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Often times, when news articles and blog posts talk about reaching female consumers, they center on statistics and superficial overviews rather than qualitative thinking. Fortunately, brand experience expert Katie Mares lays out a comprehensive case for action in Earning Her Business: The Importance of Tailoring Your Brand Experience to the Female Consumer. Mares traces the rise of female spending power along …

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How does a modern brand team get to know the company's customers and prospective customers better? Do the MBAs on board make it a priority to "walk a mile in the customer's shoes?" Or do they prefer to suck up the data with a machine? In IBM's case, the company trusts in the machine. IBM's SVP/CMO Michelle Peluso says AI is changing how brands interact with customers. Here she is on …

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Finland is north. For some technology workers, it's true north. Helsinki and some of Finland’s most renowned tech companies launched a talent attraction campaign in September branding Helsinki as the world’s first City as a Service (CaaS). The campaign received close to 7,000 applications of tech professionals interested to relocate to Helsinki. “Finding the best talent in the world is critical for us and …

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Of all the types of assignments advertising and marketing folks undertake, naming is probably the most rife with landmines, although it can be fun. A name which can seem like a natural winner in a brainstorming session (or thinking it over in the shower) might turn out to be legally problematic, tough to sell, or hard to implement for a brand. Alexandra Watkins methodically sorts it all out in Hello My Name is …

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Content isn't king. Customer experience is king. What does this mean for marketers? Simple. When a brand's primary advertising claims fail to play out in real life, the result is more cognitive dissonance and loss of trust. In other words, it's exactly what no one wants. In days gone by, a brand could make a questionable claim and more easily get away with it. In today's information economy, there's no …

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I think we’re living in a precarious age. Nothing in the modern media is what It appears to be. We’re surrounded by stories, personalities, and corporate entities that simply operate by the maxim that “the end justifies the means.” Especially if that means outright deception. Shiv Singh and Rohini Luthra, Ph.D. take a closer look at this phenomeon in Savvy: Navigating Fake Companies, Fake Leaders, and Fake News in …

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It’s been 40 years since the Sex Pistols arrived and shook up a fairly corporate and slick music scene. Now, John Lydon is 62, the music seems a little tame even if it’s still raw, and anyone who remembers (if they can remember) those punk years has more gray hair that’s in need of dyeing, And the genre’s supposed traits have been applied to the corporate world in Jeremy Dale’s The Punk Rock of Business: Applying a …

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What often separates the most successful ad people from others? The ability to effectively speak and communicate. We all can have great ideas and vision, but without the ability to sell them, those ideas won’t get anywhere. And public speaking is of the areas ad agencies often don’t train employees or work to nurture their abilities. Allison Shapira gives a great overview of public speaking, speechwriting, and …

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President Trump threatened another major American corporation on Tuesday. He said Harley-Davidson will be "taxed like never before" if the motorcycle maker moves production overseas. Like most things Trump it's an idle, annoying and distracting threat. Harley-Davidson will be here when Trump is gone. The question is how big of a political loser do you need to be to lose the biker vote? …

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Life is not an either/or proposition, and applying that principle to modern marketing is basically what’s at the core of Michael Solomon’s new book Marketers, Tear Down These Walls! Liberating the Postmodern Consumer. Solomon breaks his book into several chapters that focus on traditionally opposing forces: Us versus them, me versus we, offline versus online, producer versus consumer, and so on. It’s a clever …

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Bob Knorpp, the host of The BeanCast, asked me a difficult but important question on this week's edition of the marketing industry's best podcast. Every time you turn around these days there seems to be another bright and shiny tool in the Adtech arsenal. But for brand managers and marketing leads there's a double problem. One is obviously that it's complicated deciding which tools to deploy and training employees …

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