Marketing Strategy and Leadership Posts by Gerardo A. Dada
What makes a company like Amazon successful? What principles enabled Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, to develop a vision from a garage business to the world’s largest retailer? Are Kindle, Amazon Web Services and other innovations proof that he is the next Steve Jobs?
I found many of these answers in the book The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon by Brad Stone
Continue reading “The Amazon Bible: 7 Principles behind Jeff Bezos’ Success”
Augie Ray is a good friend and a true thought leader in interactive marketing, social media and customer experience. He is a voice of customer leader at a Fortune 100 financial services firm. I met Augie when he was the lead Forrester Research analyst covering interactive marketing and social media.
You will find Augie’s perspective refreshing and insightful. Enjoy.
Continue reading “Marketing Leader Interview with Augie Ray”
What would happen if you doubled the price of your products? How about if you increased them five-fold? Would customers still buy them?
This post tells the story of a company that did just that – by accident. Continue reading “Gold, Music and the Irrationality of Price”
Glenn Gow founded Crimson Marketing, a technology marketing firm, in 1991 which became one of Inc 500 fastest growing companies. You can get his book Revenue and the CMO via Kindle. I particularly enjoy his posts on #BadMarketing which play fun at common mistakes we marketers often make, which mirrors some of my own posts on this blog.
What company is an example of good marketing today? Who do you admire?
Cisco. They are extremely focused on understanding their buyers and making it easy for them to buy from Cisco. They are constantly studying their buyers and what is important to them. In addition, they track the buyers’ journey to an exceptional degree. Impressive. Continue reading “Marketing Leader Interview with Crimson Marketing’s Glenn Gow”
How much can we learn from Steve on Innovation, Marketing and Business Strategy?
A few days ago I stumbled on this video where Guy Kawasaki shared 12 lessons he learned from Steve Jobs. Guy worked with Steve in the early days of the Mac. This presentation was delivered a few hours after Steve passed away. It is been viewed almost a half a million times, but it is 47 minutes long. I thought I should share a summary from my notes:
If you want to watch the entire video, you will find it here.
Measuring the effect of advertising has always been a significant challenge for marketers. The Super Bowl presents a particularly interesting opportunity to study individual ads that reach millions of consumers and represent a major investment for brands at $4 million plus production costs.
I will use two sources of data to look at this problem: Un-aided recall by a random sample of consumers and sales results achieved by Go Daddy after their investment in Super Bowl ads.
Continue reading “Are Super Bowl Ads a Good Investment or a Giant Waste of Money?”
Surprisingly, the Super Bowl is not the most-viewed sports event in the world. At some 150 million viewers, it represents a fraction of the estimated 720 million viewers for the FIFA World Cup final. Despite this fact, it remains the largest advertising event in the world.
According to an informal survey we ran last week, over 60% of Super Bowl viewers claimed to watch the game just as much, or more for the ads. Welcome to the Ad Bowl.
By now there are probably a couple dozen lists of top Super Bowl ads, and everyone has begun expressing their own opinions. In this post, I will share my observations on the marketing strategies of the brands and the effectiveness of their ads, as well as general advertising trends. Please add your observations in the comments section.
Continue reading “10 Marketing Observations from the 2014 Super Bowl Ads”
It is a cycle we see too often: companies grow successful; an industry matures adopting many common practices, some good and some bad. Then these companies get complacent and fall asleep at the wheel. They stop innovating and often try to take advantage of consumers because of their position. And by doing so, they and create an opportunity for new entrants to disrupt the market.
It is easy to point at history and study how companies that were market leaders fell in this trap: Blockbuster, Motorola, Circuit City and Radio Shack are good examples. It is a lot harder to predict which markets or companies will be disrupted. But it is much more interesting to observe when it is actually happening in front of us.
This week I witnessed disruption in the rental car industry. I traveled to Dallas for a day and decided to give Silvercar a try. I am glad I did. How is the Silvercar experience better than the established companies who are asleep at the wheel? Let me recap my experience: Continue reading “Innovation – How Silvercar is Disrupting the Car Rental Business”
Maybe you have had an opportunity to observe leaders who are quick to accept credit and seem more interested in receiving attention and merit. Another style of leadership is one for whom the top interest is in creating a better future, offering new ideas and building the capabilities of the team, resulting in an organization that continues to thrive even when the leader is not present anymore. These are two styles of leadership, except only one of them is truly a leader.
This post originally appeared as a guest contribution in the Blog for the Austin chapter fo the American Marketing Organization
Peter Drucker, the father of modern business thinking, said that only marketing an innovation create value – everything else is basically overhead. He also said that marketing is the distinguishing function of an organization. Quite an endorsement about the Marketing function – but also a great responsibility.
In contrast, many people consider marketing to be deceptive, superfluous and buzz-wordy. Unfortunately, some marketing is one or all three of these. Unfortunately, marketers rank right next to used car salesmen in terms of reputation and trust. Interesting dichotomy.
What other teams in your company think about the marketing department: is it creating value for the company or spending money on funny ads? Maybe more importantly, we should ask ourselves, was Drucker wrong? Continue reading “Marketing Should be the Value Engine of your Company”