When my wife and I moved cities in 2018, I purged some of the stuff I’d been keeping for years, and in the process, I ran across an essay that my 16-year-old self had written for a college scholarship application (which I did not get). It read in part, “I am interested in the art of persuasion…[W]hat conditions and evidence will convince one person and not another. I think that this is a very important...
While shopping for party clothes for his daughter, Shridhar Marri had his epiphany about where e-commerce should head.
Amazon and the FTC are facing off. Putting any discussions of trust-busting, Prime enrollment issues and “monopoly” aside, the fascinating, underlying discussion is about Amazon’s market. The FTC and Amazon are at odds over how much of the e-commerce market Amazon controls. And, whether Amazon’s market is e-commerce or is online marketplace.
Heroes, villains, saviors, and antiheroes are all relatable and sympathetic in their own ways. In marketing, the consumer should be positioned as the hero, not the brand.
The road to making marketing accountable has been perilously slow. In the time of David Ogilvy marketers believed in measurement, their status was high. But many years ago, marketing turned inward and focused on ads. The CMO stopped being a business partner to the CEO. Marketing got dumbed down to being seen as frivolous, a cost center not an investment.
