The quest for brand or customer ‘loyalty’ is one of a number of examples of what we could call faux marketing. Faux marketing adopts all the trappings of real marketing, so it looks like the real thing. But underneath the surface it’s doing something...

Last night, eloquently supported by my colleague William Heath, I gave a master class on Volunteered Personal Information for the IDM (Institute of Direct Marketing). My concluding summary was: • We are in the midst of a once-in-a-century tipping point...

Commenting on my last post on ‘stimulus-response’ Andrew Weir says: “In my humble view marketing should focus on delivering great brand experiences (experience of a product, service, brand) as well as brand promises (stimulus-response?). It is vital that...

OK. This is a real biggie. It’s about an error – a misperception – that pervades everything marketers do: their beliefs about how marketing works (and therefore what they are trying to do when they do marketing), how they seek to do it, and how they measure...

From what I can see, there are two very good ways of getting lost in the maze of psychology and human decision making. The first is to accept, at some level or other, the insane delusions of ‘rationality’ as invented by the economics profession. I say...

So here’s the agenda for reinventing marketing I promised a while ago. First off, we need to recognise the core. Organisations apply knowledge and resources to supply individuals with products and services that are better quality and/or cheaper than these...

I wrote today in Marketing magazine about discoveries in psychology that are revolutionising our understanding of human decision-making. Many marketers are seizing upon these findings as grist to the mill of marketing’s prevailing persuasion paradigm...

The way I’ve been talking in some of my previous blogs you may be forgiven for thinking I’m against any sort of marketing campaigns. Not at all. Hopefully, the point I’m trying to make is a tad more subtle: there’s a big difference between those campaigns...

If I’m on to the right track about Punch Bag marketing , a couple of implications follow. Here’s one of them. Imagine two alternative scenarios. Under the first scenario you devote your core resources and attention to moving your base (i.e. your core...

OK. I’m still banging on about the persuasion paradigm (I’ll get beyond it one day. Promise). The persuasion paradigm is the erroneous belief that good marketing is about changing customer attitudes and behaviours. I’m banging on about it because it reaches...

If you’ve got my gist so far, I’ve questioned marketing’s ‘persuasion paradigm’ – the belief that good or effective marketing is about changing consumer attitudes and/or behaviours. Marketers believe they have a lot of evidence that their persuasive efforts...

In my Marketing magazine article on Mad Sheep Rage I only got half way through the acronym: M for Manipulation A for Awareness D for Deception S for Stimulation H for Heuristics E for Education The next E is for Enticing. This is the world of sensory...

I've just written an article for Marketing magazine on 'Mad Sheep Rage'. This is an acronym I use to list the different ways that advertising and marketing actually impact consumers - which is completely different to analysing marketing in...

In my previous post, I suggested that marketing - and marketers - are forever at war with themselves over two fundamentally opposed interpretations of what good marketing looks like. Proposition 1: good marketing means identifying and meeting customer...

To reinvent marketing successfully, I believe we have to jettison marketing’s Persuasion Paradigm: the belief that marketing is ‘effective’ when it changes consumers’ attitudes and behaviours, and that this is what good marketing does. Persuasion isn...