Suppose you’re a local craft brewery, without the marketing resources of a Coors, Miller or Sam Adams. You don’t have money in the budget for national TV commercials—or any TV spots for that matter. So how do you get the word out about your award-winning brews?
If you’re Delaware-based Dogfish Head, you [...]

Banks traditionally build brand on the pillars of strength, reliability, security, and service. Few have developed a “personality” brand and I cannot think of one that has created a brand that evokes a passionate response from its fans as do Starbucks, Apple, and Coca-Cola.
Though banks are uncomfortable with the concept, many are essentially in the [...]

I’ve been in way too many meetings lately where I have been asked the question “Is Social Media just a fad that will soon blow away?”
Fortunately, I’m well schooled in responding to skeptics since, for the past dozen years, I’ve been answering the classic question in my core business, “Does this Loyalty stuff really work?”
I [...]

I’ve gotten into a bad habit with my children. Whenever they ask me about overzealous promises from a product advertisement, I just tell them “It’s probably not true, it’s just marketing stuff“.
The bad part is that I am instilling a degree of cynicism in the little ones, but then [...]

Atlantic City, the famed gambling Mecca about an hour down the coast from me, is on a nasty losing streak. A recent story in the NY Times quoted a top gambling executive as saying “the city is in a death spiral.” Few disagreed.
It seems that after a rough couple of years, 2009 is looking even [...]

Editor’s note: I was fortunate to moderate a panel at  Loyalty Expo 2009 this week titled Building Engagement with Millennials. The panelists were rich in expertise engaging and building brand with Generation Y as well as using email and social media as tools for communications. Bjorn Larsen Founder & CEO Edhance,  Atle Skalleberg VP Marketing [...]

The Word of Mouth Marketing Association held its “WOMM-U” event last week in South Beach, and was attended by an impressive array of consumer brands including Dell, Disney, Heinz, Kraft, Lenovo, NBC, McDonalds, Pepsico, Proctor & Gamble, Unilever, and Walmart. Add to these familiar names, several titans of Web 2.0 Facebook, Google, MySpace, Yelp and [...]

If you’re of a “certain age” and have teenagers in the house, then you might have caught yourself proclaiming that your young Millennials (Generation Y) are wasting their lives playing Halo, World of Warcraft, or tinkering with their MySpace page. Since adolescents revel in the opportunity to point out hypocrisy in their adult family members, [...]

The promise of social media to Loyalty Marketers should be clear. We’ve been advocates of establishing two-way dialogue with program members for the past 20 years, touting that only within the trusted environment of a loyalty program will customers share their preferences, aspirations, and concerns relating to your brand.
Don Peppers and Martha Rogers coined the [...]

One test of social media effectiveness is whether people are listening to each other and relationships are being built. Some of the social networks I participate in are prone to shouting, with little evidence of people listening. Probably because of LinkedIn’s professional networking positioning, people tend to not only listen, but respond, contribute, and share.
I [...]