Empower

How to be a customer champion: turning insight into action

When I started my career in marketing with Ogilvy & Mather in the early 1980s, life was slower. Email hadn't yet been developed, so the arrival of the morning's post set the agenda for the day.
Read Now

Managing brands in the oil industry: the case for demerger

Experienced marketers know that there are often tensions in companies between those in the factories who produce, and those in the marketplace who sell.
Read Now

China's big problem: growing old before growing rich

In November 2005, Jerry Chen bought a minivan.
Read Now

Don't shoot the advertising

The Advertising Association recently held an excellent debate at the House of Commons where it offered, somewhat ironically, the motion 'Advertising is bad for your diet'.
Read Now

Is Mr C really Mr K or only Sunny D? Should we blame marketing for political spin?

For quite a long time, 15 years or so, I've had a nagging, amorphous suspicion at the back of my mind. I've chosen not to take it out and examine it more carefully in case I didn't much fancy what I found. Better to leave it there, I thought.
Read Now

Bertrand Russell May Not have Invented the Internet, but He Certainly Wrote the Brief For It

'There are two ways of writing about the future,' wrote Bertrand Russell in the 1920s,1 'the scientific and the Utopian. The scientific way tries to discover what is probable; the Utopian way sets out what the writer would like.
Read Now

'Treating Customers Fairly': Another Catch-22 Idea from the Regulators

Heaven knows the world of advertising and marketing has become increasingly heavily regulated in recent years, but no other sector has seen an initiative quite like the 'Treating Customers Fairly' (TCF) initiative launched in financial services la
Read Now

Is Sustainable Marketing the Route to the Boardroom?

The current economic model is unsustainable in the long term.
Read Now

Professional Services Marketing: An Oxymoron and an Irony

The professional services industry is vast and varied. One estimate puts its revenues at $700 billion worldwide and another suggests that it employs up to one in five workers in the developed world.
Read Now

How Dove Changed the Rules of the Beauty Game

Whenever we explained Dove's new brand positioning to anyone, they always said, 'Oh what a great idea.'
Read Now