marketing

marketing • October 13, 2009

Overspending Is So Last Season

Conspicuous consumption is officially dead – or, at least, it’s so…last season. For the first time in memory, the Neiman Marcus holiday catalog has discounted its fantasy gift items. This year’s flurry of stories don’t focus on the fantasy, but the downsizing. The priciest item in the 2009 catalog is a mere $250,000 – far below the […]

marketing • October 9, 2009

The Merrill Lynch Bull Charges Back, More Softly This Time

One of many painful sidebars to last year’s Wall Street bloodbath was the swift death of seemingly invincible brands, including former financial powerhouses Lehmann, Bear Stearns, and Merrill Lynch. The human toll was so vast that no one gave much of a thought to the vanquished logos. But, as symbolism, their disappearance rubbed salt into […]

marketing • October 7, 2009

Expense-A-Steak: Brilliant PR, Or Blatant Fraud?

We in public relations sometimes start our creative sessions with the mantra, “Let’s think up some ideas that could get us fired.” Part of what clients pay us for, after all, is to push the limits of what’s conventional. But, some concepts come really close to crossing the line. That’s why I laughed at the recent […]

marketing • October 2, 2009

Why Twitter Could Be Worth A Billion Dollars

The number sounds like pure froth. After all, you don’t have to go back as far as the dot-com era to come up with laughable valuations of Web-based companies (Skype, anyone?) And this is one that has yet to turn a profit, or even articulate a plan to do so, at least publicly. Like others, I’ve gone […]

marketing • September 29, 2009

Top Social Media Sins

I’ve been seriously under the weather after attending a meeting in Mexico City last week. (No, it’s not H1N1, though I did hear an excellent talk by the top docs in charge of public communication around the epidemic.) To make it easy on limited mental energy, I’m using a part of today’s MediaPost‘s Social Media Insider. It’s a […]