Riz is a genius....(again)

As usual - everything that Riz touches - turns to gold....

Brand and earned media...where you build a marketing strategy from....

The saying goes....

If you're a builder, you solve every problem with a hammer.

If you're an academic - its a document.

If you're me - you see everything as overly complex to be made simple....

So when it comes to marketing and brand - I only really have 2 models. 2 simple ways of thinking about what I consider are the critically important aspects of marketing. The ones you really can't do without.

• brand
• earned media

I don't mean everything else (offline, bought, advertising - all the other concepts, channels and categories one could throw up around marketing) aren't useful at a practical level - they're just not as important as brand and earned media.

brand - my model based on "primal branding" - 7 areas - creation story, creed, icons, rituals, pagans, sacred words, leader

earned media - 5 stages to think about - listening, content, applications, support, data

The rest is subdordinate to this. Subjective. Someone else point of view.

Brand and earned media...where you build a marketing strategy from....

A good day trawling the deep web - downfall remade - brilliant...

Design genius...

Social Media Revolution 2 (Refresh)....can we vote on the music for the next one please?

V. interesting update on the hugley popular clip.

And the clip which takes the piss out of ad execs using fat boy slim in their pitches (skip to 3:35 if its too painful..)

No one is going to read your blog...

Roughly 30-50 people read this blog every day. It is very unlikely this number will ever rise. The reasons (lack of original thought, style etc) aren't important. I actually write another blog for my psychotherapy studies which only my tutor has access to. Its only for me. Only for personal reflection. A diary.

The reason I blog, and I think millions of others do to, is because somehow we know the process of refining and distilling our thoughts is useful to us. Not for our careers - hate that f**king word and concept (why in god's name would anyone chose a "career" over living, loving, hanging out with their children?) Baffles me...But for us. For us as people. To make our own worlds richer, more interesting.

Seth Godin calls it meta cognition. He's usually right....

The public sector cash pipe.....

A friend who heads up the marketing for a decent sized organic food retailer, was detailing some of the shocking headline figures her business was trying to cope with. Double digit declines in sales, massive staff redundancies, huge cut backs. Businesses shrinking to their bones - and many not surviving.

Her expereience seems to be in sharp contrast to that of other friends in the private - and public sector. But then organic food is alone - "fully private" if you like. A sector which receives virtually no government support, and is fully dependent on discretianary spending. They've not been shielded from the reality of our continent's fiscal position. Other sectors, whose bottom line is, in part, helped by direct or indirect government cash have been luckier. The ad agency with the juicy NHS trust PR gig, the printers who have the council contract, the garage which maintains the fleet of police vehicles.....

Once the government cash pipe stops pumping - probably at around the same time as a relief well is dug in the Gulf - it is these "part private" enterprises which will be tested.

How much of these businesses are built on easy, poorly accounted for government cash? How much of our economy is built on an embedded, 35 year old psychology that governments (since the decoupling of the dollar from the price of gold in 1973) could keep printing cash

10%? 30% 50%.....70%?


From experience, I suspect many part private businesses are bloated and inflexible - in as poor state as their public sector counterparts - and the loss of government contracts will be the end for them. How much of what we now consider to be fully private businesses - the pizza chain in the Mall, the high end clothes retailer, the garden planning service......how much of their trade is based on a generation's assumption that the life they were living was "real" - when in actual fact, all of us have been being subsidised by virtual money for nearly 40 years.


How many people do they employ? How much virtual money were they contributing to the exchequer? What happens to a country when 30% of us are out of work? What do we do?

We're just about to find out.

Its election day


The last bottle of wine at the money printing party has been quaffed. The sun is coming up. The party is over.

The unavoidable consequences of 30 years of printing money are just about to kick in....