Category Archives: Consumer Marketing

Branding from the inside out

Back in October of 2007, John Quelch of WPP and professor since 1979 at the Harvard Business School, shared his insight with Laura Mazur and Louella Miles regarding the power of “branding an ingredient” as a key to better marketing a larger or more complex product or service.  ”When is the provider of the final product or service willing to compromise its own brand-building to add the […]

Communication Breakdown

I recently took my son and his friends to a concert. The drive to the venue was going to be about 2 hours so we decided to rent some movies for the drive there and back. He and I went to the local video store and started doing the slow sideways shuffle that one does […]

Smile. You could be in advertising — literally!

So imagine that you’re at an event with friends and someone takes a picture of you. Then, that exact photo ends-up in an ad for a cellular phone company — without your consent! Can you imagine?

That’s exactly what happened to Alison Chang of Bedford, Texas after attending a church camp in Australia. A camp counselor […]

BP Is Greenwashing

This summer Kolbrener published a newsletter on Greenwashing, the practice of talking the green talk in your marketing and advertising but not necessarily walking the green walk. Essentially, if you’re going to execute a campaign incorporating “Green”, then your actions better be as substantive as your ads or your brand will suffer. BP is going […]

Are Any of Your Targets Transumers?

There is a new marketing type in town and they are called transumers. As classified by Rainer Evers in a trend briefing on trendbriefing.com, transumers are “consumers who are more interested in the experience rather than owning.” Well, yeah . . . that’s called renting. They’re just renters, right? Not exactly.
Transumers do rent, but they […]