Learn how to play the branding game, says Kubi Springer – empower your team with a strong strategy and the skills to implement it. Here are her key branding lessons to help you maximise your ROI and make your brand as exciting as a World Cup victory.
Thanks to the ever-evolving social media effect, the customer now has a voice; an opportunity to verbalise and thus influence the customer experience. But Professor Steven van Belleghem says social media wield far more heft than mere comment on company performance. Here, he discusses the potentially sinister side of influence.
Technology is only valuable if you combine knowledge of what you want it to achieve with the ability to interpret what it tells you. So says William Roberts, discussing whether CMOs aiming to bridge the Digital Divide should be optimising data and incentivising customer behaviour by aligning customer understanding with tech strategy.
The arrival of the digital age has flummoxed many marketers – some of whom still call decade-old technology (such as smartphones) new tech. Three-quarters of the web’s sites are inactive, full of graveyard content, and there’s a deluge of data as yet unprocessed. Get with it and pick up the pace, says author Minter Dial; don’t let your business get left behind. Look to the future . . .
Facebook and Google increasingly dominate the time people spend online and there are both pros and cons in this web duopoly. Verto Analytics’ Dr Hannu Verkasalo spells out the implications for data-driven marketers of having two such powerful internet giants.
It’s a new kind of business model which can scale rapidly (Airbnb, Uber) by harnessing network effects: platform marketing . . . here’s how it works: