3 chords and the truth....

TGI, 3rd party research, basket data, online sentiment and influencer analysis, site surveys, focus groups......all routes into the understanding of a brand's issues and challenges

Do you need all of them to develop strategy?

No, the more we have - the more complete the picture - but can we get 70% of the way with just one of them......course we can.

90% of what they're buying......

 has got nothing to do with what they're buying....

why does anyone think selling "the cloud" is a good idea?

no one outside of the technology community has a bastard clue what the cloud is?

marketing is about selling benefits

the cloud isn't a benefit, its an enabling technology

countries as personas

we have limited resources with which to process information

we default to short cuts, bequeathed to us by evolutionary advantage

this we know

one of these short cuts is our common tendency to distil entire countries into single personas

what does this do to our behaviours?

the brand story platform

fCRM - Facebook customer relationship management

Why is any large scale corporation bothering to maintain the illusion of control over its data and customer relationship management?

Every client I encounter at the moment has a story about how....one day.....once they've spent x amount of cash they'll have 360 degree, clean customer data.

Its never going to happen!

In ecommerce we've accepted fCommerce because our ATG / SAP implemenations are clunky and Accenture take us to the cleaners us every time they change a page.

Lets now accept fCRM "Facebook customer relationship management".

Ditch your local customer databases and access customer data that is actively.....willingly maintained by all of us.

blackberry and its appeal to young women

The meme of young people using Blackberry's is not  success – it is the ultimate sign of failure...

Blackberry was a device designed for the high spending business market which has been so eclipsed by its competition, that it has been forced to eek out an existence on the margins of a market, appealing only to a poor, barely literate underclass who use it out of necessity rather than design.

An abject business failure borne out in the hard data of their shareprice ...