NaCo – making it cool to be uncool
So far every dynamic little micro brand I have sent down the catwalk has been from the UK or US.
So next up is a brand that has become a cult fashion label in Mexico City – NaCo.
Set up in 2001 by Robby Vincent and Edoardo Chavarin, with the sum total of $500, the name NaCo is a play on the mexican word ‘naco’ and all that it means.
A laboured analogy for the way search engine marketing works. Image courtesy of Glennfinlas
People are very keen on search these days.
Whether Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) or Search Engine Marketing (SEM).
It is not much of a business to be in (since it is becoming rapidly commoditised) but it’s something every business should be into.
However, my view is that SEO and SEM should be viewed as a safety net and not a marketing panacea.
The original manuscript for Orwell’s 1984. Image courtesy of netcharles.com I’m rather enjoying George Orwell’s 1984 at the moment. Loads of stuff to ponder on…
Acupuncture being used during surgery as an anaesthetic in Cultural Revolution China.
I spent some time yesterday talking to a friend that is studying Chinese Medicine.
She is training to be an acupuncturist and she is interested in the kinds of research used in evidence based medicine.
This is a big issue for complementary therapies in general as they believe in using qualitative as well as quantitative research to understand a treatment’s efficacy since most complementary health treats the whole person and not just observable symptoms.
And it is a big issue for acupuncture in particular as the standard means to test any medical treatment, the randomised controlled trial (RCT) is notoriously problematic for this therapy. You can undertake a RCT but it involves using sham needles on the control and so while a single-blind test is therefore possible the gold standard of a double-blind test is out of the question.
She wanted my help in understanding different research methodologies.
But as a planner working in marketing communications I realised I could be of little help since I rarely come across research. Or rather I rarely come across real research and our little discussion finally proved this to me.
Image courtesy of Jaki Good
People tend to rather bang on about the death of the 30 second television commercial.
It is unclear which bit they hate the most, the 30 seconds, the television or the commerical.
Obviously I am a big fan of the commercial element, I like being commercial.
I’m still rather unsure about the television component of course. I think that we have to accept that the potency of commerical messages added to the broadcast stream is being significantly challenged – by technology, by consumer behaviour and by media fragmentation. That said there is plenty of evidence that telly is in rather rude health at the moment – time shifting may spell trouble for advertisers but it is making TV a rather more enjoyable pastime. Indeed Nielsen have recently reported that in the 2005-2006 season television usage hit an all time high in the US at eight and a quarter hours a day.
But today I want to have a go at the idea that somehow creating 30 second bursts of ‘broadcast’ communication is at best moribund and at worst sexually deviant.
Image courtesy of Stephanissimo
Call me old fashioned but I like a nice bit of rational communication. I think that if you set out to persuade people of your brands qualities and point of view you ought to do just that, persuade them.
This requires active engagement from people towards the brand or communication, not just their passive attention.
However, in recent years, this model has been significantly challenged by the Low Involvement Processing school of communication.
And I began to think that I ought to raise the white flag on rational persuasion, especially as a superficial reading of some of the stuff coming out of cognitive neuroscience seemed to endorse LIP.
Not any longer I don’t.
Let’s play guess the brand. Photo courtesy of Lolapaipro As you can tell from the Brand Catwalk strand I am interested in the qualities that…
Hendrick’s Gin in its signature apothecaries bottle.
Hurtling down the Brand Catwalk this week is that small but perfectly formed premium gin, Hendrick’s and its one-brand assualt on, what Malcolm Gluck famously called, the Daily Telegraph Obituaries column image of gin and gin drinkers.
The N.W. Ayer buiding in Philadelphia, an art deco masterpiece. N.W. Ayer was founded in 1869 and was the first advertising agency to create ads for clients rather than just book space for them.
I had a terrible premonition the other day.
I was waiting for a meeting at a prestigious London media agency. Their reception was wonderfully swanky, all extreme sports on the telly, big bowls of sweeties on the coffee table and agency propaganda smeared all over the walls. And I clicked.
We, the so called ‘creative agencies’, are not future of advertising, they are.
Image courtesy of RuneT
From 1974 to 1982 I lived in a part of the UK called South Devon, in a village called Dartington.
My father farmed the next door estate to a place called Riverford Farm.
Peter Sellers in Kubrick’s 1965 film, Dr Strangelove. Image from dvdbeaver.com.
A light little post for you after the death of planning ding dong.
Ever since I had my statcounter installed I have been able to tell the proportion of people coming from different countries. On the average day about 40% of my visitors are from the UK, 40% the US and 20% from the rest of the world.
But one of the other advantages of Stat Counter is you can tell whether a visitor has come directly to you or via another site. Every day around 10% of these US visitors come from Google Images and, rather worryingly, they are searching for one thing…. mushroom clouds.
Image courtesy of MrTruffle
There is a mood abroad, often fostered by non-blogging planners, that the emergence and popularity of planning blogs is killing the discipline.
I certainly feel that the community, like all communities, has begun to coalesce around specific ‘new marketing’ ideas that are in danger of becoming an orthodoxy every bit as dangerous as the antiquated ideas about brands and communications that it is seeking to replace. Specifically it encourages a view that the marketing landscape has already reached a kind of utopian future without offering any clues about how brands and the clients that own them should get there.
But is blogging really ‘killing’ planning?
