane, or wherever else I was, writing something about market creation, brands, or consumer culture. It’s been a good first year. Currently, the blog has almost a million page views and 230,000+ visits per month.
How Silent Night Rose to Fame
The Sociology of Annoying Xmas Songs
McDonald's Marketing Misery
How Disney Has Inspired Loyalty and Love
Why do people insist on Starbucks when Second Cup is right next door? Or buy Apple products instead of Dell even though they make the same technologies? Why do people love Disney? To most, the answer is simply, they “just do.” So how do we justify the irrationality of our choices? The answer lies in the brand itself and how they have effectively moved in to the “lovemark” territory, inspiring action and loyalty beyond reason and coming out as the only choice.
Re-Envisioning Marketing: One Chocolate Bar at a Time
Boutiquification Strategy
Do you remember when the best part of waking up was hearing the sound of the dripping and percolating Mr. Coffee coffeemaker preparing for the blissful moment of Folgers in your cup? For many coffee drinkers today, this is just a faint memory of their parents coffee habits in the 1980’s and 90’s. At that time, coffee was a bipolar product: regular or decaf.
